The Masters  
The Powell & Pressburger Pages

Dedicated to the work of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and all the other people, both actors and technicians who helped them make those wonderful films.

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A Canterbury Tale:
Michael Powell and the Neo-Romantic Landscape
By: Steve Crook

An exhibition at the Sidney Cooper Gallery
St Peter's Street (lower end of the High Street), Canterbury
9 October to 11 December, 2004

The exhibition is amazing and is well worth a visit if you're in the area. The theme is to locate Powell and his fellow Archers and the films they made in the Neo-Romantic landscape (artistic, physical & political) of the time. The exhibition will run at the Sidney Cooper Gallery until December 11th and they then hope to take it to some other galleries around the country.

You are met by a stunning poster from the American release kindly loaned by Martin Scorsese. A Canterbury Tale wasn't released in America until 1948 and was re-edited to explain things more to the Americans and to allow for the changes that had taken place between 1944 & 1948. Notice the reference to The Red Shoes in the tag line on the poster and Kim Hunter's name in the credits.


The exhibition is well laid out and explores the different themes in each area. The detailed exhibition catalogue is cleverly designed to fold out like a map and the background is the map showing the pilgrim's route seen at the start of A Canterbury Tale - which is also on display here.




A close-up on some of the stunning items on show. One of the most impressive (above) is the sketch by Alfred Junge from The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp which is signed by many of the cast and crew. This, like many of the other P&P items, is on loan from BFI Collections at the J Paul Getty Jnr Conservation Centre, Berkhamstead.


On the left is an interesting design for a poster for The Small Back Room by Ivor Beddoes.


Note how all the exhibits are carefully angled so that any decent photo of them catches the reflections of the mini-spotlights above them or the flash of the camera :)


Below is one of Alfred Junge's sketches for A Canterbury Tale showing Colpeper at his desk. Could that balding figure be Micky? Is that how Alfred saw things? Micky as the glue-man pouring knowledge into people's heads?


In one side-room they were showing the film (from the DVD) and in another side-room they had the short that Nick & Eddie made when John Sweet came over in 2000, A Pilgrim's Return.

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