The Tales of Hoffmann

Dazzling, one-of-a-kind feast of music, dance, costume and cinema.

  • Directors

    Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger

  • With

    Moira Shearer, Robert Helpmann, Léonide Massine, Robert Rounseville, Ludmilla Tchérina, Pamela Brown

  • UK 1951. 128min

  • Digital/35mm

  • Certificate

    U

Powell and Pressburger’s subversive, audacious take on Offenbach’s opera drew on some of the greatest film, music and dance talents of the period. Transforming it into a phantasmagoria of feverish colours, the sensual and unsettling delights include Tchérina as a 19th-century dominatrix, a chorus of pan-sexual mannequins who appear to have raided Marc Bolan’s dressing-up box, and Shearer’s dismembered but still-blinking head.

Robin Baker

Supported by Simon and Harley Hessel.

The screenings on Saturday 9 December and Saturday 16 December will be 35mm. The screening on Saturday 30 November will be digital.

The screening on Tuesday 12 December will be introduced by Andrew Moor, Manchester Metropolitan University.

Also available on BFI Player

Film on Film