In depicting a theatre event, Powell-Pressburger’s masterpiece The Red Shoes takes us from the fiction of the film into the fiction of the original story, into the narrative POV of the film’s characters, and into their imagination—only for the fiction within the original story to take possession of the fiction of the film of The Red Shoes.

While you may never shoot a ballet sequence, insight into the cinematic principles at work here will inform and enrich your filmmaking in any genre.