The Cinema of Powell and Pressburger edited by Nathalie Morris and Claire Smith
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023
Once comparatively obscure, the oeuvre of Powell and Pressburger (otherwise known as the Archers) has become much better known in recent years, largely thanks to the popularising efforts of American film director Martin Scorsese. The latter’s recent feature-length documentary about them, Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger, goes on general release this spring and garnered extensive critical acclaim when it was shown at the Berlinale in February.
There is nothing quite like the pair’s creative output. Witty, poetic, and attuned to the ineffable, it made luxurious use of cinema’s possibilities to inject romance and cheer into a grey, hungry time. As Nathalie Morris and Claire Smith note in their introduction to this beautiful new collection of essays to accompany the BFI's major Powell and Pressburger retrospective last autumn and the nationwide re-release of The Red Shoes, "The aesthetic of an Archers' production is often defined by its romanticism and bravery, inserting a mystical, Technicolor door into the subdued palette of war-torn Europe." This is an allusion to one of the best moments in 1946's A Matter of Lifeand Death, when the heavenly messenger, a delightfully campy French aristocrat played by Marius Goring, looks around at the saturated rhododendron blossom of the subtly Blakeian corner of England to which he has been dispatched, remembers the black-and-white technocratic apparatus of heaven (suspiciously evocative of the all-encompassing administration required by total war), and sighs "One is starrrved for Technicolor up zere."
Such flamboyant artistry is characteristic of the Archers, and the many reproductions of archival material in this volume allow readers to appreciate the meticulous care that their team of creatives invested in the set designs and cinematography. Covering the years of their partnership, from 1942 to 1957, it provides new perspectives on the most imaginative works in English cinema through thoughtful essays by Ian Christie, Sarah Street, Mahesh Rao, and others. As Tim Walker writes in "Notes from a Photographer," P & P films are traditionally shown on Sunday afternoon television, yet they are so much more, and so much stranger, than the normally somewhat pedestrian and dozy postprandial fare associated with that time-slot. They reward the kind of deep consideration that this book gives them.
One reason for their distinctiveness is suggested by Morris and Smith, who draw attention to the uniquely collaborative nature of their film-making, deliberately deviating from the dominant auteur model. They had a gift for organising creative geniuses --including composers Allan Gray and Brian Easdale, cinematographers Jack Cardiff and Erwin Hililer, and actors such as Ludmilla Tcherina, Deborah Kerr, Roger Livesey and Anton Wallbrook-- into a team that was enormous but at the same time also familial. The collective, sometimes untethered euphoria that this kind of working together could produce is captured in some of Powell's diary entries from the time, about an ultimately unrealised film project on which he was working with Brian Easdale and set designer Hein Heckroth. He described the process as intimate and telepathic: "We three understand one another: director, composer and designer, we create independently in each other's minds. The Tale grows, whether we are alone or together." It is perhaps a good thing that this particular project was not realised, since they seem to have envisioned casting the Scottish actor John Laurie in a ballet sequence, which would have been excruciating. (Certainly Pressburger disliked this project intensely and wanted no part of it.) After the Archers disbanded Powell would go on to mentor the eventually far more famous American filmmakers Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, but their legacy also inspired many other names, including Derek Jarman, Guillermo del Toro, and Wes Anderson.
Caitlin McDonald's essay "Exiles" suggests that the roots of the Archers' stunning aesthetic can be traced to the Berlin film studio UFA's dismissal of all its Jewish employees on the 19th of March 1933, one of whom was Pressburger, who immediately left for Paris and then, two years later, decided to move to England. Other UFA alumnae who worked with the Archers included Conrad Veidt and Hein Heckroth (neither Jewish but both politically opposed to Nazism), the composer Allan Gray, and Erwin Hillier, who had worked as a cameraman on Fritz Lang's M and brought the haunting chiaroscuro of German Expressioism to I Know Where I'm Going! and A Canterbury Tale. Thus UFA had a huge, indirect influence on the appearance of the Archers' films. Some others of this group of UFA expellees would eventually get to Hollywood via France, Peter Lorre and Billy Wilder being only two well-known names. The UFA case gives a tiny hint of the incalculable cultural damage that Germany inflicted on itself by murdering and expelling many of its most talented citizens, an impoverishment that still resonates today; by contrast, the romantic, creative Archers output suggests what might have been.
