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
Media Partner
Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
Deborah Kerr, Sabu, David Farrar, Flora Robson, Jean Simmons, Kathleen Bryon
UK
1947
English
Book Tickets
Indigenous & Community Access
Credits
Screenwriter
Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Cinematography
Jack Cardiff
Editor
Reginald Mills
Original Music
Brian Easdale
Production Design
Alfred Junge
Also in This Series
Amelie
One of the most popular French films of the past 25 years, Amelie is a delightfully whimsical confection from the ever-inventive Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Audrey Tautou stars as a young Parisienne who resolves to make the world a happier place...
The Conversation
Gene Hackman is Harry Caul, 'the best bugger on the West Coast', a surveillance expert whose jealously guarded anonymity is threatened when he happens across what seems to be a murder plot.
The Fall (4K Restoration)
Shot over four years across 24 countries, cowritten by a six year old girl, and entirely self-financed by commercials director Tarsem, The Fall is such a mind- (and eye) boggling movie it's hard to believe it actually exists. Yet here it is!