A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

Many years ago a friend said, after I had insisted that he watch A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger 1946), that it had a different perspective from how to view the world, and that it consequently made the spectators view the world from a new perspective too. I have always felt it was a good way of describing the film, and the films of Powell and Pressburger in general. There is always more to the world than meets the eye they seem to be saying, something I have discussed before regarding their film A Canterbury Tale (1944). Now I have had my students watch A Matter of Life and Death, and afterwards they spent two hours talking about it freely. It was great fun.

The film begins with a British pilot flying towards home, the only remaining crew member on a Lancaster bomber returning from a raid over Germany, and right before he has to jump out without a parachute he talks on the radio to an American woman working on a British airfield; spending his last moments alive with her. What happens in the rest of the film is not as easy to describe. Due to a mistake from higher authorities he does not die, instead he finds himself on a beach (where he has a strange encounter with a young, naked, shepherd) and then he meets the woman whom he spoke to on the radio. When, belatedly, he is summoned to the next world he refuses to go. He was ready to die then but not now, and since they made a mistake he argues that he should be allowed to remain on earth.

This is the literal interpretation of the film. There are other possibilities, such as him having a brain injury which causes these hallucinations of another world, or that he actually died in the beginning and this is his afterlife fantasy. The film does leave it open as to what happens.

In A Matter of Life and Death, Powell and Pressburger effortlessly breaks through such conventional boundaries as death, time and space, making them seem irrelevant and transparent. Several people die in this film, death is a key subject, but when they die they are not really gone, they just move, move to another world which is a kind of secular heaven open for everyone regardless of nationality, religion or ethnicity. But they can move in our world too, at least some of them. Moving between this world and the next is here comparatively easy, there is a huge, potentially endless, escalator between the two sides, the monochrome world (which is the other world) and the Technicolor world (which is ours). But is it literally happening, or is it just in the mind of a dying man? Well, it might not matter. Who is to say what is real anyway? Not Powell and Pressburger. This is the world, or worlds, they are presenting to us and it is up to us to accept or reject them, depending upon our fears, beliefs and prejudices. This is a deeply philosophical film, as their films usually are, speculating in various ways about mind, matter, space, time, love, history and nationality. What these concepts are, what they mean, how they affect us, how they conspire to make us what we are, how they are the bedrock of humanity itself. That might sound like a lot to deal with, and Powell and Pressburger are not timid filmmakers.

Besides love and death, time is also a central aspect here. In the other world, time does not exist. Time ends when you die, and becomes separated from space. "We are talking in space, not time." as one of the agents of the other world says. He also adds "After all, what is time? A mere tyranny." When he is on earth, time stops, or rather it pauses for the people who are alive whereas it continues (since it does not exist) for those who are dead. After you die you are forever exactly as you were at the moment of death, living in a constant now.

But A Matter of Life and Death is also about England, England at war (although war was over by the time the film opened). In one spectacular sequence in the beginning a main character, a doctor called Frank Reeves, is observing the small village in which he lives through a camera obscura. With it he can see everything that is going on in the village from a room in his house. In one sense he is spying, or being the eye of God, but there is nothing malevolent about it. He is not like Peeping Tom, from Powell's later film, a disturbed and homicidal man. Reeves does it out of joy and love, even though that does not prevent it from being slightly unsettling. What he is observing is Powell's England, a brief love letter to the place of his childhood, to some extent a rural fantasy (like A Canterbury Tale). This is what is contrasted with the celestial fantasy of the other world. England is also contrasted with America, of two different cultures fighting the same war. (England's colonial crimes are also brought to light, albeit briefly.)

Powell and Pressburger and their team at the Archers, such as cinematographer Jack Cardiff, production designers Alfred Junge and Hein Heckroth and editor Reginald Mills (the composer Brian Easedale had not joined them yet, he came along with the next film, Black Narcissus (1947)), have always been pushing the medium, all aspects of it, to go further and be bolder, than what might be considered possible or practical. There is such an unrestrained imagination at work here that it is thrilling just to watch and see what they are up to, how far they are willing to push things, and A Matter of Life and Death is perhaps their most audacious film. In that respect re-watching their films will always be a slightly lesser experience from one angle, because the aesthetic surprises constantly coming at you will now already have been experienced. But that does of course not mean that their films should be seen only once. The craft, the ideas, and the powerful emotions remain from one viewing to the next, in this world and in any other that might exist.

