Powell and Pressburger

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Black Narcissus (1947)

(Source: bellecs)

Black Narcissus (1947)

(Source: bellecs)

I was at last night’s screening of Blimp at Film Forum wiht Martin Scorcese introducing, and I got there early to get a good seat. It’s a small cinema and I knew there’d be a line. I asked the few peiple who were standing nearby if they’d come to see Blimp, and all of them knew nothing about the film. They’d come because Marty was introducing it and wanted to see him! But at least they got to see the film as a bonus!
 Before Marty there was a short film presentation on the restoration given by a woman whose name I forget. They showed several before and after clips and went into quite some detail discussing the state the print was found in and the amount of work required to restore. They showed before and after clips of the German beer hall scene and the difference was truly striking. I want to go back and look at my DVD, because even there it such a visually arresting scene, but the estoration was magnificent. The bright blue coats of new guests walking in, the brilliant red of the skirt of the woman pouring the beers.
I forget some of what Marty said. I kept taking mental notes, but when the film started, I was lost and forgot most of it. This is the first time I’ve ever seen him, so if I’m repeating what he’s said a dozen times, apologies. He told a story about how he and Robert DeNiro were talking about ways to tradically transform his physical form for Raging Bull, where he gains large amounts of weight, and so naturally Blimp came up in the discussions. DeNiro said he’d like to talk to Michael Powell about what Roger Livesey went through, and so Marty asked MP to dinner one night, telling him he wanted to introduce him to DeNiro. About halfway through the dinner, MP, who was sitting next to Marty, leaned over and whispered, “I thought you said DeNiro was gioing to be here?” Of course, he was, he was sitting on the other side of MP, but was so self-effacing in public he virtually disappeared. DeNiro did get to ask MP about the Livesey’s transformation, but all Marty claims MP said was,  “It’s called acting.” (Isn’t Gielguld or someone also supposed to have said that to DeNiro about Raging Bull?).
Marty also talked about his own first experiences watching Blimp, the buthchered 90-minute version in black and white on TV in the 50s. He said he saw this again, in color, in the late 70s, and talked about the reconstitution of the film back to its original 163-minute form for the 1983 version. It was these negatives, if I remember rightly, that were used as the basis of the restoration.
 Well, the restoration! I always thought the DVD looked really fine, with sharp, bright colors and excellent sound, and wondered if a restoration was even needed, but this new version is something else. Some of the moments were a pure revelation. For example, when Clive walks into the convent at Bonne Amie (sp?) the quality of light when he first sees the rows of nurses is astonishing. There are some close-ups of Deborah Kerr’s face when she becomes luminous, and the play of emotion is tangible. There was moment after moment which came alive in a new way, and that’s hard to do for a movie that is, well, so alive in the first place. Also, the sound restoration was beautiful. I was there with a friend who had never seen it before, and was awestruck at the end. The man sitting beside me let out a loud “Wow” when the end credits began rolling, and there were similar exclamations from other audience members, and the credits were met by a round of applause. So I think Marty drawing in the unknowing New York crowds did a great service by introducing this movie to many who would never have seen it otherwise.

Ranbir

“Seeing Colonel Blimp strictly in the terms of for-the-war-effort propaganda is a terrible mistake,” warns Jaime N Christley in Slant. “There isn’t a jingoistic, early-to-mid-20th-century ‘I dare say old chap’ moment or sentiment in the film that Powell and Pressburger fail to elevate to a broader, frequently mythic, perspective. All the same, the wars portrayed in the film (the Boer War, the First and Second World Wars), depicted as they are indirectly, often through montage, are often merely a vehicle for the duo’s more pressing concerns, being no less than an inverse of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five; instead of becoming unstuck in time, General Candy (Roger Livesey) remains stuck while the century seems to evaporate and transform around him, ungraspable, in a whirlwind of battlefield commendations and animal heads. Only two things seem to remain, besides the dependability of change and a world always seeming to ignite in violent conflagration: his dear friend Theodor Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook, in one the greatest performances from one of the screen’s most dignified, charismatic figures), and Deborah Kerr, who plays three characters. For the audience, the idea of a triple-Kerr is a Buñuelian fantasy abstraction, but for Theo and Clive, it’s nearly the only continuity they can depend on as the 20th century marches on, eventually without them.”

