Black Narcissus

From the team behind A Matter of Life and Death and The Red Shoes, Powell and Pressburger, this is a hot-house erotic melodrama set in an Anglican nunnery in the Himalayas, the nuns’ mission to build an orphanage competing with nature itself, it seems. For many, this is the greatest movie shot on the three-strip Technicolor process, cinematographer Jack Cardiff evoking atmosphere on the backlot through his use of light and colour, influenced by painters like Vermeer and Van Gogh. He won the Academy Award for his work here.

This film will also play as part of the Film Studies: Creating Colour series.

Technicolor had begun in America in 1935, but it’s fair to say that the deeply romantic, theatrical, and painterly nature of the process was never more fully embraced than in Britain in those post-war years when austerity ruled in most things. It was a process that involved three separate film strips, a camera the size of a wardrobe, and elaborate printing schemes that required exceptional craftsmanship at the printing baths from men whose arms were tattooed in fantastic colors… Black Narcissus is one of the most ravishing films ever made.

David Thomson, The New Republic

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