Judging by the two-hour discussion I had with the 60 students, they seemed quite taken by it, and approached it from all possible angles. The use of colour, the concept of time, the acting, ideas on nationality and heritage, narrative structure, ethics and philosophical viewpoints. I had provided them with some keywords before but they went beyond them, and everything was meticulously analysed. They also pointed out that when the "conductor," the man sent to collect the dead, first meets the pilot a game of chess is suggested, ten years before Bergman picked up the same subject. 

A Matter of Life and Death was a huge hit when it came out, on both sides of the Atlantic, and in interviews Powell often said it was his favourite among his own films. It is comforting to know that it still enthuses new generations.

A Canterbury Tale (1944)

I spent two days in Canterbury a couple of years ago, partly because of my love for Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's film A Canterbury Tale (1944). The cathedral provided accommodation so I slept on the premises, and in the morning I walked into the actual cathedral before it was open to the public. I walked around in there all by myself; a very special thing to do. Then when it opened to the public I happened to be by the main entrance, and inadvertently greeted all those who walked in, including a group of school children. When they saw me standing there they said "Hello." or "Good morning.", and I responded in kind, even occasionally throwing in a "Welcome" as if I belonged there, as if it was my cathedral.

***

Even by the usual standards of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, A Canterbury Tale (1944) is eccentric. Shot in Kent, in the area where Powell grew up, and made at the height of the war, when American soldiers had begun to arrive in Britain to help with the existential fight against the Germans, it is filled with a deep sense of England's history, the past and the present coming together in a perpetual now. In the opening sequence a pilgrim on his way to Canterbury in the 15th century looks up at a falcon in the sky, a falcon which suddenly becomes a fighter plane (a Spitfire or a Hurricane?) in the same part of the sky, 500 years later. This is then the time in which the rest of the film is set, but the past is still there, and can be felt, and heard. This is a film about time, and the importance of history. It is also a place about space, both the natural world and the man-made. The Kentish countryside; the forest, the hills, the farms, and the small town in which the film takes place, and Canterbury and its cathedral, where the film comes to its conclusion. Everything imbued with a sense of awe and wonder, almost pantheistic.

This is fairly typical of Powell and Pressburger, for them space is always of the outmost importance. It is not just there, it means something, it is alive and it influences the characters in the most profound ways, sometimes for good and sometimes for bad. In A Canterbury Tale space is warm and benevolent, the natural world is protective, and we can hide in it, and seek comfort. An American soldier and an old English man form an immediate bond over their mutual love of trees and wood.

But there are also weird things going on, and there is a war. People are being killed, or have gone missing. Disappointments are to be had. But sometimes, miracles happen. Not due to otherworldly causes but because life is unpredictable and sends conflicting messages. Sometimes the worst happens but not always. Good things also happen, and happiness can be found, even if it takes roundabout ways.

John Sweet, Sheila Sim, Dennis Price

A Canterbury Tale is a deeply moving experience. Partly because one can sense the urgency with which they made it. "This is where I was born and this is where I grew up." Powell seems to be saying. "We must protected this place and preserve it. This is worth fighting for." The fight here is not for freedom or democracy but for time and space itself. It is also moving due to the characters, the three main characters, the American soldier, a land girl from London and a British soldier who was a cinema organist before the war, who meet by chance and become friends during a couple of days in Kent. They all have reasons to be disappointed, even heartbroken, especially she. There is one especially fine scene when she finds the caravan, now covered in dust and cobweb, with which she once travelled around Kent with a boy, now shot down somewhere over Germany.

A Canterbury Tale is also peculiar in that it contains so many things: a detective story, sometimes shot like it was a film noir, a pastoral hymn, a fairytale, a propaganda film, a history lesson. But these things are not disconnected, they are woven tightly together, in a unique and spellbinding way. The films of Powell and Pressburger constantly ask of us to reconsider the way we look at things; time, space and characters, and this is true for A Canterbury Tale too. Nothing is to be taken for granted, there is magic everywhere, if you pay attention.

***

The year after A Canterbury Tale, Powell and Pressburger made I Know Where I'm Going, with which it is closely connected (and both are photographed by Erwin Hillier). It was shot in Scotland, on the isle of Mull. I have been there too, and the magic remains.

