Degas' Dancers

In this film, as in other key titles in the Roland Collection, a meeting takes place between several media: the dance of Degas' subject matter, the dynamism of his draftsmanship, the drama of the score by Marius Constant, and the exploratory and expressive direction of the film-maker's camera work. The elements are mutually illuminating. Degas anticipates photographic and filmic qualities in his use of light and the 'verism' of his cropping and composition. The dancers 'draw' and compose in space, transposing music into visual form, which is in turn reinterpreted in the score, synchronized with Anthony Roland's moving, extemporizing camera work.

This film, like others in the collection, collaborates with its subject in a way that complements and perhaps challenges more cerebral, analytical films in this and other sections. Where a more conventional narrator might hasten to make a didactic point about Degas - for example, about the frequent misery of girls forced into the 'marriage market' of ballet training - this film, with no narration, respects the silence and inscrutability of the artist's images. It permits us a slower, more meditative entry into the pictures, during which we may indeed come to sense tensions, ambivalences, even pain, existing side by side with delicacy and beauty.