In Moonrise Kingdom, Tilda Swinton plays a social worker in Sixties’ America. She said she modelled her character’s imperious look on the Frau von Kalteneck character played by Ursula Jeans in the classic British movie The Life And Death of Colonel Blimp. (Dailymail)

While Anderson has spoken about how Francois Truffaut, Ken Loach and Alan Parker’s films centered around children influenced “Moonrise Kingdom,” he also revealed a broader influence:the filmmaking duo Powell and Pressburger.

“For many years some of the movies that have most inspired me especially in a visual way are the Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger films,” he said. “…so much of that work is about making these visual…quite artificial films and there’s something very exciting about what they’ve made that’s in front of the camera, and you know the ‘Red Shoes’ in particular is the subject matter too, but you know one of my favorites is ‘The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp‘…and also ‘Black Narcissus’; [it’s] about a woman in the Himalayas and they did it all on a soundstage.”

Perhaps Anderson was describing how artifice - like what many critics complain about in his films - can be equally emotional and poignant when artfully constructed. “You really are transported to that place but you feel that someone has made these things and they’re very emotional, moving films,”  the filmmaker said, also noted that their approach to music is very influential. “I also would say Powell and Pressberger, are a very good inspiration for music as well. ‘The Red Shoes’ is a movie where there’s a very long sequence where the music was written first and the movie was made to the music, I mean it was a dance so it makes sense. In our movie this Benjamin Britten music that we use — a lot of the movie was choreographed to it and we drew a lot of the scenes and semi-animated them in advance. So we sort of knew where the cuts were going to be based on the music.” (The Playlist)

In Moonrise Kingdom, Tilda Swinton plays a social worker in Sixties’ America. She said she modelled her character’s imperious look on the Frau von Kalteneck character played by Ursula Jeans in the classic British movie The Life And Death of Colonel Blimp. (Dailymail)

While Anderson has spoken about how Francois Truffaut, Ken Loach and Alan Parker’s films centered around children influenced “Moonrise Kingdom,” he also revealed a broader influence:the filmmaking duo Powell and Pressburger.

“For many years some of the movies that have most inspired me especially in a visual way are the Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger films,” he said. “…so much of that work is about making these visual…quite artificial films and there’s something very exciting about what they’ve made that’s in front of the camera, and you know the ‘Red Shoes’ in particular is the subject matter too, but you know one of my favorites is ‘The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp‘…and also ‘Black Narcissus’; [it’s] about a woman in the Himalayas and they did it all on a soundstage.”

Perhaps Anderson was describing how artifice - like what many critics complain about in his films - can be equally emotional and poignant when artfully constructed. “You really are transported to that place but you feel that someone has made these things and they’re very emotional, moving films,”  the filmmaker said, also noted that their approach to music is very influential. “I also would say Powell and Pressberger, are a very good inspiration for music as well. ‘The Red Shoes’ is a movie where there’s a very long sequence where the music was written first and the movie was made to the music, I mean it was a dance so it makes sense. In our movie this Benjamin Britten music that we use — a lot of the movie was choreographed to it and we drew a lot of the scenes and semi-animated them in advance. So we sort of knew where the cuts were going to be based on the music.” (The Playlist)

Carl Boehm, who played Mark in the film, was very upset by the reception it got. When we saw him, years later, for dinner, he would still say, ‘What happened? Why was it so badly received?’ Michael was much more able to understand that, I think. But then he fell into those terrible, terrible years of not being able to work, at the same age as Marty is now. Can you imagine? If Marty were suddenly told tomorrow, ‘You can’t make any more movies’? It’s just terrifying.

After the Edinburgh Festival, Marty finally found Michael in London and had a meal with him in Soho, and Michael said that it was as if he were waking from a nightmare, from those years of oblivion. He writes in his book: ‘The blood started to course in my veins again. This young fast-talking director knew everything I’d ever made and had a zillion questions about how I did it.’ It was terribly moving. So Marty raced back to America and said, ‘I’ve found him, I’ve found him! Bring him to the Telluride Film Festival, we’ll enter Peeping Tom in the New York Film Festival’, and it was a huge hit there. It was as if a bomb went off. People like Francis Coppola saw it for the first time, and Marty put up his own money to partially fund the re-release of the movie.

