Eyes and glances coming together, first in black and white and then in color, leading to the arrow hitting the center of the red, white, and blue target, the logo of the Archers, a prestigious independent production company founded in 1943 (under the powerful Rank organization) by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The director-producer and screenwriter duo had been collaborating since 1939, brought together by Alexander Korda (a Hungarian producer-director who found success in Hollywood with lavish historical reconstructions before moving to London) to create a World War I espionage film, The Spy in Black. The screenplay was transformed by the Hungarian Jew Pressburger, who had just arrived in England, fleeing from Nazi-occupied Europe. Martin Scorsese, the executive producer of David Hinton’s documentary Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger, available on Mubi from June 28, speaks swiftly and comprehensively.
Scorsese, narrating while seated in front of the camera, recounts his “sentimental education” with the cinema of Powell and Pressburger (P&P). His childhood infatuation began when he watched their films, unfortunately only in black and white, on American TV. From the first, The Thief of Bagdad (co-directed by Ludwig Berger, Tim Whelan, and Powell, who directed the Genie scenes, the Sultan’s animated toys, and the arrival of Jaffar’s ship), to The Tales of Hoffmann, which mesmerized him with its integration of music and imagery. The first time he saw The Red Shoes in color on the big screen, he was captivated by its color, light, movement, and music. This obsession with cinema was solidified in 1970 when he, already a director, saw Peeping Tom in color for the first time. The cursed masterpiece of Powell showed that cinema, for both the maker and the viewer, could resemble madness and could consume you. Between The Spy in Black and Peeping Tom, there are fourteen films written, produced, and directed by Powell and Pressburger. Scorsese, like a knowledgeable, passionate teacher, reviews them one by one, showing wonderful clips and clearly explaining the solid professional and friendly relationship between these unique talents and the profound, visual, and narrative, almost experimental and revolutionary, sense of their work. He describes them as “experimental filmmakers working within the industry,” capturing the extraordinary nature of their cinema during the 1940s and 1950s, a period between the forgotten silent era’s extravagances and the emergence of auteur-driven blockbusters.
We transition from war depicted as a game of hide-and-seek, sometimes painful, sometimes humorous (49th Parallel, Oscar for Pressburger for the screenplay), to the deeply romantic historical reconstruction of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (forty years of friendship between an English and a German officer, through loves, defeats, lost illusions, and new-found homelands), to the apparent realism of a love story infused with Celtic magic (I Know Where I’m Going!), to an incredible government-commissioned film (A Matter of Life and Death, 1945, to strengthen Anglo-American relations), a triumph of Powell’s visionary talent, Pressburger’s narrative eccentricity, and both of their humor. In this film, our world and the other world meet at the base of a grand staircase winding down from heaven to save a love on the brink of death during wartime on the Channel. Scorsese calls this “the film where they definitively freed themselves from realism to embrace surrealism.” Beloved by audiences, like the sensual, almost abstract melodrama Black Narcissus and especially The Red Shoes, which Scorsese describes as “the ultimate commercial subversive movie,” where the eros of art battles against romantic passion, leaving only the flight on the tips of red shoes. The Red Shoes is Scorsese’s favorite film, which greatly influenced Raging Bull and other works. Powell’s favorite was The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and Pressburger’s was A Matter of Life and Death. Choosing a favorite among the four or five masterpieces by P&P is difficult, leading up to the disarming “intimate confession” of Peeping Tom, the film that ended Powell’s career until admirers like Coppola and Scorsese invited him to America as a consultant, where he met his third wife, Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese’s extraordinary editor.
Made in England is a magnificent lesson in cinema. Its splendid clips should inspire those who have never seen the films of these eccentric masters, to finally discover their work, to which cinema from the latter half of the 20th century to today owes much.
Cineforum, June 27, 2024
