Since finishing my Film Studies graduate degree, I’ve tried to keep up with current cinema, averaging about 100 brand new movies seen each year. I’ve cultivated spreadsheets of upcoming release dates, attended film festivals both local and international and in the past decade, habituated myself to what’s available for streaming on various platforms from The Criterion Channel to Kanopy. When I prepare annual lists of my favorite films of each year, I feel I’ve seen enough to do so with a particular authority and thorough knowledge (even if it’s impossible to see everything that comes out.)
Keeping current, however, does not mean I shy away from seeking out older titles I haven’t seen before. When I began studying film in my early 20s, what struck me most about the medium was that for being a relatively young one, the sheer volume of great, important movies to see was remarkably vast. Books, reviews, articles and recommendations from friends frequently revealed another title to add to my watchlist; when I discovered a new old film that I loved, I often wanted to see other work from its director or actors or even in some cases its screenwriter or cinematographer. Upon its 1996 release, Fargo made an immediate impact— over the next few years, I felt moved to consume everything else Joel and Ethan Coen made including past titles I’d missed (Blood Simple, Barton Fink) while keeping up with their subsequent work. I recall seeing the trailer for The Big Lebowski a few months ahead of that film’s release and thinking, a bit dumbfounded, “Well, it appears to be about bowling.”
Settling into a lengthy tenure working for a movie theater, I’d stay and watch the occasional repertory screening of something I hadn’t seen before. For instance, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, the VHS of which I turned off after twenty minutes at home years earlier. Now, it either proved revelatory on a big screen, or perhaps I was just at a better age to grasp its unique blend of melodrama and dark humor. Likewise, I loved revisiting titles previously seen at home on the big screen, from A Thousand Clowns (with Click and Clack, the Car Talk guys introducing one of their favorite films in person!) to a front-row nosebleed seat to take in Persona at a much larger and more frightening scale than ever before (star Liv Ullman was present for that one, too.) With such an awesome resource (alongside a few other Boston-area cinemas with dazzling repertory offerings), I was watching less films at home (which would change radically during the pandemic, but that’s for a later entry.)
Reviewing a record of my movie viewing for 2009, my trusty spreadsheet reveals I watched 146 films that year including three titles seen twice (500 Days of Summer, Precious and Still Walking.) 84 were cinema screenings (all but seven of them brand new films); 32 of the remaining 62 watched at home were also relatively new titles (from XXY to Scott Walker: 30th Century Man) with twelve rewatches and eighteen older films seen for the first time. (Incidentally, I also saw Michael Clayton around this time but recently determined that I failed to record exactly when, so maybe these numbers aren’t entirely exact.) This list of older titles is unquestionably eclectic: Samuel Fuller’s art/exploitation hybrid White Dog; Chris Marker’s three-hour dissection of Marxism, A Grin Without a Cat; two unconventional comedies from the late 80s (Whitnail and I, Bagdad Café). There are efforts to fill in gaps by some of my favorite directors (Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill and The Indians, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point), a documentary about another beloved auteur (Waiting For Twilight: Guy Maddin), a pair of Douglas Sirk melodramas (Magnificent Obsession, Imitation of Life) and random stuff like, um, Troll 2 (more entertaining than The Room, also seen for the first time that year.)
Also on this list are another pair of films from the British team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Powell generally directed while Pressburger mostly wrote the screenplays but they always insisted on a dual directorial credit (similar to Joel and Ethan Coen, come to think of it.) Also referred to as “The Archers” (their production company), Powell and Pressburger and their nineteen features together were generally forgotten by the public at large decades after their 1940s heyday. Not by Martin Scorsese, however, who cited them as a major influence and fervently worked to rehabilitate their reputations and restore their work once he himself became a renowned filmmaker in the 1970s. Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese’s longtime editor, even married Powell in 1984; they stayed together until his death in 1990 at age 84.
I don’t believe I saw anything by the Archers in film school; I was likely first aware of them when, gathering research for my master’s thesis on Derek Jarman, I saw that the writer Michael O’Pray cited Powell and Pressburger as primary influences on Jarman’s work (along with more obvious antecedents such as Kenneth Anger and Ken Russell.) I may have first watched The Red Shoes around this time, probably the most seen and discussed of their works among cineastes and classic film lovers. A Technicolor take on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale of the same name, it’s both the Archers’ biggest hit and innovative for how it incorporates a lengthy, impressionistic ballet sequence in the middle of its 134-minute running time, a clear influence on what Best Picture Academy Award Winner An American In Paris would attempt (albeit at that film’s end) three years later.
