The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff - Cameraman

I went to see the prosaically titled The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff – Cameraman at the cinema the other night, a film which now sadly stands as a tribute to the great cinematographer, who died last year. Cardiff is a great subject for such documentary treatment, being a congenial and modest man, with an amused anecdotalist’s ear and an apparent ability to get on with pretty much anybody, even stereotypically irate Hollywood tyrants such as Henry Hathaway. And of course, there is the unmissable opportunity to see examples of his work on the big screen. The Powell and Pressburger films were the undoubted highlights of his career, and it’s all the more remarkable that these were the first films that he shot as principal photographer. The scenes from A Matter of Life and Death, with June tearfully listening to David Niven’s Peter as he pours forth a final rush of romantic eloquence from his crashing plane, and Black Narcissus, with Kathleen Byron’s Sister Ruth gliding through the corridors of the Himalayan nunnery like a demented spectre before appearing at the outer door with a stare of focussed hatred and red-eyed wildness which could melt the surrounding snow in a wide radius, never fail to send a shiver down my spine. The emotional impact of both is hugely amplified by Cardiff’s expressionistic use of colour; the red glow in both the airplane cockpit and the radio communication room; and the red of Sister Ruth’s dress and eyes set against the whites and muted pastels of the nunnery and distant mountains. Although a dvd is set to be released on 19th July, these really do benefit from being seen on the big screen. As do the original films, of course. A revival of Pandora and the Flying Dutchman is doing the rounds as an accompaniement to the documentary, which looks like it will show off Cardiff’s Technicolor to dazzling effect. A Matter of Life and Death is also being screened at our local Picture House. In most moods, I would cite this as being my favourite film of all time (for reasons outlined in previous posts). It does seem to be the default choice of Powell and Pressburger for screening outside London, however (last year’s re-issue of The Red Shoes aside). It would be great to have been given the opportunity to see Cardiff’s work on Black Narcissus this time (it is being shown over the Summer at Somerset House, for all you big city folk). Indeed, I’d love to be able to see The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp on the big screen again, or lesser known Powell and Pressburger gems such as the lush rural melodrama Gone To Earth, the brooding and intense The Small Back Room, or the dreamy evocation of the Kentish countryside A Canterbury Tale.

The film could almost be seen as a literary adaptation, since a lot of the material is familiar from Cardiff’s autobiographical volume of reminiscences of his life in film, Magic Hour. This has an introduction by Martin Scorsese, and it is only a few minutes before his inevitable appearance on the screen. He talks in his usual rapid, intense sentences, which tend to come to a sudden halt during which he inserts a nervous smile, as if self-consciously trying to bring a touch of levity to his almost violent expression of his passion for cinema. Despite his ubiquity, Scorsese’s presence is always welcome, as his knowledge is genuinely comprehensive, and his enthusiasm infectious (it seems rather churlish to suggest that he could do with being a bit more critical on occasion). The anecdotes which Cardiff both tells and sets down in writing have become fixed in form through the telling, and have reached a state of performative polish which makes them work perfectly against the backdrop of a photograph slowly panned across or zoomed in on, or as the prelude to a suitably chosen film extract. His position slightly outside the magic circle of stars and directors, whilst still being in close contact with them, gives him a degree of perspective which allows for fresh insight, free of the distortions of self-mythologising ego. Any slight embellishments, natural in the telling of a tale, can be forgiven in the light of the sheer range of his experiences in the film world, which date from the silent era right up until the time at which the documentary was filmed. There are scenes in which he is working on a recent movie, expressing his reluctance to retire and his hope that he’ll have a heart attack and die on the job (he has an unsentimental sense of humour, with a healthy instinct for the absurd).

