‘Made in England’ is a fascinating new documentary, hosted by Martin Scorsese, about the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, particularly those released under the Archers label. Their films were unique, innovative and influential. They made films they wanted to make, rather than under studio instructions, so took risks with little regard to box office success. The result was a group of brilliant, unforgettable films, including ‘The Red Shoes’, ‘Black Narcissus’, ‘The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp’, ‘A Canterbury Tale’ and ‘A Matter of Life and Death’. Turns out that Scorsese worked for a number of years with Michael Powell and got to know him well. Any Powell & Pressburger fans in The Afterword? Have you yet seen ‘Made in England’?
New Powell & Pressburger Documentary – Made in England
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Yes. Saw a few weeks ago at the local indie cinema. I thought it was so refreshingly enjoyable. I have P&P films for decades (shows my age). Inventive, thought provoking visually stunning. Fables and fabulous.
And Martin Scorsese is such a brilliant guide. His love of cinema generally and P&P in particular shines through. With such a connection knowing him (and rescuing him) in the 1980s and introducing Michael Powell to Thelma Schoonmaker. His joy and enthusiasm is infectious (if you can track down his DVD A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies. I HAD to get a copy of Leaver Her To Heaven after hearing him enthuse)
Anyway back to Made in England. I see it had a 100% rating on Rotten tomatoes. Deservedly so. The scene in “Blimp” where the camera pulls away from the sword fight. Brilliantly audacious.
Every film fan should see this.
That sounds wonderful. Love P&P but can’t see any availability for the doc in Spain yet. Hope it becomes available soon somewhere, somehow.
My Spanish partner and I have a semi-official ongoing project of introducing each other to each other’s cinema, outside the obvious. Despite both being fairly cine-literate my beginning and end point for Spain was basically Almodovar while her’s was Fish called Wanda and 4 weddings (basically Brit cinema is rom coms). Since we’ve started it’s been a great education both ways.
P&Ps we’ve seen together so far are Blimp, Life &Death and I know where I’m going. Big hits all.
There’s so much classic cinema that’s never really travelled outside its place of origin and it’s a joy to discover it, both ways.
Your Anglo-Hispanic film project sounds very enjoyable @Guiri.
along with the British films you’ve watched together, I’m very keen to also hear about the Spanish films you’ve seen. As you say, genius that he is, Almodovar does tend to dominate things but there must be other directors worth looking out for.
I just discovered this BFI list by the great man himself of his Spanish film favourites.
https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/pedro-almodovar-13-great-spanish-films-influenced-me
All new names to me except for Bigas-Luna’s Jamon Jamon. (Ham ham)
Back in the 90s, Julio Medem was a great favourite of mine. I remember Sex and Lucia, The Red Squirrel and Lovers of the Arctic Circle as being very enjoyable.
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0575523/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_1_nm_7_in_0_q_Julio%2520Medem
@Kaisfatdad I’ll get back to you on recommendations once I’ve had a chance to look at my watched list. But, like you, I’ve never heard of, never mind seen all but Jamón Jamón on that Almodovar list! Clearly still lots of work to do where Spanish cinema is concerned!
I have El Sur which is pretty good (Victor Erice made The Spirit Of The Beehive also), and Blancanieves which is just wonderful. Drew a blank on the rest of them.
Just as I was surprised when, Francois Truffaut became the great champion of Alfred Hitchcock, at a time when most of the cinema establishment were sneering down their noses at the Psycho Hitmaker, I was equally taken aback to read that the very American film-maker, Scorsese was a big fan of P & P, such quintessentially English film-makers.
“In the new documentary “Made in England: The Films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger,” Scorsese recalls watching “The Red Shoes” as a child. He describes it as “one of the origins of my obsession with cinema, itself.”
https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/journey-films-powell-pressburger-courtesy-scorsese-schoonmaker-111951297#:~:text=In%20the%20new%20documentary%20%E2%80%9CMade,obsession%20with%20cinema%2C%20itself.%E2%80%9D
This AV Club article is knowledgeable, comprehensive and insightful.
https://www.avclub.com/mythologized-artists-receive-a-restrained-overview-in-m-1851588234?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR1FxAV5Ucsns–yg5bIG7m83y11qPJjBw3DzkBCBYRYARvSqv2sFGNcqSc_aem_wAnZBuSJKs5biT7V_4qpFw
Little Marty sat there in Little Italy and was spellbound:
“Out of all the major American filmmakers, Scorsese is probably the most comfortable and credible at being a film-history talking head, and anyone who has heard him talk about his favorite films in documentaries, interviews, or old DVD special features is probably familiar with the story (repeated here) of how he discovered cinema as an asthmatic child in postwar Little Italy, cooped up indoors watching broadcasts of British and Italian movies on his family’s little black-and-white TV. To the young Scorsese, Powell and Pressburger became “mythical beings” who made films of “grandeur, lush images, heightened emotions.”
