Oberon (2023) was commissioned by BFI, as part of their landmark Powell and Pressburger exhibition, exploring the early genesis of their film The Red Shoes (1948). The work is a response to a photographic series of actor Merle Oberon in the BFI’s collection, taken at around the time that Korda was developing the script for The Red Shoes. Make-up, lighting and cosmetic surgery masked the physical trauma of a car accident in 1937, in addition to Oberon’s complex relationship with her visual identity whereby she passed as white until her death in 1979. These techniques also lightened her skin on camera.
Written as a love letter from Korda to Oberon to help her secure The Red Shoes Lead, (the role eventually went to Moira Shearer). Korda speaks the lines of Konstantin – an early version of ballet impresario Boris Lermontov – during a fictional make-up test. Here, spaces of casting/screen tests beyond the archival photographs is a reflective and political tool to question the relationships that extend behind the camera to the individuals (mostly men) who held Oberon’s career and her image in their power.
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