Paul Morris recently posted 4 photographs on his flickr photostream. The pictures are titled ex-military and numbered #1 – #4. In them, Paul has posed a naked man with a TV monitor showing images from Powell and Pressburger’s 1948 movie The Red Shoes. There’s no way this is unintentional, he obviously chose that film for a reason.
In these pictures the monitor shows Anton Walbrook as Boris Lermontov. In the standing picture (above), the monitor image is 38 minutes into the film, and Lermontov is inviting a young composer, Julian Craster, to work on a ballet score for The Red Shoes. In the close-up cock picture (below), presumably taken 2 minutes later, the monitor image is 40 minutes into the film: Lermontov is watching a rehearsal, and makes a disparaging remark about a dancer who has compromised her commitment to ballet by choosing to marry, deliberately in ear-shot of another dancer, Victoria Page, played by Moira Shearer.
I don’t know why Paul has photographed this man in combination with The Red Shoes , but it might be to do with the character of Lermontov. In the movie, Lermontov is a charismatic authoritarian empressario. His intense relationship with the dancers and musicians that he employs is a central theme. Maybe Paul identifies with Lermontov, and is drawing a comparison to his own relationship with the men he photographs and videotapes.