It’s as unlikely a story as Norman Wisdom becoming wildly popular in Albania.
Back to that ABC article again:
“In the new documentary “Made in England: The Films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger,” Scorsese recalls watching “The Red Shoes” as a child. He describes it as “one of the origins of my obsession with cinema, itself.”
“The Powell-Pressberger films have had a profound effect on the sensibility that I bring to all the work I was able to do,” Scorsese says in the documentary. “I was so bewitched by them as a child that they make a big part of my films’ subconscious.”
No question about it P & P are ginormous here on the AW.
Are there any other British directors who are also as popular in 2024 as they were in their heyday?
I would humbly submit Nic Roeg as perhaps as feted now as ever, for Don’t Look Now, Performance, Walkabout and The Man Who Fell to Earth in that order, followed by Bad Timing (lesser), Eureka (minor) and some other stuff, but those four are as good a fistful as most other British directors.
Great choice ,Moseley! Amazing to think that Don’t Look Now was released 51 years ago in 1973.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069995/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_3_tt_8_nm_0_in_0_q_don%27t%2520look
I suspect it still holds its own rather well.
Another longtime P&Phead here, impatiently waiting for this doc to show up in Oz. Mrs Thep has instituted a blanket ban on old movies – she associates them with wet Sunday afternoons in her childhood, and claims to have been traumatised by The Dam Busters. But I recently forced her to watch I Know Where I’m Going and she was enchanted.
My Spanish other half had a a similar reaction to I Know Where I’m Going. Afterwards she basically sat there saying ‘where did that come from? Why have I never heard of it before?’
Here’s Marty going into detail about the restoration of The Red Shoes.
His enthusiasm about movies is very contagious.
MOMA had a major retrospective of Powell and Pressburger.
https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/5707
Their presentation of the programme contains lots of interesting titbits.
“The series features several 35mm prints, as well as new digital restorations of such Powell and Pressburger classics as The Small Back Room, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and The Tales of Hoffmann. Of special interest to cinephiles is a section devoted to Michael Powell’s early work as a director in the UK’s “quota quickie” sector, low-budget films made to satisfy the government’s requirement that a certain percentage of films in theaters be of British origin. The program includes all 13 of Powell’s quota quickies known to exist, from Rynox (1931) to The Man Behind the Mask (1936), in newly remastered editions from the BFI National Archive.”
Here’s an account of Powell’s early days and those quota quickies.
http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/598751/index.html
It mentions this film as a milestone in his career:
“The result was his most distinctive work to date. The Edge of the World (1937) was a poignant elegy to the death of a community. Inspired by the true story of the abandonment of the Hebridean island of St Kilda by its inhabitants, it delivered all that Powell’s earlier films had promised, and more. The director’s spiritual affinity to the islanders and the desolate, craggy beauty of their unforgiving home was tangible, and the film began a love affair with the Scottish islands as passionate as Powell’s many more earthly affairs.”
@Kaisfatdad if you like film books as much as you like your films I’d strongly recommend Powell’s autobiography A Life in Movies. One of the best film books and autobiographies I’ve ever read. He also wrote a second volume, Million Dollar Movie, which is out of print and I’ve never been able to track down at a sensible price.
Thanks @Guiri. It is on my shopping list now.
https://www.academia.edu/5954157/Review_Michael_Powell_A_Life_in_Movies_Heinemann_London_1986
I’m in for quite a read!
“This is a very long book – 705 pages to take us up to 1948.”
That Archers theme tune is part of our DNA. “Di di di di di di dee, di di di di dee dee …”
For those of us (like me) who know fairly little about P & P, this Arena documentary is an entertaining introduction.
And this lecture by Ian Christie puts a lot more meat on the bone.
I once sang Happy Birthday to Michael Powell at a screening at the NFT. Can’t remember for the life of me what the film was though. Maybe Gone to Earth?
Curiosity about that birthday celebration at the NFT and which year it was, @yorkio, led me to the P & P pages on the NFT site! It’s a mine of wonderful information:
https://powell-pressburger.org/NFT/Program.html
Here’ s the intro:
“For the best part of 30 years, from the ’50s to the early ’80s, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were British cinema’s guilty secret. Most of their films were impossible to see in anything like their original form, or at all, and their reputations were tarnished by the memory of the later, more conventional films. Even Powell’s Peeping Tom, which had the potential to reinvent him for a new generation, like Hitchcock’s Psycho, was slow to build its cult reputation. And yet it was Peeping Tom that led some (including me) to seek out their joint films of the ’40s and discover how bold and bizarre British cinema could be.