Cardiff was born into an itinerant theatrical family, who toured theatres and halls as a variety act with him in tow, and soon taking to the stage himself. His reminiscences of his early life give a fascinating insight into the continuity between and intersection of the worlds of stage and screen. In Magic Hour, Cardiff tells us that his father, a comedian, performed on the stage with Charlie Chaplin in a Fred Karno show. When he met him much later in life in Switzerland and asked him about this, he was delighted to discover that Chaplin still remembered this show, and had clear recollections of working with his father. Cardiff’s parents took roles as extras in films whilst ‘resting’, and he relates the thespian scam of creating a circulating queue when collecting the day’s wage of a guinea, with a variety of disguises adopted to accumulate extra coinage. The camera picks out wee Jackie sheltering between the arms of his father, a dapper bow-tied and boatered figure, in a group photograph taken in front of the Hippodrome, and again, sitting at his side, in line with a black-face troupe at the seaside (a real sign of changing times).

Cardiff gravitated towards screen rather than stage, working his way up through the industry after early opportunistic experiences as a child actor gained through accompanying his parents in the search for roles as extras. He went from clapperboy to focus puller, to working on camera teams at Elstree and with Alexander Korda at Denham Studios (where he also worked on the special effects unit for Things To Come). He was a self-educated man, his early peripatetic lifestyle offering little opportunity for more settled schooling, and was an avaricious reader with a real thirst for learning. This autodidactic drive gave him an unorthodox range of reference points, which were well employed when he was examined by a board of big studio cheeses looking to select someone to send over to the USA to learn how to operate the new Technicolor equipment. Cardiff cheerfully admitted to his complete lack of technical knowledge, but impressed them with his appreciation of the representation of the effects of light in paintings by the Old Masters. He got the job.

Cardiff gives us a guide to this hulking piece of equipment, which is shot as if it is a monumental sculpture in enamelled chrome, which in a way it is now - a monument to a bygone age. This very unportable technology was hauled around the world at the behest of the eccentrically wealthy travellers the Count and Countess von Keller, and there are some marvellous pieces of footage shot at a variety of exotic locations. There’s the Taj Mahal, an Indian temple covered with sensuous wall sculptures, and Vesuvius, which was undergoing a minor eruption at the time, which resulted in burnt shoe soles and a significant shortening of the tripod of the very expensive camera equipment. Cardiff also lugged it onto the seas for the semi-fictional wartime drama Western Approaches, made for the Crown Film Unit in the style of the documentary movement. The footage from this was stunning, with the waves of the Irish sea swelling above the tiny lifeboat in which Cardiff, his equipment, director Pat Jackson and several merchant seamen were crouched. These scenes resembled a World War Two restaging of Hokkusai’s famous print The Wave. There’s a glorious shot of the sun on the sea’s horizon, whose colours were achieved using a combination of filters and film development techniques, and which strays slightly from the documentary ethos to express a more poetic realism. It’s a foretaste of the imaginative and unabashedly romantic uses to which Cardiff would put the Technicolor process.

Jack and Michael Powell on the Burrows

He was given the perfect opportunity to apply his painterly eye by Michael Powell, who noticed his camera work on the scene in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp in which he conjures the heads of the Colonel’s hunting trophies onto the walls of his house with the crack of a gunshot until every space is filled. Powell was sufficiently impressed to offer an impulsive invitation to shoot his next film. This was to become A Matter of Life and Death. Although not strictly his debut (he’d shot The Great Mr Handel in 1942) this was an impressive film to be involved with so early in his career, and he brought all the knowledge he had accumulated to bear, both in terms of his technical expertise and of his appreciation of the use of the representation of light in painting. Set designer Alfred Junge tried to impose his own ideas of how to light his backdrops, but Cardiff stood his ground and did things his way. The contrast between the black and white, bureaucratic heaven and the vibrant colour of the Earth and the Universe allowed him to demonstrate that he could master the chiaroscuro gradations of monochrome and the enhanced realism of the Technicolor palette. Marius Goring’s famous line ‘one is starved for Technicolor up there’ could almost be seen as a small tribute to the sensuous quality of Cardiff’s colour photography. Photos of Powell and Cardiff on the dunes of Braunton Burrows above the wide expanse of Saunton Sands are testament to the closeness with which the two worked. One anecdote which underlines the pragmatism with which Cardiff approached technical challenges concerns the creation of a mist which gradually clears to reveal the landscape of sea and sand. He achieved this through the simple expedient of breathing on the lens. The fact that I now know that what I see on the screen is the dissipating condensation from Jack Cardiff’s breath, the transient imprint of a moment of his life, makes the scene even more magical. It provides an appropriately evanescent borderland between Heaven and Earth, life and the afterlife, black and white and Technicolor. Through the incidental improvisation of an effect, it creates a small poetic enhancement of the film’s meditation on the precious and fragile beauty of human life.