I wasn’t around then, but shortly after that, when Marty and I were working on Raging Bull, he started showing me the films of Michael Powell, which he does with anyone he cares about. Actors who start working with him for the first time are usually bombarded with DVDs of Michael’s films. And, at one point, he said, ‘Well, as you love his films so much, maybe you should meet him. He’s coming for dinner tonight.’

So I met Michael and fell in love with him immediately. He was such an extraordinary person. Even though he was 30 years older than me, he was so vibrant. His love of life was just written all over his face. He had these startling blue eyes, and when he spoke - and he didn’t speak a lot - whatever came out was so interesting and unusual and unclichéd, and always fresh. I was just stunned by him, but he didn’t know that. He came back and talked to me in the editing room for a bit. And then he would sometimes call, late at night, because he knew we worked very late and he liked to talk to Marty, and sometimes Marty wouldn’t be in the room and I would talk to him a bit.

When Marty and I went to LA for the Oscars that year, Michael was there at Zoetrope, which was Francis Coppola’s ill-fated experiment in independent cinema. Francis had asked Michael to be senior director in residence, because he had always loved Michael’s films, particularly The Thief of Bagdad. Michael and I started having lunch, and then we started having dinner and things began to develop between us, and, in 1980, he moved to New York to live with me when we started The King of Comedy, our next movie.

I have heard that Michael could be pretty rough on the set. He felt filmmaking was like a religion, and when you came on his set you had damned well better be ready and do the best possible job for him, and if you didn’t he could be merciless. I never saw that myself; you see, with me it was a different thing. But I’ve been told stories by actors of his bad behaviour towards them. Dirk Bogarde once said to me, at a dinner in Paris, after Michael had died, ‘You knew his cruelty?’ and I said, ‘No, I didn’t’. I never did.

Michael taught me a lot about love. He understood love in a way I think very few people do, and that was a great gift to me. It keeps me going now; it’s like a little furnace burning inside me. Scorsese and I learnt so much from Michael about filmmaking. He taught us always to be ahead of the audience - not to explain too much - and never to talk down to them. We learnt to be bolder in our films and not be afraid if maybe the audience didn’t understand everything.

Michael also taught Marty that you don’t need the beginning, middle and end of every scene - usually you can do without the beginning, just plunge right into the middle, and sometimes you don’t need the end either. Every shot in Michael’s movies taught Marty something - he so admired the acting in the films, the humour, the emotion, the dazzling style, the use of colour and the fearlessness, the absolute fearlessness.

Horatia Harold, 2007

Thelma Schoonmaker and Michael Powell on their wedding day in 1984

Actually, Kingsley resembles the late, great English director Michael Powell (The Red Shoes), who, like Méliès, was another movie genius past his prime and nearly forgotten until Scorsese resurrected his reputation. So it should come as no surprise that Scorsese would find a way of connecting Powell to Méliès in this valentine to French cinema.

Scorsese even played matchmaker by setting up Powell romantically with his friend Thelma Schoonmaker, A.C.E., who became Powell’s bride and Scorsese’s longtime editor. She has collaborated with Scorsese on more than 20 projects over a career spanning 44 years, editing every feature film of his since Raging Bull (1980), for which she won her first Oscar. In fact, with her subsequent Academy Awards for cutting two other Scorsese films (2004’s The Aviator and 2006’s The Departed), Schoonmaker is in a four-way tie for the most Oscar-laden picture editor with Michael Kahn, A.C.E., Ralph Dawson and Daniel Mandell.

“Hugo has deep resonance for Marty because it’s about a great filmmaker who has fallen on hard times and is forgotten,” Schoonmaker tells Editors Guild Magazine. “Marty has restored the reputations of so many filmmakers––mainly my late husband’s––and the film is a wonderful distillation of that. But, of course, that is why he was drawn to the story in the first place; the chance to show this genius, who is thrown aside, and then to show his greatness.”

Everything about Hugo is influenced by Powell, particularly the emotion and the portrayal of silent cinema, which obviously had a powerful influence on the English filmmaker. “All of Michael’s special effects people were trained by Méliès, the inventor of special effects,” she continues. “He always talked to me about them, like Papa Day, who worked on Thief of Bagdad and so many others. It was just wonderful for me to see again what Méliès’ great genius was all about.”

