The films of Powell and Pressburger: life, art and Technicolor. Part 2.

The clues to their cinema.

To my English speaking readers: since my native language is Spanish, I apologise in advanced for any mistakes that you can find in the English version of this post. Thanks for your support! 😊

If there’s something you can say about Powell & Pressburger’s, or The Archers’, films is that, although their filmography covers subjects as dissimilar as anti-nazi propaganda or adaptations of ETA Hoffman’s tales, they managed to build a language of their own, which they used to emphasise the magic component of their films. For that, they used surrealist elements, set designs that resembled German Expressionism and, above all, exploring the plastic possibilities of Technicolor.

During the first years of their collaboration, between 1940 and 1946, Powell and Pressburger made mostly anti-nazi propaganda films commissioned by the British government. However, and although they didn’t lose the message they were carrying, they always managed to made them way deeper than expected for this genre.

In this period they filmed their first masterpiece together: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), in which the propaganda component becomes secondary (apparently Churchill wasn’t happy about that) and love, friendship and the passage of time become the main subjects. Maybe thanks to that the film has barely aged and it’s still relevant today.

Same thing happened with A Matter of Life and Death, from 1946, the last propaganda film they would ever make, which was meant to reconcile British and Americans, as their relationship had tightened towards the end of the war. For that, Pressburger came up with the idea of a British aviator who is about to die in a plane crash and unexpectedly falls in love with the American operator who receives him. Due to a cosmic mistake (the angel who is supposed to take him to Heaven gets lost in the fog and can’t find him) he survives and, to stay alive, he’ll have to face a supernatural trial to defend his right to stay on Earth with his new love. Again, love as the main subject in the context of war, and its transcendence over the conflict.

The film introduces also that exploration of the expressive possibilities of Technicolor and makes the most of them, shooting in black and white the scenes that take place in Heaven, and in vibrant Technicolor the ones that are placed on Earth. This means they choose to give more life an more expressivity to the mundane elements, while they give the supernatural components an ordinary quality. That’s why their movies are considered to have certain hues of magic realism.

Already in this first stage, and although they made mostly commissioned projects, we can see what would become the clues of their cinema: universal and timeless topics (such as love, honour and friendship) as the center of their plots, surrounded by supernatural elements introduced with absolute normality and the use of scenography and Technicolor as expressive elements.

Also, during this first years, they start to build a network of people who will work in The Archers’ productions consistently over the years, such as Deborah Kerr, Kathleen Byron, Anton Walbrook, Marius Goring or Roger Livesey.

After the end of the war, they finally got the creative freedom they wanted and they make two of their best films ever, both considered some of the greatest masterpieces in the history of cinema: Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes.

Black Narcissus follows a group of nuns who are sent to the Himalayas to set a convent and school. The cultural shock quickly makes them reevaluate their way of life as they start experiencing new passions. Powell and Pressburger were really subtle in their way to tackle the crisis in these characters and they use colour to show the progressive changes. Technicolor is so important to deliver the message in this film that, when the Church wanted to censor it, they showed it in black and white.

The Red Shoes, on the other hand, adapts the namesake tale by Hans Christian Andersen. Victoria Page is a ballet dancer played by Moira Shearer who struggles to decide between the love of a composer and her love for dancing, encouraged by the owner of the ballet company. The magic component of the red shoes (in Andersen’s tale, the red shoes make the girl dance until she eventually dies of exhaustion) is so subtle and natural that is not even verbalised. Again, magic realism. The only hint of the magic quality of the shoes is the terror we see in Victoria’s face near the end of the film when the shoes drag her dancing to her fatal end.

The passion for the arts, represented by the red shoes, become the center point of this tale, charged with expressionist elements, probably inherited by Pressburger’s years writing for the UFA. For the role of Victoria Page, they wanted a ballet dancer who could also act (not an actress who could learn how to dance), and it took them a year to convince Moira Shearer to accept the role. The wait was worth it.

In a post-war period dominated by austerity, The Red Shoes was a breath of fresh air for an audience eager to see beauty again, and they found comfort in the Technicolor paradise created by Powell and Pressburger.

After a few minor movies, they succeeded again in 1951 with another adaptation, this time of ETA Hoffman’s: The Tales of Hoffman. The film adapts Offenbach’s opera which in turn adapted several tales by the writer. It is also what Powell named a “composed film”, a film made to fit music that was already written (instead of writing music as a soundtrack for the film), a technique they had already used in the last ten minutes of Black Narcissus.

After this, the creative collaboration between Powell and Pressburger started to fade and, after a few minor films, they disolved The Archers in 1957.

Powell kept directing on his own, and the critics slated him when he released Peeping Tom, considered the first slasher film ever. After this failure, he retired to his cottage in the English countryside.

Pressburger, on the other hand, kept writing but as a novelist, he never made cinema again.

And here comes the real tragedy. Both audience and critics quickly forgot about these two geniuses who made some of the best British films in history.

Luckily, the 70s brought a new wave of young American filmmakers including Scorsese, Coppola or Brian De Palma, who defended Peeping Tom as a film ahead of its time and brought back the work of The Archers which, thanks to them, was discovered by new generations.

In the recently released documentary, produced and narrated by Scorsese, Made in England: the films of Powell & Pressburger (a great entryway to their cinema), the director openly admits the great influence of films like The Red Shoes in Taxi Driver.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger have influenced generations of artists that have come after them. Their films, aesthetic and timeless, are as relevant today as they were when they were released, and entities such as the British Film Institute have hosted tributes to these directors, with the commitment to preserve their work.

For Powell and Pressburger, the film camera was their red shoes: the vehicle that helped them to put art above any other thing and helped them make history.