Made In England: The Films Of Powell And Pressburger

David Hinton’s thoroughly captivating Made In England: The Films Of Powell And Pressburger (a highlight of the 23rd edition of the Tribeca Festival) has Martin Scorsese (who is also an executive producer) as our personal guide into the wonderful world of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, which includes production designers Alfred Junge and Hein Heckroth, cinematographer Jack Cardiff, and art director Arthur Lawson.

Starting with The Thief Of Baghdad (co-directed by Powell with Ludwig Berger and Tim Whelan) and The Tales Of Hoffmann on a black and white TV, little Marty was already “bewitched.” Later, The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp’s influence is vast on Scorsese, with the duel between Clive Candy (Roger Livesey) and Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook) inspiring the way he shot (cinematography by Michael Chapman) and cut (by Thelma Schoonmaker) the fight scene in Raging Bull, and with Deborah Kerr’s aura floating through The Age Of Innocence. We also hear that Walbrook’s impresario Lermontov in The Red Shoes shares some aspects with Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. “Even the eyes are choreographed,” says Scorsese about the much admired filmmakers.

The personal relationship for Scorsese began, when he tracked down the at the time reclusive Powell, who could never recover his status after the public and the press were shocked by his Peeping Tom (in which Sissi-film heartthrob Karlheinz Böhm played a tortured, film-obsessed serial killer). After watching Mean Streets, Powell wrote the young director a letter, which contained the comment that there was “too much red” in the film. Hinton accompanies Scorsese’s amused retelling by showing us a quartered screen exploding with Powell/Pressburger reds! Shoes, lips, flowers, lights, no other colour features as prominently in their universe.

Powell and Pressburger (who founded The Archers production company), comments Scorsese, created works “as close to pure expression as cinema can get.” Nobody used Technicolor the way they did, or explored the relation of camera movement and music quite that way. Their movies, both successes and failures in the critics’ and public’s eyes are always audacious, be it The Small Back Room, which provided a needed “escape from romance to reality” or The Red Shoes (starring ballerina Moira Shearer) which catapulted the Hans Christian Andersen tale firmly into the 20th Century and changed dance on camera forever. Hinton’s choice of clips from The Red Shoes covers a whole spectrum of effects the picture sparks: It can awaken your desire to dance and determine your preference in footwear for decades to come. This masterpiece of filmmaking also holds up a mirror to artistic obsession and explains with sleight of hand tropes of vanity in classic tale tradition.

There is David Niven’s magnificent performance (opposite Kim Hunter) as a pilot blithely hovering between two worlds on (Metropolis production designer) Alfred Junge’s grandiose staircase in A Matter Of Life And Death, the audacity and love of Kent inherent in The Archers’ take on The Canterbury Tales, or the charms of I Know Where I’m Going, which lie deeply in the film’s intrinsic values. We learn how the Hungarian émigré Pressburger, after working at UFA in Berlin, arrived in England and met native Powell and we get to see, in archival clips, glimpses into their fascinating collaboration. Footage of Jennifer Jones rescuing a fox in an obscure Hollywood production, butchered by Selznick, and the team’s war movie in VistaVision (The Battle Of The River Plate) find their place, as do the masterpieces. In some of them their frequent cinematographer Jack Cardiff drew on Rembrandt and Vermeer, in others an architectural maze holds us captive.

Hinton’s documentary visually points to all the complicated, often triangular entanglements, as in The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp and Black Narcissus, which leaves us poised high up in an Anglican convent in the Himalayas (all shot in a studio in England). Their films are filled with the fairy-tale number three and lots of doubles, so it is no wonder that the team was attracted by Jacques Offenbach's 1881 opera The Tales Of Hoffmann, based on three stories by ETA Hoffmann, overlord of the Doppelgänger. With Olympia, the doll in The Sandman, an early instance of AI, narratives blur, as they do in The Canterbury Tales, where ancient legends and the war-time present intersect in the landscape and reflect each other. A falcon turns into a Spitfire. Pressburger will later (and without Powell) direct an adaptation of Erich Kästner’s famous book, Das Doppelte Lottchen, as Twice Upon A Time (later film versions go with the title The Parent Trap) about twin sisters who encounter each other in summer camp.

Many of The Archers productions include the fantastic, because it is precisely this magic that allows them to speak of our deepest fears and longings and the very real problems that would be unbearable to address in a more naturalistic way. A Matter Of Life And Death begins with a shocking premise and as the petals of the film open and expose its visually so distinct worlds (a starkly bureaucratic afterlife in architecturally sublime black and white, opposed to an earthly here and now of the mid 1940s shot in the brightest, most delicious Technicolor, we follow Royal Air Force pilot Peter Carter wherever he takes us. He is played by David Niven (who will later also star in their Pimpernel remake, The Fighting Pimpernel) with such unforgettable poise and nonchalance, such humor and affection when confronted with matters of love and death, injustice and chance, that it is difficult not to want to be him until yet another truth to his condition is revealed.

I Know Where I’m Going, together with its haunting Scottish folk song, actually proposes the opposite of what it states. Wendy Hiller as Joan Webster on her way to the Hebrides to get married, is stopped by fate in the shape of a stormy sea and a man named Torquil MacNeil (Roger Livesey). As in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, set in the same part of the world, the non-reaching of the once desired target is the point.

In 2022, Chloe Zhao, Radha Blank, Sofia Coppola, Janicza Bravo, Julie Dash, Tom Ford, Regina King, Autumn de Wilde, plus Scorsese were invited to create installations for The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute exhibition, In America: An Anthology of Fashion, in their period rooms. Martin Scorsese took over the museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright Room, which was designed between 1912 and 1914 in the Prairie School style as a lakeside summer retreat in Minnesota. The clothes given to him for the exhibit were by the great American couturier Charles James and to stage his one-frame movie he chose John Stahl’s Leave Her To Heaven as inspiration. And yet, the result for me was supremely Powell and Pressburger - a room in a real museum and out of this world, a timeless space of beauty where anything could happen and anything that is true is as possible as it is fleeting.

Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger was decades in the making, to be precise, since 1986, when David Hinton met Michael Powell to direct a South Bank Show episode on him. Now this illuminating documentary celebrates the unique artistic output by the team who called themselves The Archers, through the eyes of a third cinema great, who spills the beans about how deeply their films influenced his own. The result is a loving and smart triptych that makes you want to revisit and rediscover their movies again and again. The Powell and Pressburger oeuvre perpetually catches you by surprise. Their films are like trees whose blossoms open not all at once and which bear fruit that tastes a little different each year.