We now know from Mass Observation reports that their wartime films had more popular support than might be guessed from most histories of British cinema. But what stuck was the puzzlement of critics – a condescending ‘yes, but …’ – which soon became outright hostility from the young post-war critics and future filmmakers towards the flamboyant Technicolor melodrama of Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes.
Strange, in retrospect, that many who admired the artifice of Hollywood musicals had such problems with the highly experimental opera-ballet of The Red Shoes and its successors, The Tales of Hoffmann and Oh, Rosalinda!! But the passage of time has turned these, as well as the wartime films, into the new classics of British cinema – preferred in many cases to the worthy realist films that were long venerated as our ‘true’ national cinema.
Powell and Pressburger prided themselves on thinking ahead, and also keeping abreast of ideas from outside cinema, while at the same time considering themselves traditionalists. As a result their wartime films reach back into history and analyse the national temperament and character with a unique double perspective -that of the sophisticated. cosmopolitan outsider Pressburger; and that of the equally inquiring, outward – looking native Powell. Research on individual films has often shown that the most ‘English’ aspects came from Pressburger and the most ‘foreign’ from Powell; but whatever the alchemy that enabled them to function as cinema’s most successful writer-producer-director partnership, there can be little doubt that their best work was done together.
But even if there is now a growing appreciation of just how complex and multifaceted the main films of The Archers’ partnership are, with many studies linking them to the main currents of twentieth century English and European culture, including expressionism, surrealism and neo-romanticism, there are still many aspects of these two careers that remain little known. One such is the ‘prehistory’ of Powell as a young director making his way in the boom years of British production that resulted from the quotas of the l929 Films Act.”
Ian Christie seems to be the world’s greatest authority on P and P and has written a short book about a Matter of Life and Death
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/matter-of-life-and-death-9781839023897/
“The film is a magical, profound fantasy and a moving evocation of English history and the wartime experience, with virtuoso Technicolor special effects. In the United States it was released under the title Stairway to Heaven, referencing one of its most famous images, a moving stairway between earth and the afterlife.”
Well I never! Were Page and Plant aware of this?
Here’s an interview with Ian Christie which is an interesting read:
https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/publishing/review/35/british-academy-review-35-ian-christie-interview/
Revealing comment about The Red Shoes:
“As an example, I have just written again about Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, after many previous commentaries and studies, arguing that the film is really valuable for understanding austerity Britain in 1948. It offered audiences a vision of many things that they could aspire to: the luxury of colour and high fashion, travel to the south of France, and the cosmopolitan world of ballet. But it did so in a climate where the heroine’s ultimate crime is that she goes out to work, because the taboo against women having a career in 1948 was absolutely ferocious.”
I was trying to work out when it might have been. Some time between the mid 80s would be my best guess! All I can remember is that he was sitting just behind us and that he was accompanied by Thelma Schoonmaker. It certainly wasn’t a birthday event, as I recall that whoever was on stage just mentioned in passing that it was MP’s birthday in passing and the audience couldn’t resist singing a slightly embarrassed happy birthday. Beyond that, all’s a blur, I’m afraid.
The NFT was pretty incredible in those days when Hollywood giants still walked the earth. I remember a friend of mine had sat a couple of seats away from Ingrid Bergman a few years earlier!
I too have many, very happy memories of the NFT @yorkio.
In 1977 I went there during the London Film Festival to see the first major feature film by a new American director who did a very entertaining Q and A afterwards.. Both he and the movie completely blew me away.
The film was Assault on Precint 13 and the director of course was John Carpenter.
I’m still a fan!
Incidentally, it seems the NFT, the BFI and Sight and Sound magazine have all played a major role in nurturing the heritage of P & P. and keeping their films in the public eye.
It’s a fantastic doc – I went twice when it was on at my local.
I must see that. Am a huge ‘The Archers’ fan. Their run of Canterbury Tale, I Know Where I’m Going, Blimp and AMOLAD are always in my top five films.
Peter Bradshaw wrote this excellent review of the doc.
https://amp.theguardian.com/film/2024/feb/21/made-in-england-the-films-of-powell-and-pressburger-review-martin-scorsese
It is full of interesting titbits,.
Powell was persona non grata in the 60s film world after Peeping Tom.
Pressburger wrote novels in his retirement.
He mentions what a very unlikely champion Scorsese was for P and P.
I am not sure whether I am a cinephile or just like saying fill- um in the Irish way.
My general understanding is that Powell basically directed the films, and Pressburger was the screenwriter. Is that correct, or it is an oversimplification?
If it’s basically correct, then Emeric Pressburger must be one of the greatest exophonic writers of the 20th century, as his first language was Hungarian, and he didn’t move to the UK until he was 36. What wonderful scripts he wrote.
