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MYSTICISM AND POLITICS
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About the British Film 'A Matter of Life and Death'
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by B.S.
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I recently chanced to see a number of British Ally, which published
a lengthy article about the New British film, 'A Matter of Life and Death'.
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I happened to see this film in London, where it created no small sensation.
The film does, in fact, attract attention not only by its symbolical and
significant title but also by its extremely eccentric and unusual subject.
The film was produced and the scenario for it written by two well-known
producers - Michael Powell, one of the founders of British cinematography,
and Emeric Pressburger. It was clear that the producers had spared no expenditure;
outstanding actors were engaged to take part in the film, the decor is pompous
and calculated to achieve an irresistible success; the enormous number of
extras arrayed in the costumes of various epochs is on the Hollywood scale.
It is clear to the spectator from the first shots that the producers have
mobilised all the resources available to them in order to make the main
trend of the film as convincing as possible.
[and all for £320K]
One must admit that the British producers
[I think Emeric would be delighted to be assumed to be British]
have succeeded in their enterprise. The political trend of the
film is extremely plain and unequivocal, despite the fact that it is served
up with a mystical-philosophical sauce and is garnished with profound deliberations
on the all-conquering power of the simple love of simple people.
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To what then is this film devoted? What is its content and meaning?
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The action of the film develops on two planes-the one a real and earthly
plane and the other a deeply spiritual and other-worldly plane. A British
bomber crashes and with it its crew.
[Well the rest of the crew "baled out on my order 0335"]
One airman, with a serious head wound,
escapes by a miracle after jumping from the plane without a parachute. While
still in the burning aircraft, his wireless messages are received by an
attractive American radio operator in the Women's Auxiliary Corps. Though
invisible to one another, a nonetheless ardent love instantly springs up
between the British pilot and the pretty American girl. And when the airman
regains consciousness after his fall, providence in the form of the producers
of the film solicitously acquaints the American girl with the British pilot.
On personal contact their love at a distance becomes yet more ardent.
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But the love idyll is suddenly permeated to an increasing degree by a devilment
of the first water. The pilot has a wild fancy -- the mansions of Paradise
present themselves to his injured brain. The heavenly spheres in the film
certainly have an extremely practical and well-ordered appearance; all new
arrivals are brought to the Records Office by uniformed girls with angelic
faces. It later becomes clear that the sinful earth and the fate of mankind
are ruled by certain higher forces and laws which it is absolutely impossible
for a poor human to contravene. These higher laws preordain that this unfortunate
airman, who has already escaped from immanent death, must appear in his
appointed place, which is not in the embraces of the gentle American girl
but in the other world. He is totally unable to comprehend this, although
the heavenly powers dispatch a special envoy to him who has the task of
conducting the pilot to Heaven, where he will, like all the others, be entered
in the records under the appropriate number. The pilot, unwilling to part
with the loved one he has just acquired, decides to appeal to the Supreme
Court which turns out to exist in the other world. His earthly fate entirely
depends on the decision of this tribunal.
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The action of the film is transferred to the humdrum earth, where the pilot,
in the tender care of his loved one and of doctors, battles for his life.
The course of his illness and the possibility of recovery entirely depend
on whether the Court decides in his favour. If the Court does so, the airman
will recover; if not, he will be obliged to follow the heavenly envoy to
the world in which there is neither sorrow nor weeping. And then begins
the trial of the pilot, who has violated the ordinances of the supreme powers
by failing to die at the appropriate time. The court scene provides the
answer to the question of the purpose for which this whole theosophical
network was woven, seasoned with love à la Hollywood, the purpose
for
which Mr Powell and Mr Pressburger invoke the higher and supernatural laws,
and to the question as to what precisely the symbolic title of the film
means.
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An American acts as the airman's prosecutor - the first American soldier
to be killed by the British during the War of Independence. The producers
have taken no little trouble to make him look as unprepossessing as possible
-- an inebriated hysterical face with the half-mad eyes of the fanatic,
an angular narrow-shouldered figure - a Chicago gangster to the life,
accidentally garbed in the uniform of a soldier of Washington's army.
["Inebriated"? Raymond Massey? And far from "accidentally dressed ..."]
The airman's defending counsel is a British doctor.
His appearance is a great deal more prepossessing
-- a well-built figure, a well-featured face, the very embodiment of bombastic
humanity, clad in a modest jacket of modern cut.
