Object of the week: The painted ‘flying ballet’ design for Superman
Created for the Christopher Reeve version of Superman, this 20-foot-long painting creates a wondrous impression of the landscapes around the globe that Lois and Superman witness on their first magical flight together.
The Ivor Beddoes archive is one of the largest collections of design artwork cared for by the BFI. An incredibly talented sketch and storyboard artist, matte painter, costume and set designer, dancer, composer and poet, Beddoes made his first foray into film design in the mid-1940s. Under the tutelage of art director Alfred Junge, he worked on Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s beautiful and unsettling Black Narcissus (1947) and remained with the company to work on The Red Shoes (1948) the following year (this time under artistic director Hein Heckroth).
Like many sketch artists, Beddoes took his skills and, with a chameleon-like ability, adapted them to each production that he worked on. Fast forward to the 1970s, and Beddoes is in Hollywood, working on major box office successes, including Star Wars (1977).
This object, entitled ‘The Flying Ballet’, is a 20-metre scroll of paper created by Beddoes for Superman (1978).
It is a single, enormous design, which Beddoes created by pasting together a series of single sheets. It was intended to be scrolled on rollers (for the benefit of the film’s director, Richard Donner), to provide an impression of the night sky and cityscapes that would’ve moved behind Lois and Superman as they took their first magical flight together.
Beddoes borrowed the technique of scrolling paper from his time in theatre scenery, but it’s also a trick that he and art director John Barry had used on their previous collaboration, Star Wars (for the famous text crawl at the beginning of the film).
The object takes us deep into the pre-production process. It was probably never intended to be seen by anyone other than the director, the art director and the artist. It’s a micro performance that we might not otherwise know about, underlining the fact that a production contains within it many, many more performances and conversations than those seen within the finished shot.
But it’s also a crucial point of creative agency for one of the most famous special effects sequences ever created. It shows Beddoes interpreting the script, fusing it with his own knowledge of comic books and the mythical all-city, Metropolis, his time travelling as a war artist, and even his dance background. Unrestricted by time or space, the scroll takes us the full circumference of the globe.
The site and locations are not about geographical or architectural accuracy but about embodying the fantasy of moving across continents and time zones, projecting surface, colour, form and materials as if remembered hazily, spontaneously springing up from memory, rather than copied accurately from life or research.
We know from the finished film that the director ultimately chose to shoot against just the nocturnal skyline of Metropolis. But as just one problem-solving exercise within the design process, it shows the importance of these artists and of paper itself within the film world.
Produced with the support of the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.