To that @duco01, you must add the years in the 1930s when he Love’s and worked in the film industry in Paris!!
https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/emeric-pressburger-the-archers-michael-powell-england-exile
Another excellent article about the Archers from a UK film site that I just stumbled across.
https://www.cinemaparadiso.co.uk/films/collections/the-instant-experts-guide/the-instant-experts-guide-to-powell-and-pressburger
“He stood the plot on its head and completely restructured the film.” Excellent quote from Powell about how bowled over he was on first working with Pressburger.
He didn’t speak a word of English when he arrive in the UK.
I was looking for a piece on Pressburger’s remarkable skills as a linguist. I failed but I did find this essay which is a very interesting read.
https://brightlightsfilm.com/the-music-of-words-storytelling-in-two-powell-pressburger-films/amp/
Some of you may have heard of Oscar-winning Scottish documentary film maker, Kevin MacDonald.
Interesting chap!
https://the-talks.com/interview/kevin-macdonald/
And very pertinent to this thread as he is Pressburger’s grandson and has written a biography of his grandad.
https://powell-pressburger.org/Reviews/Emeric/LaDoaS.html
That led to this review of Emeric’s lost Nazi novel:
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/10/18/emeric-pressburgers-lost-nazi-novel/
His first novel was made into a film starring Gregory Peck and directed by Fred Zinnemann: Behold a pale horse. (1962)
Oddly enough it occurred to me only this morning to wonder if either Powell or Pressburger had descendants…so it was that I discovered Andrew Macdonald, Kevin’s brother and long-time Danny Boyle and Alex Garland producer. Another equally successful chip off the old block!
Great minds think alike @mikethep!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emeric_Pressburger
Pressburger had one daughter, Angela, from his second marriage.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emeric_Pressburger
Kevin also made a film about the grandad he never knew and his quest to get to know him better.
The Making of an Englishman
https://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2016/01/30/the-making-of-an-englishman-emeric-pressburger/
If you have Facebook, @Baskerville Old Face and other P &P fans, this may interest you:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/151541771615779
It’s a group dedicated to the Archers that FB suggested that I join!
My initial thought was that there can’t be anything that hasn’t already been mentioned elsewhere. But there are all kinds of interesting titbits. For example people who are relatives to P & P.
How about this?
The 2024 A Canterbury Tale film locations walk will take place in Canterbury on Sunday 25 August. It would help with planning if you can book ahead. Booking link is in the information here:
https://www.facebook.com/events/1653728281827667
Or how about this for esoteric? Invaluable for all the Russian speakers on the AW.
“Good day to everyone! Greetings from Russia, this is George Darakhvelidze, author of 7-volume study of Powell and Pressburger films “Landscapes of Dreams”. Available only in Russian so far, alas. Hope they bring the new retrospective to us!”
Seriously though, well worth a browse through to see the stuff they’ve been discussing.
That led me to this BFI-produced video essay.
“In this video essay Lara Callaghan explores how the work of one of Britain’s greatest film-making partnerships influenced modern culture as varied as Matthew Bourne’s ballet, Kate Bush’s music, the gaming world of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and jokes on The Simpsons.”
For anyone who has yet to watch it, currently streaming on curzon home cinema for a fiver
Hello @Baskerville Old Face.
This was in today’s Guardian and may interest you and other Powell and Pressburger fans.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/oct/16/powell-pressburger-masterpiece-behold-a-pale-horse
“The Lumière festival in Lyon in south-east France – the home of 19th-century movie inventor-pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière – always serves up mouthwatering classic films on the big screen. This is true once again this year, with a retrospective season of works by Fred Zinnemann, famously the director of High Noon and From Here to Eternity.
In one of its most interesting films, the festival also provided what could be the last remaining underexamined footnote in the history of the great Powell/Pressburger partnership that gave us Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.
Zinnemann’s fascinating film Behold a Pale Horse (1964) is based on a novel that Emeric Pressburger wrote after his split from Michael Powell, called Killing a Mouse on Sunday. (Pressburger also wrote a second novel, The Glass Pearls, a psychological thriller, which was ignored at the time, but has been recently reissued.)”
Apparently on BBC2 tomorrow night on a double-bill with I know Where I am Going
The documentary is on the iPlayer, as of 21/11/2024.
And so’s I Know Where I’m Going. The film is the newly restored high definition version by the BFI. I saw some when it was on Saturday just gone, and it looks fantastic. Going to watch both this week.
Just listened to a fascinating ‘My Cultural Life’ (BBC Sounds) with Thelma Schoonmaker, where she talks about her and Marty’s love for the P&P films. Also an astonishing first hand account of being under the stage at Woodstock, handling the reels as they were transferred from the various cameramen.