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The American prosecutor, in the desire to make things difficult for the
accused, calls appropriate jurors; each of them represents a nation which
has in its time suffered considerable wrong and grief at Britain's hands
- there is a Frenchman, a Boer, a Russian, an Irishman, an Indian and a
Chinese.
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With malicious joy the American reminds the British defending counsel of
the infamous pages in Britain's history, stained with sanguinary crimes
against these peoples. At the same time he extolls American democracy whose
principles are more lasting than the pyramids of the Egyptian Pharoahs.
In order to get the better of his opponent, he proposes that the tribunal
of judges should listen to the voice of present-day Britain and turns on
a miniature wireless set from which there issues the repulsive drawling
voice of a British commentator, giving radio listeners an account of a sporting
event, a voice full of stupid self-satisfaction and of contempt for its
surroundings.
[I assume they've never heard a real cricket commentary]
The commentator's voice is interrupted by a wild gabbling,
roaring and whistling; there is no sense nor anything human in the shouts
of the spectators; it is as if a herd of maddened animals were stampeding
in a vast enclosure, its roaring being transmitted by an obliging wireless
set.
[I think they means the spectators at the cricket match applauded]
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The American is not so far wrong in thinking that this British transmission
gives a more or less true conception of the contemporary state of British
bourgeois culture - of it spiritual poverty, its decadence and degeneration.
It is enough to turn over the pages of the fashionable novels by men of
letters, the average reading matter with which the brains of millions of
readers are polluted, enough to acquaint oneself with the over-clever verses
of popular poets, enough to cast a glance at the canvasses of certain "famous"
artists on which the real world and real people are depicted as if in a
nightmare, in order to be convinced of the rightness of the arguments of
the American army veteran. Even British broadcasts, literary-political and
others, are not far removed from the broadcast account of a sporting event
-- the distance between them and sound common sense is colossal.
[So we can assume they're not an Anglophile]
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The American thinks that this case is won and that he has left his opponent
without a leg to stand on.
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But the airman's defending counsel is unwilling to give way without a struggle.
He has his own "cogent" arguments over and above the clearly felt sympathies
of the producers of the film. He mainly invokes humaneness and good feelings;
his most convincing argument -- the tears shed by the airman's loved one
and collected by the envoy of Providence, a frivolous Frenchman, in a fragrant
and gorgeous rose.
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The defending counsel proposes that the court should listen to the voice
of contemporary America and also turns on a wireless set, from which there
issues the strident, ribald, wailing, groaning, grunting and quacking sounds
of jazz to the accompaniment of doleful, nasal singing. The American is
dumbfounded -- he had not expected this. Times have certainly changed. The
veteran of the War of Independence, who extolled the sacred principles of
the American Constitution -- equality, brotherhood and other equally touching
and exalted ideals -- feels himself literally stunned. Only 150 years have
passed and his mother, America, has embarked on a path which amazes even
his unexacting imagination.
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If the producers of the film had felt inclined to translate the prosecutor,
an American of the age of Washington, to his homeland in the 40's of the
20th century, he would have seen much that might remove his desire to make
constant references to the achievements of American civilisation. He would
have seen that the much renowned democracy, in the struggle for which he
was hit by a British bullet, to all intents and purposes represents the
authority of the propertied classes; he would have seen millions of people
roaming the roads of America without work and in search of income; he would
have seen that American democracy, priding itself upon its love of freedom,
is introducing a police regime; that the capital and foodstuffs accumulated
are going to support deep-dyed reactionaries in all corners of the globe;
he would have seen that the defendants of brotherhood and the guardians
of the laws are lynching their dark-skinned fellow citizens in a brotherly
way, whose rights are "guarded" by the American code of laws. He would have
seen hackneyed films, hackneyed books and hackneyed people; he would have
discovered that the overwhelming mass of the population lives in constant
fear for the morrow; he would have noticed that assertions regarding the
incorruptibility of American citizens are successfully refuted by thousands
of venal hack writers, who daily deliver tons of lies to semi-respectable
organs of the press. He would have seen the legalised hypocrisy, which conceals
the unlawful egoism of the dominating classes. Here you have American progress
and the lauded American culture!
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But the Englishman is not destined to enjoy his triumph for long; his opponent,
despite the fact that he is a soldier of the Washington era, is nevertheless
an American, in other words, a senior partner with whom it is difficult
to quarrel.
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The defending counsel and prosecutor are ready to seize each other by the
throat, but they are compelled to calm their passions. Despite the producers,
the real and earthly contradictions between America and Britain have found
their reflection in the dispute between the American and the Englishman
in the other world, contradictions which the producers have not succeeded
in glossing over despite the introduction of every sort of devilment into
the film.
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The British defending counsel begins to resort to wheedling and artifice.
He makes a moving speech in defence of Britain, calling on the names of
the great figures of British culture such as Pope, Coleridge, Shakespeare,
etc. In the final resort was not George Washington himself an Englishman?
What point is there in these family disputes and disagreements? Would it
not be better to find a happy ending, for the old and the new world to forget
past wranglings, i.e. for Britain and America to throw themselves into each
other's arms? The echo is here clearly heard of another speech, a speech
made by Mr. Churchill in Fulton,
[Churchill gave his speech at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri
on March 6th 1946 in which he said "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste
in the Adriatic an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent"]
which has left a sombre trace on Britain's
policy. With the direct encouragement of the producers of the film, the
British defending counsel puts forward his last argument. In the first place
he demands that the jurors, who have been assembled from various epochs,
should be replaced by contemporary people, who understand present political
problems and solely by Americans; in the second place he summons to the
court the British pilot and his American girl friend -- simple people with
simple hearts. And when the tribunal of judges demands that the American
girl should give her life for the Englishman she loves, she is prepared
to make this sacrifice, but, of course, not without grief. This is naturally
the last test of the stability of the Anglo-American alliance. It goes without
saying that the judges decide in favour of the airman, that he recovers
and is ready to continue his earthly life in good accord with the American
girl he loves. By this skilful stage device, Mr Powell and Mr Pressburger
prove a simple idea, namely, the necessity for an Anglo-American bloc. Thus
mysticism is transformed into concrete politics.
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It is absolutely clear that the title of the film, "A Matter of Life and
Death," is devoid of any philosophical or theological depth.
[so the "Do you believe in the survival of human personality after death?"
exchange between Dr Frank, Peter & June doesn't count then?]
Loyally serving
their political masters, the producers instil in the spectator the idea
that the creation of a bloc consisting of Britain and America is now a question
of life and death. As regards the tears collected in the rose, the amorous
and mystical complications of the plot, these are the gilt with which the
bitter pill is gilded. Despite the fact that Powell and Pressburger grotesquely
represent Americans and tend to stress the virtue of the British, they insistently
recommend that Britain should harness herself to the end to the wheel of
American imperialism and should serve it with loyalty and truth.
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The film 'A Matter of Life and Death' is tendentious from start to finish
and serves as an expressive example of the artifices of propaganda to which
supporters of an Anglo-American bloc are resorting. Although the word "politics"
is not mentioned in the film,
[Yes it is - Dr Reeves says (of Farlan) "If he gets onto politics I'm sunk"
and Peter replies "Who isn't"]
in fulfilling a definite social order, it
nevertheless instils in the mind of British audiences the necessity and
inevitability for Britain to follow in the wake of American policy. The
spectator can easily make the immediate political deductions from the film;
he only needs to cast an eye over the headlines of the articles in British
daily papers, of articles in respectable weeklies. He, the spectator, will
be persuaded by the mystical argumentation contained in the film that a
joint Anglo-American policy is a panacea for all the evils threatening "dear
old England." As regards the fact that Britain in this joint policy plays
the unattractive role of second violin in American atom-dollar politics,
the producers make elaborate allowances for the patriotic feelings of the
British.
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The ordinary British spectator will, nevertheless, grasp the idea propagated
in the film without special effort. Even the British press has been compelled
to admit this indirectly in praising the film mainly for its technical achievements.
The rank-and-file Englishman evidently feels no particular enthusiasm at
the prospect of the transformation from a poor relation of Uncle Sam to
the latter's submissive slave.
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And if British Ally sees the value of the film in that it
demonstrates the "transient nature of national and historical prejudices",
the rank-and-file Englishman is hardly likely to concur in the view that
Britain's national independence is a "passing prejudice".
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Kultura i Zhizn, No. 15, 30th May, 1947
