Powell and Pressburger

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.

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Michael Powell And Emeric Pressburger

It’s impossible to watch the film without feeling the autobiographical resonances. Pressburger was a Hungarian Jew who had learned German long before he spoke English, had attended a German speaking university, and had worked for the Ufa studios in Berlin before fleeing the country in 1933, during the first great purge of Jews, after a tip-off from a Nazi colleague. Walbrook, born Adolf Wohlbrück, was a half-Jewish Austrian, and also gay, who had left Germany in 1936. Both were classified as “enemy aliens” when the film was made.

According to Kennedy’s essay, Walbrook was confronted by Churchill about Blimp during the interval of a play in the West End in which Walbrook was performing. Churchill wanted to know whether Walbrook thought the film good propaganda. Walbrook’s reply?

“No people in the world other than the English would have had the courage, in the midst of war, to tell the people such unvarnished truth”.

.

Pea soup. As the fog swirls over the Channel, voices from the wireless float past each other, until a connection is made: an American flight controller, June (Kim Hunter), has picked up the voice of RAF pilot Peter Carter (David Niven), whose plane is going down. Their voices find each other in the haze, lock in, and Michael Powell is off and flying with the thrilling opening of A Matter of Life and Death.

Opening-proper, that is. The first image to glimmer onscreen was an establishing shot across the cosmos, which appeared as a misty blue abstraction — a sight that will be echoed later in the misty reddish abstraction that fills the screen after the celebrated point-of-view shot of Peter’s eyelid closing over the camera lens. The universe in a man’s mind: such an apt image for an artist, and so fitting for Powell, one of those great directors for whom movies were an abstract universe. Powell understood that a movie is a movie not in the way it tells a story, delivers a theme, houses fine performances, or records pleasing dialogue. Rather, movies live in the collision and collage of swatchs of color, sudden changes in angle, degrees of sound and music, shapes of landscape and body, and movement, movement, movement.

All of that is in the first conversation between Peter and June. June sits in a stylized space with red lights flashing behind her; she spends most of the sequence in white-hot closeup. Red-orange flames dance outside Peter’s cockpit window, the twisted metal of the plane’s interior framing him. He has no parachute, but he is about to jump anyway (“I’d rather jump than fry”). The Powell-Pressburger dialogue crackles with the immediacy of mortality, with the urge to get a few things said that need saying, before the end. Some of these words must appear as high corn, English-style, if read on paper; Peter dashes off some belated love to his mother, and observes that “it’s funny, I’ve known dozens of girls. I’ve been in love with some of them, but an American girl whom I’ve never seen and whom I never shall see will hear my last words. That’s funny.” But Powell stages the action so enthrallingly and fast, and Niven is such an unsentimental hero (even while quoting Walter Raleigh), that the sequence comes off brilliantly. The flames, the engine roar, the glow over June’s face, the matter-of-fact presence of the corpse of Peter’s radioman (“They’ll be sorry about Bob, we all liked him”), and the way Peter slips through an opening in the bottom of the plane, a hole shaped like a movie screen — these are the colors in Powell’s paintbox; this is the matter of life and death. 

The rest of the film is the flicker through Peter’s mind as he hangs in the balance between existence and the end. Inexplicably surviving the fall, he washes ashore and falls in love with June, much to the consternation of the otherworldly conductor (Marius Goring) who was supposed to take him to heaven but missed him in that fog. When Peter appeals his case, a trial is held in the celestial (monochrome) world, with an Anglophobic American from Revolutionary days (Raymond Massey) arguing against Peter, and June’s friend Dr. Reeves (Roger Livesey) making the case in favor of an extension for the young poet-flyer.

Throughout, Powell and Pressburger maintain a sublime, utterly calm balance on this most enormous of issues. The desire for life remains sharp and stubborn, but the prospect of death is met with implacable good nature, as exemplified by Peter’s “dying” words. Even the conductor, who is constantly trying to trick Peter pearly-gateward, is scarcely disappointed when his best efforts fail. Dr. Reeves, who fiddles with a camera obscura and take an intense interest in Peter’s point of view (“I know about your eyes”), would appear to be one of Powell’s most complete self-portraits; one of the most civilized human beings in moviedom (especially in Roger Livesey’s brandy-smooth performance), he still savors the pagan sensation of riding his motorcycle too fast — the habit that eventually costs him his life. When he reaches heaven he is barely perturbed by his own demise, and powerfully flattered and pleased that Peter has chosen him as his supernal advocate. Death is taken by these characters as a fact of life; grace is something more meaningful, and perhaps just as permanent.

Death courses through Powell’s autobiography like one of the rivers he describes following along to the sea — an avowed passion of his. By “autobiography” I mean not only Powell’s lovely first volume of memoirs (a dreamy and genteel book, intriguingly shot through with cords of steel) but also his films; the name of the book, after all, is A Life in Movies. In this film, death even gets title billing (except in America, where the distributor imposed the alternative title Stairway to Heaven). A Matter of Life and Death stands as Powell’s most playful and — despite his description of AMOLAD as “a joke about life and death” — serious rumination on the end of things. The last line of A Life in Movies is “And then there will be nothing left for me but the open sea.” Peter Carter comes out of that sea after he has fallen to earth, and thinks he is in heaven. It is a beautiful English morning on the coast. The tide has gone out, leaving streaks and pools of water across the sands. A hound sitting in the dunes spots Peter and howls at him. Peter calls him over. “Oh,” he says, “I always hoped there would be dogs.” There are dogs in Michael Powell’s heaven.

A Matter of Life and Death « The Crop Duster

1. We owe allegiance to nobody except the financial interests which provide our money; and, to them, the sole responsibility of ensuring them a profit, not a loss.

2. Every single foot in our films is our own responsibility and nobody else’s. We refuse to be guided or coerced by any influence but our own judgement.

3. When we start work on a new idea we must be a year ahead, not only of our competitors, but also of the times. A real film, from idea to universal release, takes a year. Or more.

4. No artist believes in escapism. And we secretly believe that no audience does. We have proved, at any rate, that they will pay to see the truth, for other reasons than her nakedness.

5. At any time, and particularly at the present, the self respect of all collaborators, from star to prop-man, is sustained, or diminished, by the theme and purpose of the film they are working on.

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— The Archers’ Manifesto by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

(via samhumphries)

byronic:

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger checking rushes from The Red Shoes, photographed by N.R. Farbman, 1947

LIFE: - Hosted by Google

byronic:

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger with a set model for The Red Shoes, photographed by N.R.Farbman, 1947

- LIFE Hosted by Google