A Michael Powell Centennial Celebration

Films in Series:
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) Nov 2
The Edge of the World (1937) Nov 9
I Know Where I’m Going (1945) Nov 16
A Matter of Life and Death (1946) Nov 30
The Red Shoes (1948) Dec 7
The Thief of Bagdad (1940) Dec 10

"I live cinema . . . I am the cinema." Michael Powell (9.30.1905 – 2.19.1990)

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were one of the greatest writing and directing teams in the history of European film, and this month, in honor of the centenary of Michael Powell’s birth and in conjunction with our Tribute to Thelma Schoonmaker ’61, who married Powell in 1984, Cornell Cinema presents a series of Michael Powell and Powell/Pressburger films selected by Schoonmaker, some of their most visually and thematically stunning work.

Filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Neil Jordan, and Derek Jarman, among others, have all acknowledged a debt to Powell and Pressburger's films. Brian De Palma went so far as to claim that he decided to become a film director after seeing their tale of obsession, The Red Shoes, first released in 1948. Pressburger died in 1988 and Powell died two years later, but not before developing a close friendship with Martin Scorsese and falling in love with his editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, who has devoted herself to promoting his films and his writings since his death.

Shortly after Michael Powell entered the business in the twenties, he collaborated on the script of Blackmail (1929), the first British sound film and one that was to make Hitchcock's career. It is said that this is the only time that England's two greatest filmmakers ever collaborated. Powell started directing on his own in 1931, but went unrecognized until The Edge of the World (1937), a mystical semi-documentary shot on a small North Sea island. While making the film, he met the Hungarian screenwriter, Emeric Pressburger. The two became friends and formed their own production company, The Archers. They produced films together for the next twenty years. The company included an international group of designers and composers, including the German composer Allan Gray, who had studied with Schöenberg. The credits on the Archers' films read: "Written, produced and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger." But the truth was that Pressburger would write the screenplays and Powell would tell them in filmic terms, leaving his signature on every frame.

After the Second World War, their films had trouble finding an audience because the experimental, surreal quality of their work was not designed to appeal to London's postwar critical establishment. They avoided the norms of social realism and documentary, opting instead for a world of mirrors and illusion. According to Elliott Stein, writing in the Village Voice, "The Archers' films were spun of artifice and illusion—their lineage descended from Méliès and German expressionism, not Lumière and Flaherty. These were more than imaginative movies—the imagination itself was often their subject."

Obsession, too, was a common theme in their films, and is evident in three of the films showing in this calendar. City girl Wendy Hiller is fixated on marrying a rich man in I Know Where I'm Going (1947); David Niven is determined to stay alive in A Matter of Life and Death (1946); Moira Shearer is compelled to be a dancer in The Red Shoes.

The offbeat eroticism and unorthodox wit of Powell and Pressburger's work frequently clashed with British censors. Winston Churchill was outraged by The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) and tried to have it suppressed. "The Prime Minister was infuriated because the film centered on an old-fashioned English officer of the kind that was mismanaging the war, and Churchill felt it would harm the war effort (when it was nearly banned, attendance soared)." (Nora Sayre, NY Times). Powell and Pressburger had similar problems in 1946 when American censors demanded that entire scenes be cut from Black Narcissus, which was the story of an erotically-obsessed nun, and again in 1948 when some British critics thought the ending of The Red Shoes was in bad taste. But it was Powell's film (not written by Pressburger) Peeping Tom (1960) which created the greatest outcry. It was denounced as immoral because it portrayed a timid soft-spoken murderer who really enjoyed killing as a substitute for sex. Nora Sayre wrote "In Britain the film was quickly withdrawn from circulation, distributors recoiled from handling Powell's movies, investors no longer wanted to finance them and the director's career was damaged for years."

Lucky for us that Michael Powell’s films and those of Powell and Pressburger are now widely regarded as classics, and that these beautifully restored prints, several shot in spectacular Technicolor (The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death, The Red Shoes, The Thief of Bagdad (not written by Pressburger)) are available in the U.S., in part due to the work of Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker ’61.

Special thanks to the Atkinson Forum for their support of A Centennial Celebration of Michael Powell.

Photos: Michael Powell (top); The Theif of Bagdad (middle right); The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (middle left); A Matter of Life and Death (bottom)