One striking development went underreported in the coverage of last year’s decennial poll from Sight and Sound magazine. Two filmmaking forces tied for most titles in the critics’ stab at the 250 “greatest films of all time”. Nobody will be surprised to hear Alfred Hitchcock was one of those scoring six. Bookies would have given longer odds on Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger – known professionally as The Archers – also registering so many. All six of their dreamy British features from The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) to The Red Shoes (1948) were mentioned. This for a partnership which, as David Thomson has noted, “in the ‘60s and ‘70s… had hardly any adequate critical appreciation”.
Hutchinson notes how ‘brushstrokes are visible in the gore’ painted on the doomed heroine’s legs at the close of The Red Shoes
As The Red Shoes celebrates its 75th anniversary, the British Film Institute confirms total rehabilitation with a major retrospective season and the publication of two essential volumes. Edited by Nathalie Morris and Claire Smith, The Cinema of Powell and Pressburger raids the BFI’s archive to provide definitive visual gloss on the partnership’s career. Gorgeous paintings from the production-design teams. Reproductions of pages from Powell’s diary revealing his immaculately vertical penmanship. Lavish promotional stills that work subtle variations on the moving images. No coffee table is complete without it.
The text reads like an overlapping conversation between heated enthusiasts. Caitlin McDonald addresses the recurring themes of exile. Alexandra Harris’s treatment of pilgrimage re-enforces the Archers’ interest in emotional and physical distance.
Just as unmissable, Pamela Hutchinson’s monograph on The Red Shoes, latest in the long-running BFI Film Classics series, employs the slyest wit as it teases out a kaleidoscope of themes in the greatest of all ballet films.
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Both books remind us of the films’ conscious artificiality. Hutchinson notes how “brushstrokes are visible in the gore” painted on the doomed heroine’s legs at the close of The Red Shoes. The volumes also fascinatingly tease out the mechanics of a partnership that bled across filmmaking disciplines. Pressburger, Hungarian émigré, was often seen as the screenwriter. Powell, Kentish eccentric, was treated as director. It wasn’t that simple. “I’m not the originator of the story,” Hutchinson quotes Powell saying. “But I am the teller of the tale.” The Red Shoes. A Matter of Life and Death. Black Narcissus. What tales.