Video Essay: Art Goes On Forever - A Tribute to Powell and Pressburger

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The set of Black Narcissus

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With poise alternating with rebelliousness, Kerr plays three different women in Colonel Blimp (while turning twenty-one on the set in 1942), each one essential to a storyline that extends from London and Berlin in 1902, during the Boer War, to World War II. News of the film being shot in the middle of the blitz, and daring to portray a German officer in a sympathetic light by contrasting his noble nature with the Nazis, reached Winston Churchill. Calling it a threat to military morale, Churchill sought to derail it. However, powerful impresario J. Arthur Rank remained behind The Archers — the Powell/Pressburger name for their unique writer/director/producer collaboration as well as for their independent production company — and the film was released to wide acclaim for its performances. But anxiety about its content lingered with British critics, under the spell of the war. The exportation of The Archers’ first Technicolor film was blocked for two years, then released only to be butchered — in various incarnations by twenty minutes to over an hour — in America. Kerr’s three disparate yet spiritually kindred characters fuel unconscious, Oedipal themes underlying the unique frisson and unlikely friendship of a buttoned-up, British officer Clive Candy (Roger Livesey) and his sensitive German counterpart Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook). Through a fateful letter, Kerr’s intuitive, bilingual governess Edith Hunter triangulates the characters, who evolve over forty years. Edith speaks her mind on matters of diplomacy and the human costs of war, which Kerr understood only too well: Her father, a WWI veteran, was exposed to nerve gas and had a leg amputated after a severe bullet wound. He suffered ill health for years, and died at forty-three. The characters in Blimp are a paradigm for Great Britain, from its nefarious colonial reputation that began the twentieth century to its apotheosis as a noble underdog fighting against Nazi imperialism in WWII. Clive and Theo age, while Kerr morphs herself and Edith into Barbara Wynne — a Red Cross nurse, whom Clive meets during WWI and marries — and Angela (“call me Johnny”) Cannon — a tomboy and former model turned home-guard military driver during WWII. Director Michael Powell praised Kerr’s special contribution to this unsung — until its 1983 restoration — masterpiece. He described Blimp as Pressburger’s favorite film and the best romantic script he ever wrote. Before the Archers’ second Technicolor project, hinging on the twenty-six-year-old Deborah Kerr channeling a thirty-six-year-old Sister Clodagh in Black Narcissus, the busy actress returned to the stage in Shaw’s Heartbreak House. She also entertained the troops in Gaslight, had her contract (with producer Gabriel Pascal) sold to MGM, and married RAF pilot Anthony Bartley, ending her romance with Powell, who was sixteen years her senior. Kerr’s Sister Clodagh struggles with duty and piety as she clashes with sensuality and lost love, reawakened in the intoxicating atmosphere of the Himalayas. She is joined in the quixotic mission of turning a palace brothel into a convent — complete with school and hospital — by Flora Robson (Sister Philippa) and taken off course by David Farrar, Jean Simmons, Sabu, and Kathleen Byron. Although, the nuns are an Anglican, working order, the Catholic Legion of Decency threatened to cut the crucial flashbacks of Clodagh as a young Irish girl. Kerr sparkles with adolescent innocence in those scenes, reflected in her intense love for an impossibly handsome young man. It’s difficult to determine which version audiences saw, especially during the first U.S. exhibition. Without the seminal, flashback sequences so beautifully photographed by Jack Cardiff, Kerr’s artistry may not have been fully appreciated until the 1983 restoration. In a sequence in which Clodagh fishes in Cardiff’s shimmering stream, Kerr radiates in equal measure through dialogue and gesture the cinematographer’s magical lighting. Then, in an extreme close-up of the girl’s face dissolving into Sister Clodagh’s, the actress suggests how feeling love-struck can no longer be repressed. Kerr’s powerful performance inspired the sometimes brutal taskmaster Powell to describe her as “the ideal … the flesh-and-blood woman whom I had been searching for ever since I had discovered that I had been born to be a teller of tales and a creator of dreams.”

nazi-julieandrews:

Top 10 Aesthetically Pleasing Films (in no particular order)

Black Narcissus (1947), by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger

Even before Kerr went to Hollywood, the anonymous writer of Time could define her as ‘everything Englishmen mean when they become lyrical about roses’. Although written about Black Narcissus, these words also describe her first important part in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), in which she plays the three women in the life of Clive Candy (Roger Livesey), suggesting the idea that, at least in Powell and Pressburger’s powerful construction of male Englishness, ‘Englishmen always fall in love with the same type of woman’. If Major Barbara, Kerr’s first film, already anticipated a great deal of her future star persona, Blimp, the film after which she became an established name, firmly placed her as a figment of the male imagination, as an image of idealised English femininity and one clearly attached to past models of womanhood. As Jeffrey Richards has recently argued, whereas Blimp becomes ‘the embodiment of a chivalric ideal overtaken by the grim reality of modern war’, the three characters played by Kerr are, in a very real sense, ‘the same woman, the eternal, sensible, forthright, independent-spirited British woman’.

- from “The nun’s story: femininity and Englishness in the films of Deborah Kerr“ by C. Deleyto, “British stars and stardom: from Alma Taylor to Sean Connery”, 2001, p.122

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jools-the-kid:

My DVD of ‘The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp’ arrived yesterday. :D (so, this is the last crappy cap of this film you’ll have to deal with.)
Smiley Anton is smiley. <3

I’ll bug you with a pic spam soon…I love HQ caps…Very much! ;D

(Source: tea-with-theo)

witzseeker:

Black Narcissus (1947)

fuckyeahantonwalbrook:

Kerr, Walbrook and Livesey: Colonel Blimp