I appreciated The Red Shoes but did not rush out to consume the rest of the Archers’ oeuvre. A few years on, I caught Black Narcissus, a gloriously deranged picture about repressed nuns in the Himalayas that culminates in a shocking-for-its-era depiction of raw female desire when a troubled sister defrocks and removes her makeup. Later came I Know Where I’m Going!, set on a remote, otherworldly Scottish isle, its black-and-white cinematography and heavily-layered fog rather hallucinatory for what was essentially a screwball comedy rather than any sort of dreamlike fantasy. Thanks to Criterion Collection reissues, these films became much easier to see. In early 2009, I watched A Canterbury Tale, a work from the Archers’ peak period but also one of their odder efforts. Set in contemporary (i.e. World War II-era) Britain, it’s structured around an American soldier (played somewhat awkwardly by actual American solider, Sgt. John Sweet.) Less romantic and starker than the other Archers films I’d seen, it seemed an anomaly in their catalogue (albeit one I mean to revisit.)
Much later that same year, I saw A Matter of Life and Death. Arriving between I Know Where I’m Going! and Black Narcissus, it would initially seem to have more in common with A Canterbury Tale given its setting: on May 2, 1945, less than a week before Germany’s surrender of World War II (filming took place a mere six months later), Peter Carter (David Niven), a Royal Air Force pilot, is shot down over the English channel while on a bombing raid. He jumps from the burning aircraft, but his parachute malfunctions; he should be dead and when he wakes up near the shore, he assumes this is the afterlife. However, he is very much still alive, for Conductor 71 (Marius Goring), a guide in guise of an 18thCentury French dandy sent to escort him to what the film refers to as the “Other World”, misses him in the fog. In no time, Peter runs into June (Kim Hunter), a US Air Force radio operator whom he initially communicated with from his plane after it was hit. They immediately fall in love (this is the movies, after all), which creates a problem for Conductor 71 who is tasked to rectify his mistake and bring Peter to his rightful place for “it was his time”. Peter refuses to abide, matter-of-factly telling the guide, “I’ve fallen in love because of your mistake.”
It’s not that simple, of course. Through the observation of June’s friend Dr. Frank Reeves (Roger Livesey, an Archers regular), we learn that Peter is likely experiencing hallucinations and that his fall may have caused some brain damage. Whenever Conductor 71 visits him, time and space seem to suddenly stop. For instance, while convalescing at Dr Reeves’ home, Peter calls out for help when this occurs, but June and Dr. Reeves, playing ping pong in an adjacent room, can’t hear him—they’re perfectly still, the ball in mid-bounce over the table between them. As the hallucinations become more frequent, is it determined only brain surgery can help Peter live fully in the Real World; for him, however, this plays out as a court trial in the Other World where he must make a sound case to a jury to go on living because he’s found true love. His defense lawyer ends up being good old Dr. Reeves, who is suddenly killed in the motorcycle accident and finds himself in the Other World (or at least Peter’s hallucination.)
The contrast between the two worlds is the film’s most striking construct. Set up as sort of a reverse The Wizard of Oz, the Real World scenes are in eye-popping Technicolor while the Other World is shot in black-and-white. It was the first of three consecutive Archers films to be helmed by cinematographer Jack Cardiff; he’d win an Oscar for Black Narcissus the following year and go on to film The African Queen and The Barefoot Contessa, among others. The Real World is as scintillating and rich-hued as any film of the period, often highlighting fiery reds, feather-soft pinks and infinite blues along with dramatic close-up shots and ornately-detailed frames (Dr. Reeves’ home gives off a convincing illusion of an actual, lived-in space rather than a set.) The Other World draws more heavily on abstraction and German Expressionism: cathedral-sized sets (the court sort of resembles the Roman Coliseum), severely tilted angles and fantasy set pieces such as the ginormous escalator serving as a conduit between the two realms (in America, the film was originally released with the title Stairway to Heaven.) Although each world is clearly delineated from the other, they still give off the impression of existing simultaneously (hallucination or not)—one motif occurring in both realms is the appearance of oval-like shapes: giant, ceiling spheres peering into a seemingly endless Department of Records in the Other World are later recalled by Dr. Reeves’ unusual, mirrored telescope, its oval-shaped lens gifting him a view of his entire village in the Real World (along with the near-oval of the mirror above an operating table later in the film.)
