Original at
The Austin Chronicle
October 1996
The Films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
Archers Deluxe
by Chris Walters
They called themselves the Archers, the director from Canterbury and the
Hungarian-born screenwriter whose partnership resulted in Black Narcissus
, The Red Shoes, The Tales of Hoffmann, and many other
movies now seen as touchstones of exotic cinema. Why the name was chosen
is no longer well-remembered, but from 1939 to 1956 the Archers' witty logo
-- a target decorated with badly aimed arrows, a final shaft thwacking into
the bullseye -- announced pictures that fell far outside the dry center
of the British film industry yet found large audiences in the home islands
and all over the western world.
The Archers were director Michael Powell and screenwriter Emeric Pressburger,
and 40 years after their collaboration ended it is increasingly evident
there was nobody like them, then or now. Committed to the emotional use
of color and movement in a country that distrusted strong feelings, they
introduced traditional British values to eroticism and passionately modernist
technique, and invited them all to dance. Ardent antirealists, their work
fell out of favor when a grinding realism took over British movies in the
Sixties, and many years passed before their films enjoyed delighted reappraisals
on both sides of the Atlantic. Not until the Eighties and Nineties did Powell's
startling talent become widely recognized for its brazenly meteoric modernism.
Influential fans such as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola led the
Michael Powell bandwagon, praising the master who inspired them so.
Thanks to the Austin Film Society and the British Film Institute, sparkling
new prints of the key Powell & Pressburger movies are now being screened
locally for the first time in eons. And the six pictures remaining in the
series include five of their most important works, along with a shocker
Powell made by himself in 1960:
* Black Narcissus (1947) may be the greatest movie about repressed
passion ever made. High on a windswept bluff in the Himalayas in a building
once used for a harem, an order of missionary nuns are reduced to emotional
rawness by altitude, isolation, and an intractable clash of cultures. Sister
Ruth (Kathleen Byron) succumbs to ravenous hunger for a handsome plantation
overseer, and in her hysteria imagines the mother superior, Sister Clodagh
(Deborah Kerr), as her rival for the overseer's affections. She seeks release
in violence, in a heart-stopping sequence that outdoes Hitchcock because
it is plausible, rooted in emotion rather than contrivance. Sexual tension
whips through the movie like the icy Himalayan wind you can hear in almost
every scene.
* Stairway to Heaven (1946), originally titled A Matter of Life
and Death and recently restored, treats the idea of pleading before
a heavenly court for a way out of the afterlife with eccentric humor. The
movie steps from one world to the other with a delicacy seldom managed by
other afterlife stories.
* The Red Shoes (1948) is probably the Archers' best known and beloved
movie. This quintessential ballet film is a knowing and affectionate backstage
story, full of detail, about a Russian ballet impresario who blows hot and
cold and an aspiring dancer, played by Moira Shearer, who actually could
dance. Powell, writing his memoirs, knew why it caused a sensation. "We
had all been told for ten years to go out and die for freedom and democracy,
for this and for that, and now that the war was over, The Red Shoes
told us to go and die for art."
* The Tales of Hoffmann (1951), based on Jacques Offenbach's fantasy
opera, deploys lavish decor and choreography in a hymn to the transcendence
of the female spirit, personified by Moira Shearer, Pamela Brown, and Ludmila
Tcherina, actresses who ran the gamut from angelic to vampy. The color red
is a major character here as well.
* The Small Back Room (1949) handles the story of a crippled munitions
expert struggling against disability and bureaucracy with expressionism
rather than the earnest realism apparently required by the material. Like
Black Narcissus, it trembles with nervous tension, though of a different
kind.
* Peeping Tom (1960), made by Powell without Pressburger, shocked
audiences when it was released a few months ahead of Alfred Hitchcock's
Psycho. Unlike the better known movie, it still shocks people today
and is frequently cited as the forerunner of the modern horror film. Powell
delved too far for anyone's comfort into the nastier implications of voyeurism
as a way of life with this story of an introverted film studio camera operator
who films women as he kills them. To make matters worse, there was the mechanical
plot device that doubles the victims' terror and the killer's thrill of
spectatorship, plus the way Powell calmly observed the action while he slipped
dark little jokes under the covers, so to speak. Years before perversity
became commonplace in movies, Powell was prescient about the frenzy born
of continuous watching, and how mass entertainment acted as midwife.
Peeping Tom was greeted with real rather than appreciative horror,
and Powell's career fortunes waned (though he was able to make a few more
movies). Pressburger began a new career as a novelist, and Powell went
off to Australia for his last several projects. He ended up in the U.S.,
teaching at Dartmouth, working as a senior director-in-residence at Coppola's
doomed studio, Zoetrope, and married movie editor Thelma Schoonmaker (who
won an Oscar for editing Raging Bull and whose longtime creative
collaboration with director Martin Scorsese is well-established). She helped
Powell complete the two volumes of his autobiography, A Life in Movies
-- now out of print and hard to find
[Since been reprinted. Often available secondhand]
-- and Million-Dollar Movie, published last year, five years after
his death. The story of the Archers is told in those books; in Emeric
Pressburger: The Life and Death of a Screenwriter by Pressburger's grandson,
Kevin McDonald; and in Arrows of Desire: The Films of Michael Powell
and Emeric Pressburger by Ian Christie.
Numerous are the reports of people who tried to talk Powell out of sharing
full directing and producing credit with screenwriter Pressburger, telling
him that it simply was not done and how profits would have to be shared
down the middle. Powell felt their duties overlapped so much that fairness
demanded the unusual arrangement. According to Kevin McDonald, overlap was
only the half of it:
"The true secret of Michael and Emeric's collaboration is something which
cannot be explained. It was the uncanny empathy they had for each other's
ideas: `He knows what I am going to say even before I say -- maybe even
before I thought it -- and that is very rare... there was an inner response,'
said Emeric, using a typical metaphor, `like a violin that would respond
to an outside sound if it is tuned in a similar way.'".
All movies are screened on Tuesdays in the Texas Union Theatre at 8pm.
Admission is free.
[This was a few years ago - Steve]
- Black Narcissus (October 8);
- Stairway to Heaven (October 15);
- The Red Shoes (October 22);
- The Tales of Hoffmann (October 29);
- The Small Back Room (November 5);
- Peeping Tom (November 12)
