A Matter of Life and Death

Michael Powell has a special place in the hearts of British film lovers. Hitchcock went to Hollywood. David Lean was most at home with international epics. But Powell was English through and through, and “Englishness” was one of his favourite subjects, even if much of that came from his Anglophile Hungarian-born writing partner, Emeric Pressburger. Powell’s own English style stands in marked contrast to the prevailing bland realism which characterized the industry around him: he was a florid romantic, with a love for expressionism, for poetry and surrealism.

With Pressburger, during and after World War II, Powell made an unparalleled series of passionate, idiosyncratic, unforgettable British films, including The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The Red Shoes, I Know Where I’m Going, Black Narcissus and A Canterbury Tale. All of them are wonderful. But the most beloved of all is A Matter of Life and Death.

It began life as a commission from the wartime Ministry of Information, which required a film stressing goodwill between the Brits and their American allies. It ended somewhere else, a transatlantic love story framed by an English airman’s morbid neurological fantasy after his plane comes down in the Channel. Peter Carter (David Niven) washes up on Saunton Sands, where he falls in love with an American nurse (Kim Hunter). Guilty that he has cheated death, Peter dreams that he must plead permission to extend his lifespan before the highest court of all, in Heaven. With all the philosophers and poets in history at his disposal, who will he choose for an advocate?

Powell shoots “reality” in vivid, vibrant Technicolor, and Carter’s celestial “episodes” in black and white. Likewise, the film’s temperament encompasses the old school stiff upper lip and something that conjures its fervid opposite.

Sunday’s Pantheon screening will be preceded by a 15 minute introductory lecture and feature a book club-style discussion afterwards.

Apr 21: Introduced by William Brown, Assistant Professor of Film, University of British Columbia; Honorary Fellow for the School of Arts, University of Roehampton, London

There are more stunning ideas in this one film, concerning a mistake made in heaven about a WWII pilot who should be dead but isn’t, than the whole of British cinema can usually muster in a decade.

Nick James, Sight & Sound

Bursts with tantalizing ideas, surprising connections, suggestive flights of fancy.

Alan Scherstuhl, Village Voice

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