These notes were first written in 2005 for a Cornerhouse (Manchester) Event. I’m posting them now as part of my response to the BFI’s Powell & Pressburger Season (October-December 2023)
“But what do they know of England, who only the West End know? . . . Beauty, truth and the heart of England, I believe in those three things”. Michael Powell (1950) defending Gone to Earth and The Elusive Pimpernel. (see www.powell-pressburger.org/Reviews/50_GTE/GTE09.html)
Michael Powell was passionate about most things, but perhaps most of all about his vision of cinema. He was in some ways unfortunate that it was a vision which he was able to realise at a time when film critics in the UK were at best disinterested and at worst hostile to what he wanted to achieve. Between 1942 and 1956 Powell was partnered with Emeric Pressburger in ‘The Archers’. They shared the roles of producer, writer and director, though Powell was usually identified as director and Pressburger as writer with the other supporting. The partners met on The Spy in Black in 1939 and last worked together on Ill Met By Moonlight in 1957.
Many of Powell and Pressburger’s films were commercially and critically successful in the 1940s, but critical support was only possible if the films stayed within certain kinds of boundaries. These are explored in John Ellis’ seminal Screen article about ‘quality film’ in 1978. An early wartime film like One of Aircraft is Missing (1942) received support for its lively presentation of a contemporary story, but The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp put ‘art before profit’ and was ‘too spectacular’. A Canterbury Tale (1944) was perhaps the most reviled P&P film of the period and I Know Where I’m Going (1945), although supported in some quarters, could also be dismissed as “roaming in the realms of fancy” – a description also applied to Black Narcissus. Most of The Archers films committed one or both of two cardinal sins. They were not ‘realist’, as defined by the leading critics, and they mixed styles and genres, making them ‘incoherent’. From our contemporary perspective, both these charges refer to what may well be strengths rather than weaknesses.
For Powell, the goal was a film in which set design, colour, cinematography, music, acting, dialogue, movement and dance etc. were in harmony, creating passion and excitement. He felt that The Archers were moving towards this goal with Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes and for many fans, they achieved it with The Tales of Hoffman (1951):
Powell, in his desire to bring all the arts together into a new cinematic whole (what he called “the composed film”) and at the same time be free of the laws of realistic narrative sound cinema – free to reinvent cinema at its pre-Griffith magical roots – created a film that operates according to laws of cinematic layering. Its surface and depths are indistinguishable. (Amy Greenfield, Film Comment, March 1995 – see www.powell-pressburger.org/Reviews/51_Hoffmann/Hoff01.html)
For many, the ‘composed film’ will be the studio film over which Powell and his creative collaborators could have complete control. Yet, the same ideas can be applied to the many films Powell made, after 1936, on location in different parts of the UK (i.e. outside the studios of London and the Home Counties) and overseas.
In terms of ideas of a ‘national cinema’, Powell embodies that contradiction of being the ‘most English gentleman’ and yet the most internationalist and open-minded lover of cinema. (His treatment in the UK was sometimes similar to the treatment of a director like Kurosawa Akira in Japan, in that his ideas about representing his national culture were not appreciated by the cultural opinion-makers of the time.)
Powell’s parents came from Worcestershire. His father’s family were hop growers. Powell himself was born on a farm east of the Medway, making him a ‘Man of Kent’, and in his eyes, much better off than the poor ‘Kentish men’ growing up under the influence of London. For Powell, Kent and Worcester were the ‘heart of England’ and A Canterbury Tale, The Elusive Pimpernel and Gone to Earth were important to him because they were filmed where their stories were set. In the 1930s, Powell would discover the islands of Scotland and find another kind of passion there:
. . . we have got to think and plan, write and direct, visually; we have got to create an old-new pattern of entertainment that does not lean on language; we have got to go out and look for stories that are as much a part of us as our food, our weather and our religion.” Powell interviewed by Roger Manvell in The Penguin Film Review, No 1, August 1946, answering a question about whether British films should be made with an international appeal or specifically to represent, as faithfully as possible their country of origin?
Powell attempted to find landscapes in other parts of the world – successfully in Canada for 49th Parallel, forced by economic measures to substitute the mountains of Southern France for Crete in Ill Met by Moonlight, but able to film in the paradise of Dunk Island in the Great Barrier Reef for Age of Consent (Australia 1969).
He tried to bring to the landscape shooting the same magical ideas developed for the studio and in this he was aided by brilliant cinematographers willing to explore all possibilities. In some ways, the most interesting films from the imagination of Powell and Pressburger are those which combine studio magic with location shooting. (technically, of course, that is nearly every film, but I’m thinking of films like I Know Where I’m Going.)
These comments on Gone to Earth neatly summarise what Powell (and here Christopher Challis) achieves and what London critics who don’t know English landscape miss:
. . . one of the great British regional films, and marks one of the few occasions when we managed to break out of the studio and photograph the endlessly surprising, endlessly lovely British landscape in all its Technicolor strangeness. (Jonathan Coe, New Statesman, 15/8/97 – see www.powell-pressburger.org)
With numerous breathtaking shots of the vast English countryside, the film’s location work is simply gorgeous to behold, with the luminescent Technicolor giving the realistic settings an otherworldly quality. (Martyn Bamber, www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/05/36/gone_to_earth.html)
In the short presentation based on these notes, I didn’t have time to properly explore the importance of the soundtrack for all of these sequences, but Powell was insistent about the contribution of sound. He was very proud that Edge of the World included what at the time was one of the longest sequences of uninterrupted musical score and that long narrative segments were constructed with dialogue limited to only occasional words.
Film clips
The Edge of the World (1937)
Filmed on location on the island of Foula in the Shetlands, the story is based on the real evacuation of the islands of St Kilda, in the Outer Hebrides, the most remote part of the British Isles, in 1930. (Camera: Monty Berman, Skeets Kelly, Ernest Palmer)
A Canterbury Tale (1944)
A contemporary pilgrimage to Canterbury for a London woman in the Land Army, an American army sergeant worried about his girlfriend at home and a British army sergeant who wants to play the cathedral organ. Their journey is interrupted by the strange actions of the local squire, Mr Colpeper (Eric Portman). (Camera: Erwin Hillier)
I Know Where I’m Going (1945)
Wendy Hiller is a bank manager’s daughter from Manchester who thinks she knows what she wants – to marry a successful businessman on the Scottish island he has rented. But when she meets the real ‘laird’ of the island (Roger Livesey) she begins to change her mind. The film was shot on the Isle of Mull, but all the interiors were shot in the studio at Denham (Livesey was appearing on stage in the West End – all his outdoor shots used a double). (Camera: Erwin Hillier)
The Small Back Room (1949)
Sammy Rice (David Farrar) is a wartime bomb expert with problems – a tin leg, a craving for drink and an unsatisfactory relationship with Sue (Kathleen Byron). Though largely confined to London during the blackout, Sammy also ventures out to remote spots to investigate a new type of German bomb. The climactic sequence is filmed on Chesil Beach in Dorset. (Camera: Christopher Challis)
Gone to Earth (1950)
Jennifer Jones is the simple country girl who loves her animals in a melodrama adapted from a Mary Webb novel based in the 1890s. David Farrar is the local squire. The film was shot on location in Shropshire. (Camera: Christopher Challis)
Reference
John Ellis (1978) ‘Art, Culture and Quality: Terms for a Cinema in the Forties and Seventies’ in Screen, Vol 19, No. 3
Over the next few weeks we’ll be posting much more on Powell and Pressburger’s films.
itp Global Film 