\n<\/p>\n
Toward the end of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger\u2019s \u201cBlack Narcissus\u201d (1947), set at a convent high in the Himalayas, the crazed Sister Ruth sneaks up behind her perceived nemesis, Sister Clodagh, who is ringing the convent\u2019s cliffside bell, and gives her a good shove.<\/p>\n
The scene, a classic in the Powell-Pressburger canon, is remarkable for many reasons. For one, the mountains are an illusion, conjured with paintings on glass and matte work at Pinewood Studios near London. \u201cWind, the altitude, the beauty of the setting \u2014 it must all be under our control,\u201d Powell recalled explaining to his collaborators.<\/p>\n
For another, the whole sequence was filmed to a precomposed score. Shooting action to music fascinated Powell. He and his filmmaking partner, Pressburger, would refine the technique in \u201cThe Red Shoes\u201d (1948) and in the filmed opera \u201cThe Tales of Hoffmann\u201d (1951). In the new documentary \u201cMade in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger,\u201d Martin Scorsese says that repeated childhood viewings of \u201cHoffmann\u201d taught him \u201cpretty much everything I know about the relation of camera to music.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Scorsese is hardly alone in feeling that Powell and Pressburger, the greatest British filmmakers this side of Alfred Hitchcock, left a profound mark on his way of thinking about movies. Francis Ford Coppola\u2019s forthcoming \u201cMegalopolis\u201d pays tribute, too, by lifting an exchange from \u201cThe Red Shoes.\u201d For those who already are or who long to be similarly entranced, Powell and Pressburger are blanketing New York this summer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
For five weeks beginning Friday, the Museum of Modern Art is screening \u201cCinema Unbound,\u201d<\/a> the most comprehensive Powell-Pressburger retrospective ever mounted in the city. Scorsese will introduce \u201cBlack Narcissus\u201d on Friday, while his longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, who was married to Powell until his death in 1990<\/a>, will introduce a preview of \u201cMade in England\u201d<\/a> on Saturday. That film, which features Scorsese as an onscreen guide, opens July 12. And Film Forum is giving a run to \u201cThe Small Back Room<\/a>,\u201d the noir that followed \u201cThe Red Shoes,\u201d starting June 28.<\/p>\n The retrospective offers multiple points of entry for newcomers and completists alike. There are several ways to classify the pair\u2019s movies, but they all feel inadequate, perhaps because the two men were seeking a purely cinematic form of expression that isn\u2019t easily reduced to words.<\/p>\n Many of their most famous images \u2014 like the dancer Victoria Page (Moira Shearer) in sweaty close-up, hallucinating visions of her Mephistophelian mentor (Anton Walbrook) and her composer (Marius Goring) during the \u201cRed Shoes\u201d ballet \u2014 are in Technicolor. Certainly, the way the directors harnessed the potential of that format\u2019s golden era, through a harmony of cinematography, production design and costuming, was never equaled.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But to characterize Powell and Pressburger as mere maestros of color is to shortchange the magic they brought to their black-and-white films. In \u201cA Canterbury Tale\u201d (1944), shot in the English countryside, and \u201cI Know Where I\u2019m Going!\u201d (1945), filmed in the Hebrides, the British landscape becomes an essential character, rendered in shades and textures as mysterious as anything the filmmakers could dream up for a soundstage. Still other films (\u201cGone to Earth\u201d or Powell\u2019s pre-Pressburger \u201cThe Edge of the World\u201d) confirm that their genius was hardly confined to the studio.<\/p>\n You might also be tempted to divide Powell and Pressburger\u2019s films into wartime and postwar efforts (the dates in this article refer to when the films were first shown, not necessarily in the U.S.). But the sheer range of their creativity and subject matter in the war years, when British pictures required official approval to get made, inevitably makes those categorizations look reductive.<\/p>\n They warned America about the looming Nazi threat in \u201c49th Parallel\u201d (1941), which depicts Germans invading Canada, and saluted the Dutch resistance a year later in the similarly gripping \u201cOne of Our Aircraft Is Missing.