McDonald's essay zooms in on a much-remarked phenomenon, the outsize contribution of Hungarian Jewish emigres to the English cinema industry during the first half of the twentieth century. The movement from Hungary to what, for a time, became jokingly known as Budapest-on-Thames took on such dimensions that one Hungarian migrant, the highly successful film producer Alexander Korda, was reputed to have put a sign on his office door which warned job applicants that "It's not enough to be Hungarian, you must have talent too." However, this raises the question of why exactly these new arrivals threw themselves into making popular English narratives. The preoccupation of Hungarian emigres with Englishness --in the films of Pressburger and Korda but also the books of George Mikes-- has long intrigued me, and I developed a hypothesis during a recent excursion to Budapest. There I discovered that Hungary before the Second World War was highly unusual in offering its Jews a level of integration and prosperity that turned them into fervent bourgeois patriots, emboldened to take an active and confident part in national debates about Hungarian culture and identity. When they came to England, they seem to have brought this interested engagement to a country just as ancient and eccentric as the one they had left behind: in other words, because they were used to considering what it meant to be Hungarian, it came naturally to them to delve into Englishness. (The partly-Hungarian Leslie Howard, whose relatives had been part of an earlier immigration wave, even capitalised on his status as the Nr. 1 matinee idol of the nation's womankind by turning himself into a quintessential English war hero, first in various films and then, tragically, in real life.) The overall goodwill which many of them reported experiencing also helped: in the 1970s Pressburger made the poignant and humorous comment, with reference to the Archers film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (about a harrumphing old colonel with a secret heart of gold), "There I was with my Hungarian passport, an enemy alien, surrounded by Blimps of all kinds, including the best kind."
Though Pressburger was a very reserved individual compared with Powell, Morris and Smith observe that an exuberant, poetic, expressive personality comes out in his film treatments. They would pass Pressburger's scripts back and forth between them to improve and refine them. In a way the two were a mirror of each other, as McDonald points out: Powell had acquired a certain Continental sophistication while working in the South of France, while Pressburger's powerful need for a home led him to focus intently on evoking a sense of place in his new country, whether in the area around Canterbury or the sand dunes of the Kentish coast, expressing a subconscious nesting instinct in a time of international upheaval. As Alexandra Harris notes of A Canterbury Tale in her essay "Pilgrims," in the film Pressburger was asking, as an alien, what the "English landscape meant to him." She notes that the film "belongs to a time when the celebration of deep England was, for many, a solace, motivation, and survival strategy"; an often-articulated official war aim was the preservation of the English village. In this film, with fantastic music combining Canterbury bells with Onward, Christian Soldiers composed by Allan Gray (born Jozef Zmigrod in Austrian Galicia) and luminous cinematography intentionally evoking English landscape painting by Erwin Hillier, Pressburger elliptically reaches an answer to that question, by showing how an array of English and American modern-day secular pilgrims, forced into the countryside by the war, all unexpectedly attain their heart's desire there. The machinery by which this happens is somewhat mysterious; the latent magic continually moving below the surface of daily life to achieve good purposes in Pressburger's scripts seems to echo Judaism's belief in a divine immanence in the everyday, while his conviction that it is kindness, not money, that rules the world is evident in all the films that the Archers made together. (This quality is mostly absent from Powell's solo works.) While the Archers were very twentieth-century and modern in their outlook, Harris identifies a theme of pilgrimage common to A Matter of Life and Death, A Canterbury Tale, and I Know Where I'm Going! Apart from the scope that it gave for Pressburger's humorous mysticism, this may also be a reflection of the weary distances that he and his fellow refugees had traversed to safety.
