A Matter Of Life and Death & Black Narcissus (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1946, 1947)

Britain’s masters of above board perversity produce two dissimilar yet singularly representative works. In the former, David Niven’s very David Niveny pilot fights to remain on Technicolor earth than the black and white afterlife when he survives a bomber crash. In the latter, a bunch of nuns are sent into an erotic/nostalgic reverie in their new exotic environment and by the sight of David Farrar’s shorts. Both films seemed filled with formal contradictions to accompany their narrative ones, the depiction of Life and Death’s aforementioned afterlife, Narcissus’s cold hothouse, whereas most stories of eroticism are enacted in claustrophobic interiors, this one’s is positively agoraphobic, despite being shot entirely on studio sets. Kathleen Byron’s Sister Ruth becoming more beautiful the more nutso she gets (although that could just be me). What sticks in the minds eye the strongest in the films are the moments of sheer beauty, a beauty borne out of neuroses (which is perhaps what links Scorsese so closely, explicitly and implicitly, to their pictures). Images as broad as the vastness of the Himalayas or as intimate as small town projected through a camera obscura, or as heartbreakingly unsentimental as Niven dictating a telegram to his family knowing that he’s certainly going to die. The irony of course is that he doesn’t but falls in love. It is not the auratic impressiveness of Wagner or Malick, but an interior vision depicted on the screen in otherworldly Technicolor. Driven by a veddy English brand of neuroticism their films are at once immediate and distant. Like I said, contradictory. The Archers give credence to the idea that films are the embodiment our collective dreamscape.