Schoonmaker cites a scene in Hugo as an example: “An explosion occurs and people disappear, and Méliès shows you exactly how that was done. Well, you look at Red Shoes and Anton Walbrook looking at himself in the mirror and smashing his hand in the mirror. It was [a substitution trick] done exactly the same way. So it’s this wonderful echo that’s going on.”

Thelma Schoonmaker and the Movie Magic of ‘Hugo’

Imre József Pressburger, Born: December 5, 1902 in Miskolc, Austria-Hungary

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.”

R.I.P. Googie Withers (1917 - 2011)

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

(Source: quixotando.wordpress.com)

R.I.P. John Sweet (1916 - 2011)

fuckyeahantonwalbrook:

Esmond Knight, Michael Powell and Anton Walbrook, who was visiting the set of Black Narcissus

W. Stanley Moss & Patrick Leigh Fermor

R.I.P. “Paddy” Leigh Fermor (1915 – 2011) Portrayed by Dirk Bogarde in Ill Met by Moonlight, has died aged 96.

My favorite film of all time is ‘A Matter of Life and Death,’ directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, starring David Niven. In the U.S. it was called ‘Stairway to Heaven.

For me, it is beautifully shot. It is fantastically acted. It has a quality of strangeness that I always love in the best works of art. It is about two forms of reality, the real world that David Niven inhabits and this fantastical world of Heaven with angels and all that stuff. And you never get asked to choose which one is the real one or not.

I think that — as with all of Powell and Pressburger’s films — it is incredibly progressive for its time and also very challenging, but in the form of being very accessible entertainment. And I love that.

— Michael Sheen

constancemilligan:

Conrad Veidt and Valerie Hobson - Contraband (1940)

It’s a crucial moment in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), and thus all the more conspicuous as it elides the payoff of the long sequence preceding it: as Clive Candy (Roger Livesey) and Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook) begin their duel in 1902 (heralding the start of their forty-year relationship) after a prolonged dithering over protocol, the camera, while observing them from overhead, pulls back into the rafters, and then (courtesy of a dissolve) into the sky above the wonderfully obvious miniature of the gymnasium, a miniature Berlin in the distance, false snow whipping the lens; reaching its peak, it descends back to the cardboard earth towards a toy hansom cab, in which Edith Hunter (Deborah Kerr) anxiously awaits the outcome.

A virtuoso shot, and one with more than an echo of the famous “unbroken” take craning into Susan Kane’s nightclub a mere two years previous. But Michael Powell’s willfully grandiose gesture carries far more resonance than Welles’s masterful showboating. Stanley Kauffmann’s rather harsh charge that Welles was “a scene and sequence-maker, not a filmmaker” nevertheless contains an irreducible truth at its core: for a great majority of “ambitious” filmmakers in the first two decades of the sound era, scenes and sequences took precedence over the film as a whole. One need think only of Ford’s overt preciousness of composition in The Informer (1935) or The Fugitive (1947), or Mamoulian’s aggressive playfulness, or Milestone’s uniquely weighty sense of innovativeness to realize that Welles was only the most pronounced (and publicized) example of Hollywood’s erratic but consistent romance with capital-A Art. Innovation in cinema never springs from some pure and untapped creative well. For those Thirties and (more dwindling) Forties Hollywood producers who counted prestige as a subdivision of profit, these occasional ventures into the Artistic were only good business sense.

For Powell, however, the constrictions exerted by the far more staid British system somewhat modulated the stylistic exuberance he had first begun to exhibit at the end of the ‘30s. This isn’t (merely) cultural stereotyping, but historical fact: Britain’s entrance into World War II exerted a far more wide-ranging and deep-seated effect upon British films than did America’s cinematic outpouring post-1941. The cinema’s shift into propaganda mode, however, did not so much squelch Powell’s verve as channel it, and even develop it. The vivid documentary quality he brought to his remarkable 1937 film The Edge of the World (the beginning of his love affair with Scotland’s Orkney Islands, crystallized in his 1945 masterpiece I Know Where I’m Going!) indelibly marked the rugged outdoor footage interspersed between the all-star theatrics of 49th Parallel (1941) and the flying sequences of One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942). And the taste for fantasy and artifice which he had first indulged in Alexander Korda’s Wizard of Oz-baiting mega-production The Thief of Bagdad (1940), which became so pronounced with his official postwar classics A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947), and The Red Shoes (1948) (not to mention the surrealist dream sequences in 1949’s fascinating war drama The Small Back Room), first surfaced in the midwar curio that is Colonel Blimp, one of the strangest epics, most bizarre propaganda efforts, and greatest films to ever emerge from the British cinema.