Although occasionally rendered via a simple cut, transitions between the two realms are often slow dissolves. They effectively personify the off-kilter, damaged mind state Peter experiences—at one point, while moving from the Other World back into the real one, the color literally returns to his face via a gradual dissolve. While succumbing to anesthesia for his surgery not long after, his eyes slowly close and the camera pans down (rather than up!) to the Other World. From there, the surrealness of his situation is made more explicit. During surgery, he has a literal out-of-body experience, his persona splitting in two as one version of him sits up awake in his own body, the other version of which lies still in freeze-frame courtesy of a visit from Conductor 71 and the now-deceased Dr. Reeves, rendered with a playfulness Bob Fosse would later reference in All That Jazz.
For all of its technical spectacle and far-seeking invention, however, A Matter Of Life and Death is, like most of the Archers films, a fable full of substance and heart. As much a good old-fashioned romance as it is a fantasy, its ambitions never obscure the humanism continually evident at the picture’s core. Sure, Peter and June meet over a mayday call (one of the more dramatic of circumstances) but it still comes off as a meet-cute (“I’ll be a ghost and come and see you,” he drolly tells her amidst the flaming wreckage), further confirmed upon their unexpected, near-magical reunion on the ground. When Conductor 71 first materializes in the Real World, he notes, referring to where he has come from, “One is starved for Technicolor up there”; he also picks a pink rose which later becomes an item meant to prove Peter’s love for June (via his tears of joy for her collected on the flower) in his trial. Speaking of which, that whole sequence dominates the film’s third act. It may be a huge set piece with a cast of seemingly thousands of the deceased (from presumably every nation and culture in the Real World) and shot as if it were a heightened version of the political rally from Citizen Kane but it’s also laced with an approachable, knowing humor—when the prosecutor, Abraham Farlan (Raymond Massey), an American alive during the Revolutionary War biased against all Brits argues that his culture is more worth preserving and celebrating than Peter’s, Reeves plays a recording that approximates a then-contemporary American swing tune with mostly nonsense lyrics (to which Farlan scoffs, “I don’t understand a word!”)
The film concludes with the two worlds finally, briefly converging (if only in Peter’s head.) Key members of the trial have literally descended into the Real World via the giant staircase, arriving at Peter on the operating table (who again wakes up as time and space stops.) The tears on the flower are not enough concrete proof for the judge and prosecution. They ask Peter if he would die for June. He says he would, though he’d rather live a life with her. They then call June to the witness stand, awakening her from a Conductor 71-assisted slumber. Dr Reeves asks June if she would take Peter’s place in the Other World to prove her love for him. She would, and as she steps onto the stairway as it begins to move away from the Real World, that clinches it—proof not only that Peter is in love but also loved in return. He’s allowed to live on in the Real World with June; the film ends with him awakening from surgery in his hospital bed to the sight of June’s smiling face. “We won,” he says; “I know, darling,” she responds. It’s a sentimental ending, for sure, but as usual for the Archers, it’s an earned one, with Peter’s words particularly affecting coming just one year after the end of a Real World War.
Although products of a time long past, the Archers’ work endures because their narratives, while often highly fantastical were always built on solid emotional foundations. Powell and Pressburger may have viewed the world a little differently than their homegrown colleagues or Hollywood counterparts, but they usually sought to say something concrete and resonant about the human condition. So much of today’s studio filmmaking values technical innovation over anything relatable from our own Real World. Whenever I watch a film for the first time, I keep in mind how it makes me feel, which can come from its cinematography, special effects, musical score, the brilliance of a performance, etc. In the best films, however, there’s also a deeper connection, one that not only changes our literal view of the world but also our perception of it. A Matter of Life and Death accomplishes this by recognizing the act of love as the driving force its title refers to; what better reason does one need to live?
Essay #19 of 24 Frames
Go back to #18: My Winnipeg
Haunted Jukebox 