Blimp and collaboration
By Chris Fujiwara
.... Perhaps Leigh's sympathy for Gilbert and Sullivan's predicament is
made possible by his own, unusually collaborative, filmmaking practice.
(Leigh's films are developed through extensive improvisations, during which
he and his actors discover the characters, their relationships, and their
world. To some extent, even Topsy Turvy was prepared in this way, although
the historical record limited the leeway for improvisation.) A sustained
body of work signed by two directors constitutes a no less impressive exception
to the rule of the film director as demiurge, and the work of Michael Powell
and Emeric Pressburger, who together wrote, produced, and directed 15 films
during as many years, is all the more interesting since their films themselves
focus on collaborative situations. These situations include artistic creation
by a group (The Red Shoes), non-artistic group efforts (One of Our Aircraft
Is Missing, A Canterbury Tale, Black Narcissus), and corporate decision-making
(the heavenly tribunal in A Matter of Life and Death). But it's their 1943
masterpiece The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp that perhaps comes closest
to capturing the spirit of their partnership.
The film's two central characters are British career officer Clive Candy
(Roger Livesey) and his best friend, the German officer Theo (Anton Walbrook).
Powell and Pressburger put a lot of themselves into Theo and Candy. Theo
is, for much of the film, an exile in England, as Pressburger was; in the
memorable scene in which Theo pleads to immigration officials to be allowed
to stay in England, Pressburger uses the character to express the refugee's
ambivalent relationship to language: "In earlier years the most important
principle of my life was: 'Never lie, always tell the truth.' ... I have
not told a lie, but I also have not told the truth. A refugee soon learns
that there's a big difference between the two." Candy, on the other hand,
has the same eternal immaturity Powell, in his autobiography, ascribed to
himself. Candy's brashness leads him to fight a duel with Theo, in which
each leaves a "mark" on the other. These incisions, which unite them for
life, suggest the mutual cutting Powell and Pressburger practiced on each
other: Powell slashed scenes and lines of dialogue from Pressburger's scripts
("Do we really need that?") and Pressburger exacted his revenge in the cutting
room over the footage Powell had shot. The symbol of their collective identity
is, in fact, a puncture: their production company is called The Archers,
and its legendary trademark shows an arrow hitting a bullseye.
The bullseye also suggests vision, and reminds us that collaborative creation
is a kind of stereoscopy, aligning multiple viewpoints on a work or a theme.
In Blimp, Candy's feminine ideal, encountered in three different incarnations
(all played by Deborah Kerr), becomes the theme for the differing viewpoints
of Candy and Theo. Theo gets the girl the first time; later, Candy marries
her double. Candy's wife never meets Theo, but she knows him, in a way,
better than he does (intuiting, in closeup, that Theo fails to share Candy's
optimism about the post-World War I chances of defeated Germany), and she
dies without her husband's ever seeming to know her.
When Candy shows Theo the portrait of his wife, it's as if Theo's look is
needed to certify Candy's vision: Candy's experiences remain incomplete,
unreal, until Theo sets the seal of his gaze on them. With his intuitive
understanding, his quietness, and his closeness to femininity, Theo is closer
to the women in the film than Candy, and he stays close to the sad, steady
heart of the film, while Candy's life goes by in a blur of action, marked
by the mounted animal heads that fill up the wall of his den. It's Theo,
not Candy, who is able to express most movingly a love of England and affirm
the necessity of fighting for it. But Powell occasionally puts a cynical
spin on Pressburger's romanticism: told by the third Kerr that her name
is Angela, Theo remarks: "Lovely name. It comes from 'angel,' doesn't it?"
Powell added Angela's reply: "I think it stinks. My friends call me Johnny."
Powell and Pressburger completed each other, as Theo and Candy do: Pressburger
needed a collaborator with Powell's willingness to experiment and his knowledge
of English, and Powell needed "a screenwriter with the heart and mind of
a novelist." The force of Blimp comes from our awareness of the multiple
sensibilities at work in it, whose mutual exteriority is preserved, not
resolved, in the film's ever-deepening ambiguities ....
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