Indeed, Colonel Blimp’s greatness stems from the convergence of these disparities. The grand title connected to the name of David Low’s buffoonish cartoon character, who is most unlike Livesey’s innately dignified Candy; the decades-long tracing of a military career which includes not a single scene of battle, even in stock footage; a salute to British military tradition which depicts it as hopelessly outdated in the modern era of warfare, while simultaneously depicting the new practicality, in the person of a brutal Welsh sergeant in World War I and an upstart young lieutenant in World War II, as inherently unattractive and quite possibly amoral (no wonder Churchill detested the film and tried to have it banned). And threaded throughout this is one of the most poignant and beautiful of all cinematic love stories, which of course features not a single scene of romance and is split between three women: Candy’s pre-WWI love for the fiery suffragette Edith, whom he amiably loses to Theo, realizing his love only upon the moment of loss; his postwar bride Barbara, a gentle and understanding nurse; and his WWII driver Johnny, a vibrant working girl engaged to the aforementioned upstart who humiliates the aged and at least physically blimpish Candy in the film’s opening.

Powell’s reverse-Buٕñuelian tactic of casting Kerr in all three roles is only the most prominent example of the strain of fantasy he works into his historical panorama. The early sequences in Berlin, culminating in the duel, are marked by scenes of extraordinarily intricate, almost balletically choreographed movement, invariably cut to music: Candy’s taunting and insulting of a German agent in a posh restaurant, the amusingly agitated fervour of scurrying aides in the halls of the British embassy, and finally the methodical preparations in the gymnasium for the duel that will settle British and German “honor.”

Powell and his partner Emeric Pressburger (credited as co-director, actually the film’s chief writer) are noticeably arch about the actual meaning of the duel, though slyly nationalistic at the same time: the Germans are stiff-backed and insistent, the British side viewing the whole affair as decidedly archaic but unfortunately necessary. Colonel Blimp looks back to this earlier era not with fond nostalgia for a better and truer time, but with a pronounced sense of its absurdity. Yet underlying that absurdity is a genuine regard for those who, knowing its absurdity, nevertheless adhered to its strictures—which is either the greatest absurdity of all or the true nobility that so often accompanies it. Candy’s friendly and amused smile to his opponent just before the match that may cost either of them their lives—occasioning a quizzical furrowing of the German’s brow—is not only a bit of “typically British” bravado, but a recognition of the idiocy of their position as well as an appreciation of the utter seriousness with which they undertake the playing out of that idiocy. It would take a dogmatically rigid view of such things not to see the equal weight of both sides of that balance, nor the mysterious, dreamlike quality in the midst of the enervatingly precise preparations which elevates this encounter into romance—a romance founded on the entrance into, and acceptance of, the presence of death.

Naturally, death has no real place in Powell’s masterpiece either, despite the promise of the title. The duel will result in mutual injury, mutual recovery, and mutual friendship, but in that one extra-narrative camera movement, Powell subtly unites the many movements operating within his most ambitious film thus far. It is a narrative movement, eliding the outcome of the duel and increasing the suspense by focusing upon those who wait outside. It is a technical and stylistic movement, evidence of a cross-pollinating influence from the American cinematic flair exemplified by Welles. It is a movement towards fantasy in its delicately lovely miniaturization of a snowbound commencement-de-siècle Berlin even as it moves against nostalgia by the preceding disparagement of the duel itself. And as Allan Gray’s music shifts from an urgent swashbuckling theme cast to the clashing of blades to a wistful and melodic one timed to the gentle blowing of snow as the camera reaches its apex, we are moved away from the disparities of these other movements and invited to reflect upon their confluence, on the curious and curiously beautiful progression of life even as death hangs over it. More than anything, Powell’s intentionally conspicuous shot is an emotional movement, an exemplar of the great tenderness underlying his stylistic flourishes, as opposed to the so often forthright assertiveness of his American contemporaries (the Ford of Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley excluded). No one sequence can encapsulate The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, for its beauty exists as a film entire. In moving his film always forward, however, Powell can still find time for the grace notes, for those spaces of reflection that cause us to consider where all the many movements within this single, gentle flow intersect, and bloom.

Up and Away - Andrew Tracy on The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp