Submitted by
Tracey Brown
Black Narcissus (1946)
The Criterion DVD
Review by: Steve Erickson
Angeles Magazine, February 2001
Tracey writes:
This is from the February 2001 issue of Angeles Magazine. It part
of an interesting article on films the writer recommends for watching
alone with one's TV late at night and how some movies are better
viewed ALONE than with an audience! Films discussed include;
Vertigo, Eyes Wide Shut, A Place in the Sun, In the Mood for
Love and BN!!!! Enjoy!
For Your Eyes Only: It's midnight, you're home alone and a new
cinema is born.
By Steve Erickson
Finishing their blurb on In the Mood for Love, "But rarely has there
been a movie where sensual repression seemed so sensual, where
passivity seemed so potentially combustible.
I can think of only one, actually. As it happens, just as In the
Mood for Love is being released to the theaters, Michael Powell's
Black Narcissus is being released on DVD by Criterion, which is to
say that for the first time since it was produced in 1946, it will exist
in its ideal form, gorgeously resorted for private viewing by the
Audience of You. I've never seen Black Narcissus in a theatre,
and I'm not sure it would be a good idea. Like Verigo, it's another
perennial contender for those all-time to 10 lists, and if Hitchcock's
erotic fixations so unsettle audiences they can only laugh, Black
Narcissus would have them howling like libidinally berserk nuns in a
remote Himalayan convent, which by complete coincidence just
happens to be exactly what it's about. Made in an England still
shoveling out from under the rubble and ash of war, Black
Narcissus offers a paradise at once narcotic and overpowering,
serene and seductive, lush and unforgiving, where Eve is a guy
bounding about the mountains in hiking shorts and the serpent
is an Indian girl decidedly unimpressed by the sexual etiquette
of any quaint Western God.
In the gloriously disreputable tradition of the Cinema of Hysteria,
it all sound perfectly ridiculous, but some years ago, after seeing
and inferior video version on TV one midnight, even with Jack
Cardiff's ravishing, depraved cinematography awash in dingy
blues, my sleep patterns weren't the same for a month. My wife
slept through the whole thing and still woke the next morning,
turned to me and said, "What was that?" And come this Saturday
night, somewhere out there is a spellbound 13-year-old teenage
girl will watch it while Mom and Dad are gone and she'll never be
the same and neither, for her, will the movies.
Back to index