On wonderment in cinema

A Canterbury Tale (1944)

Max Weber has appeared on this blog before, the previous time regarding his ideas about ideal types. This post is related to another idea of his; that in the modern era society, through rationalisations and secularisations, are experiencing a loss of enchantment, of the mystical, the irrational. The term he used to describe this modern phenomenon was Entzauberung (a term previously used by Friedrich Schiller), meaning disenchantment or demystification. In a speech from 1917, "Science as a Vocation", Weber explained it as that the modern person believes "that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted."

I would like to borrow this idea and apply it to cinema, or rather; I would like to suggest that we can talk about a kind of cinema, from a number of filmmakers, that have kept this sense of the magical, the irrational. Note that "enchantment" is not referring to something necessarily joyful, but something mysterious or spiritual or strange, so calling it a cinema of enchantment might give the wrong impression. Better perhaps to call it a cinema of strangeness, or wonderment. In his book The Art and Politics of Film (from 2000) John Orr suggests that Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Parajanov, Aleksandr Sokurov and others working under communist dictatorships brought in a new style of filmmaking, which used religious symbolism to undermine social realism ("a fusion of the marvellous and the tragic") and Orr calls this "a cinema of wonder" (he also includes Theo Angelopoulos and a few others). That is not what I am talking about though, my scope here is much larger.

One example is Jacques Tourneur, a filmmaker I have written about before, and who made films where there is generally found a sense of the otherworldly, of ghosts and monsters, and also uncertainties and ambiguities about what is real and what is imagined. A contemporary example is the Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, in whose films ghosts, apparitions and spirits mingled freely with ordinary mortals.

Tropical Malady (2004)

Hayao Miyazaki is another filmmaker who likes to show gods, monsters and fantasy-figures go about their daily business.

Spirited Away (2001)

It can be found, of course, in surrealist films or magic realism, or a cinema of abstractions. But it can also appear in films that are ostensibly realistic. Films in which there are no embodiments of magic or wonders but that have what might be called a pantheistic view of nature and the world. Terrence Malick is a contemporary example of this, as in The Thin Red Line (1998). He has even made a film with the title To the Wonder (2012), although in Malick's case that sense of wonder can occasionally feel overbearing. Another example is the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in which nature seems to be imbued with a life-force of its own, and where every place has a sense of magic and wonder. In their films the spaces in which the characters find themselves deeply affect them in ways they do not understand. See for example A Canterbury Tale (1944), I Know Where I'm Going (1945), Black Narcissus (1947) or Gone to Earth (1950).

I Know Where I'm Going

Black Narcissus

One common way of letting the audience share the characters' sense of wonder is by close-ups of their faces. In the case of Steven Spielberg's films (which are generally built around a sense of awe and wonderment) it has given birth to the expression "the Spielberg face", zooming in on the face of a person looking up at something wondrous, scary, or both, which happens more or less in all of Spielberg's films.

François Truffaut in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

Filmmakers who might otherwise be seen as more materialistic, like Michael Mann, can also include such moments of wonder. With Mann it is often related to animals (as I have written about before here). This clip show such a moment, an encounter with two coyotes in downtown Los Angeles. After this neither man is the same any more.

Ordinary, daily life might sometimes feel dull and filled with inordinate amounts of concrete, and one of the joys of art is to bring forward other dimensions, to enchant the world, or re-enchant it, to suggest that we are not all there is. It can also be subversive, as magical realism often is. It is not a religious thing, although for some it undoubtedly is, and neither is it about a belief in aliens or ghosts, just that there is something beyond the logical and the rational, something that is undefinable, but intuitive and emotional. We do not always understand what is happening to us and why.

The strange encounter with a wolf in Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009).

Wendy Hiller

Wendy Hiller is without a doubt one of my favourite actresses, wonderful and wondrous, with a unique voice and a strong presence. She was witty and warm, a combination of sternness and naivety, or pretended naivety. From Eliza in Pygmalion (1938) to The Countess Alice (1993), when she was 81 years old, she own the screen (despite few leading roles) and perhaps no more so than in Powell and Pressburger's I Know Where I'm Going! (1945). Unfortunately it is hard to find good scenes with her on youtube but I managed to get these:

This is from Major Barbara (1941), an adaptation of yet another play by George Bernard Shaw:

This sequence from I Know Where I'm Going! is perhaps more an example of Michael Powell imagination and visionary style, but Hiller is in it too.

And as a special treat, here's the episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents in which she plays the new teacher in European literature. It is not a great episode but it has some charm.