In the magical, mystical cinematic world of Michael Powell, anything is
possible. Time and space are boundless -- and so is the imagination. That
was his genius.
And Powell, who died in 1990, was never more imaginative with time and space
than in "A Matter of Life and Death," the 1946 celestial fantasy starring
David Niven and Kim Hunter as cosmically crossed lovers who thwart the
natural laws of the universe with their passionate romance.
Squadron leader Niven, his aircraft going down in flames, shares his last
conscious moments talking by radio with Kim Hunter, a pretty Yank he's never
met who works at the United States Air Force base in England.
As a brain surgeon works feverishly to save his life after the crash,
[Well sort of - his life wasn't threatened by the plane crashing.
He wasn't there !!]
the film proceeds along two tracks: In silvery black-and-white, a heavenly
court weighs whether Niven should be allowed to live; and in brilliant colors,
visible once again on Thursday, when a new print of the film has its premiere
at the Museum of Modern Art, Niven and Hunter meet and fall in love amid
the surreal horrors of World War II.
This film was Powell's personal favorite, and it's easy to see why. It not
only paved the way for the British director's best-known works, "Black
Narcissus" and "The Red Shoes," with its bold and dazzling use of color,
but also revealed his heart, his belief in the power of love and its
delirious effects on the mind.
According to Powell's autobiography, "A Life in Movies," there was a more
subversive reason the film was his favorite: its innovative form and content
enabled him to challenge the austerity that had crept into post-war England's
social system and film industry.
The film editor Thelma Schoonmaker, Powell's widow, thinks "A Matter of
Life and Death" comes closest to expressing his personality. "Living with
him," she says, "I found he had no fear of death. 'Love is sacrifice and
sacrifice is love,' he used to say. The real reason it was his favorite
was he could be a magician with it. He could create heaven and earth and
stop time."
[Powell's son Columba also mentions Powell's attitude "As he was being
eaten away by the cancer and we all saw this frail little body - but his
mind was soaring to new heights right until the end" (in A Very British
Psycho and in conversation at Avening]
In a war-battered England coping with the loss of sons and husbands, Powell's
ability to stop time while a heavenly jury considers the fate of a downed
airman struck an immediate chord.
And the film's popularity with British filmgoers has endured to this day:
it ranked 20th on the British Film Institute's recent
100-favorites-of-the-century poll,
despite the dimmed versions in which it has been seen in recent years.
[The BFI poll of the top 100 films of the century compiled from
entries from "1,000 people embracing all strands of the film, cinema and
television industries throughout the UK - producers, directors, writers,
actors, technicians, academics, exhibitors, distributors, executives and
critics."]
For decades audiences had to make do with prints that didn't accurately
reproduce the original three-strip Technicolor look, in which each primary
color was encoded on a separate strip of film.
Working from the original negative borrowed from the BFI, Grover Crisp,
the film preservationist at Sony Pictures, has returned "A Matter of Life
and Death" to all its Technicolor and black-and-white glory.
It's only fitting. After all, this is a film about the senses under siege:
color and black and white, poetry and philosophy, music and movies, the
smell of fried onions and the sight of a naked boy playing a reed pipe on
a sand dune, a Coke machine in heaven and an aristocratic heavenly messenger
come to earth to retrieve the unlucky Niven.
In fact, the film's origin is as strange as its premise. The British
Government commissioned a script to improve postwar Anglo-American relations,
which Powell and his partner, Emeric Pressburger, incorporated into a
whimsical story inspired by a real-life account of a Royal Air Force airman
who miraculously survived a plane crash by bailing out without benefit of
parachute.
The resulting film, released in the United States in a more saccharine,
now-retired version called "Stairway to Heaven," daringly combined substance
and escapism. Martin Scorsese, who controls the North American theatrical
distribution rights, suggests the film is still provocative. "It holds up,
I think, because of the outrageousness of it," he said by phone from his
Manhattan office. "It's a real leap of faith -- you either go with it or
you don't. And if you do, it's both a fantasy and a love story that plays
out in the mind of Niven. What happens to him is totally realistic. Powell's
vision is a place that's so beautiful to be alive in. His use of Technicolor
is so romantic and spiritual."
Viewed today, in light of "Pleasantville," and as a fascinating reversal
of "The Wizard of Oz" (with the real world in color and the fantasy world
in black-and-white), we can fully appreciate the film's stylistic
innovations, its ingenious ambiguity. Everything happens quickly and
confusingly, as in a dream, where even a ping-pong match stops in
mid-serve. And the improved color only intensifies the story.
Thus, when the "conductor" assigned to escort Niven to the afterlife lands
in a grove of red, pink and violet rhodedendron, his joke about heaven is
much funnier: "One is starved for Technicolor up there," he says. Now,
we can experience the sudden flood of color along with him.
The film was rejuvenated at the behest of Ms. Schoonmaker, who has edited
every Scorsese film since "Raging Bull," and Scorsese, who in 1979 introduced
Powell to Ms. Schoonmaker. Printing from the original three-strip negative
was not as troublesome as expected, Crisp said. "The work was
straightforward. There were some slight tears and two shots that are out
of register that were the result of camera problems. Interestingly enough,"
he added, "it was the black and white sequences that gave us the most trouble.
They had a lot of dirt and scratches and inherent problems because of the
way they were optically printed. We've made some improvements and it looks
a lot cleaner." The results of Crisp's efforts are most apparent in the
powerful first encounter between Niven and Hunter -- a meeting of two minds
and souls, if ever there was one. In the new print, the shots of Hunter
are a revelation. Her rosy flesh, the scarlet in her lipstick and the
eerie shadow around her face make her look like an enraptured angel.
With its heavenly colors on earth and its black-and-white view of heaven,
"A Matter of Life and Death" isn't merely the model for a modern-day experiment
like "Pleasantville"; it's the father of all surreal movies that transport
film audiences from the humdrum reality of daily life to the heightened
reality of the imagination.