In many ways, then, Powell and Pressburger were far ahead of their time (and in a sense they are still ahead of ours), but in another way they were very much of it. In this volume Indian film director Mahesh Rao contributes a poetic meditation on their problematic Black Narcissus, a piece of Orientalist hokum that eventually becomes far more than the sum of its ridiculous parts in spite of itself. Although its attempted interrogation of Western hegemony falls flat because its basis of comparison depends on offensive tropes of the chaotic and sensual East, there are moments of transcendent genius mostly supplied by Jack Cardiff and the other creatives who worked on the film under Alfred Junge’s brilliant art direction, for which Junge won a well-deserved Oscar. (Like Pressburger, he was another former UFA employee.) Nevertheless, as Rao notes, the film was a terrible waste of the talented Indian film star Sabu as the Prince, who made Rao physically cringe with his Babu-esque language when he first saw the film.
Despite this, Rao acknowledges that the film is beautiful to look at. Indeed, those who have seen the Archers' colourful masterpieces may have vaguely noticed, without thinking about it further, that they look different from Hollywood's contemporary output. Sarah Street explains why in "Starved for Technicolor." They deliberately deployed Technicolor in a more refined and muted way than the saturated, often garish contemporary American use of it, with the result that their films achieve a complete suspension of disbelief on the part of the viewer, with the appearance of a hyper-reality that eluded most Hollywood productions. Of particular interest here is Street's examination of Vermeer and Caravaggio's influence on Jack Cardiff, very obvious in his use of light in his work for Black Narcissus. Powell and Pressburger also embraced the artificiality of cinema sets and made it into a (very) obvious virtue of the films that they could not afford to shoot on location, such as in their unsettling recreation of the Himalayas at Pinewood for this film. Their approach, anticipating post-modern film-making tactics by combining the obviously artificial with the apparently real, emboldened later film-makers such as Joe Wright to similar audacity.
One final point of importance is the way that Powell and Pressburger detected and promoted star power in certain actors who would otherwise have been much less well-known. The husky-voiced, gentle Welsh-born Roger Livesey became a romantic ideal (much, it is said, to his own bafflement) for thousands of housewives through his appearances in the Archers' films. The refugee actor Anton Wallbrook brought a slightly unhinged (but ever so refined) Viennese charm to a number of Archers productions, improbably cast as a rigid Prussian military officer in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and a megalomaniac Russian ballet impresario in The RedShoes, and investing both of them with tenderness and hyper-awareness, though somehow the incongruousness ultimately does not seem to matter. (The Archers did finally put him into his natural element with the main role of the mischievious Bat in their production of Strauss's Die Fledermaus, which they entitled Oh...Rosalinda!) Even those actors who subsequently became major Hollywood stars, such as Deborah Kerr, never got to demonstrate quite the same range again.
This book, and its important re-evaluation of Pressburger's outsize contribution to the Archers' canon, is long overdue. As a refugee from an environment that had been focussed on his destruction, Pressburger, after his arrival in England, was determined to find peace in his adopted home. The result was a succession of peerless screenplays which meditate on England and Englishness (and Scotland and Scottishness) with the acuity of an outsider's gaze. His new country did not completely succeed in providing him with the comfort that he so desperately sought. Pressburger would be haunted all his life by the Nazis and the Holocaust, particularly by guilt over his failure to bring his mother to England and her death in a concentration camp. His short-lived attempt to settle in the Austrian Tyrol in the 1970s was defeated by local anti-Semitism, so that he ultimately retired to the depths of rural Suffolk. However, while the Archers partnership lasted, the films and the friendship with Powell seem to have provided him with a powerful distraction from his troubles. We owe him a considerable debt for his highlighting of the peculiarities of a country which emerges, through his gaze, as an island of individuality and kindness.--Isabel Taylor