\u201d They charted 40 years of military history (and friendship) in the deeply moving \u201cThe Life and Death of Colonel Blimp\u201d (1943). They addressed a home front feeling of uprootedness in \u201cA Canterbury Tale.\u201d And at war\u2019s end, they even had room for a romantic fantasy, \u201cA Matter of Life and Death\u201d (1946), in which a Royal Air Force pilot (David Niven) and an American radio operator (Kim Hunter) fall for each other as his plane goes down \u2014 a catastrophe he miraculously survives through an error of divine accounting.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Then there is the chilly and despairing \u201cThe Small Back Room,\u201d a 1949 premiere set in 1943, centered on a British scientist, Sammy (David Farrar), who is called on to defuse explosive booby traps that the Nazis have been dropping on Britain. He is alcoholic and wounded in a way that connotes impotence. (He repeatedly raps on the prosthetic he wears on the lower part of one leg.) While the film delivers the suspense of a thriller, it also taps into his agonized mind.<\/p>\n On the surface, the stark ambience couldn\u2019t be more different from the lush Technicolor highs of \u201cThe Red Shoes,\u201d which devotes 15 minutes of screen time to a surreal, proscenium-dissolving ballet performance. But for Sammy, like Vicky Page, success requires risking oblivion. Reuniting Farrar and Kathleen Byron from \u201cBlack Narcissus,\u201d \u201cThe Small Back Room\u201d adds new layers to that film\u2019s dynamics of sexual repression and need.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n That Powell and Pressburger\u2019s art is, frequently, \u201cnot at all comforting,\u201d as Scorsese says of \u201cThe Red Shoes,\u201d is part of the key to the sophistication that they were able to achieve together. Although they usually took a joint credit, their partnership had defined contours. \u201cAs far as we could we shared every decision,\u201d Powell says in \u201cMade in England.\u201d Pressburger elaborates: \u201cMichael directed on his own, and I was more the writer, and we produced together.\u201d<\/p>\n Before they first collaborated, on \u201cThe Spy in Black\u201d (1939), and before they started their own production company, the Archers, which put out films from 1942 to 1957, the men came up in separate film industries. Pressburger, a Hungarian Jew, worked on movies in Berlin before fleeing the Nazis and landing in Britain. Powell ground out features in Britain\u2019s \u201cquota quickie\u201d sector. A law compelled British theaters to show a certain quota of British films, and the industry responded.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n One reason the MoMA retrospective is the most complete yet is that it has a lot more of Powell before Pressburger. The museum is screening 13 quota quickies, all but one<\/a> recently remastered by the British Film Institute, that Powell made from 1931 to 1936. Several others are presumed lost.<\/p>\n But they improve more or less chronologically. They offer an opportunity to watch Powell experimenting with different genres, including a musical comedy (\u201cHis Lordship\u201d), a class satire (\u201cSomething Always Happens\u201d), a ghostly lighthouse story (\u201cThe Phantom Light\u201d) and a murder plot (\u201cCrown v. Stevens\u201d). Powell\u2019s sense of camera movement and lighting grows toward the end of the cycle. The most delightful entry may be \u201cThe Love Test\u201d (1935), which follows the romantic misunderstandings among a group of chemists seeking to fireproof celluloid.<\/p>\n This from a filmmaker who would soon set the screen ablaze in one feature after another with Pressburger (and a late one without \u2014 the disturbing \u201cPeeping Tom\u201d<\/a>). Watching the dissolves in the \u201cRed Shoes\u201d ballet, as dancers turn into flowers and then birds in flight, you sense that Powell and Pressburger are the rare filmmakers who embraced the full freedom of the art form.<\/p>\n \u201cI like that it sometimes seems out of control,\u201d Scorsese says of \u201cThe Red Shoes,\u201d explaining, \u201cNot the emotions of the characters, but the emotions of the people who made the film. Their passion\u2019s out of control.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n