Cardiff went on to shoot Powell and Pressburger’s next film, Black Narcissus, which furthered his burgeoning reputation as a supreme cinematic colourist. In the documentary, he emphasises the degree to which various painters have influenced his cinematography and approach to lighting. The interiors of Vermeer, with figures engaged in the unremarkable minutiae of daily domesticity or simply lost in thought obliquely highlighted and etched by shadow via light slanting through windows, were a particular model. The muted tones of the nunnery are reminiscent of Gwen John, who herself painted several portraits from 1913 onward of nuns from the Order of the Sisters of Charity in Meudon, near Paris, where she had settled (whether Cardiff was aware of these I don’t know). This restrained palette is predominant throughout most of the film, before it is violently disrupted by the vivid primary colours which burst forth when Sister Ruth’s suppressed desire explodes into madness. Cardiff points to the expressionist reds and greens of Van Gogh as being an influence here.

Gwen John's nun

His love and knowledge of art was another facet of his self-education, and played a major part in forming his ideas of colour and lighting (and its corollary, shadow). He sits in front of paintings in the National Gallery and extols the virtues of the Dutch masters, the Impressionists and above all Turner. As he contemplates Rain, Steam and Speed (the richly atmospheric painting of an approaching train crossing a viaduct), he observes that he would have been a great cinematographer were he alive today. Cardiff ushers us into his own studio and shows us a selection of his own paintings, in which he copies the styles of his favourite artists. He is typically disparaging about his efforts, claiming that this is merely his way of analysing the work of his heroes and discovering how they achieved their characteristic effects. The results are, nevertheless, nothing to be ashamed of. He is completely in thrall to the great artists, and it is they, rather than other cameramen, who seem to have been his greatest inspiration. In Magic Hour, ostensibly a memoir about his life in the film world, he devotes considerable space to his encounters with various artists, such Utrillo, de Chirico (certainly an influence on parts of the Red Shoes ballet) and Braque. He also runs into Jean Cocteau, an artist who leapt with a light and airy step between the varied worlds of theatre, poetry, art, music, ballet and, of course, film. He seems overawed at the prospect of meeting the elderly Jane Avril, the model for some of Toulouse-Lautrec’s most famous depictions of Montmartre night life. Alas, she died shortly after he learnt of her whereabouts, and the meeting never took place.

Expressionist reds

Cardiff went on to shoot one more film, The Red Shoes, with Powell and Pressburger. His Technicolor cinematography reached new heights of gaudy expressionism here, especially in the celebrated dance sequence in which Moira Shearer puts on the red shoes. The air of heightened expressionism is enhanced by his close-ups of the faces of the dancers, in particular Moira Shearer as the rising ballerina Vicky Page. Their exaggerated stage make-up, designed to make an impression at a distance, distorts their features and makes them look as if they have just stepped out of a painting by Munch or Ensor. The Red Shoes isn’t one of my favourite Powell and Pressburger films, perhaps because I have little interest in the high culture world of the ballet in which it is set. Powell himself would display an increasing tendency to breath the elevated airs of the classical art world, with adaptations of Die Fledermaus (transformed into Oh! Rosalinda and updated to post-war Vienna) and Tales of Hoffmann (much admired by George Romero and Martin Scorsese, but not so much by me). Apart from anything else, these marginalized Emeric Pressburger’s gift for characterisation and storytelling, which were of paramount importance to the partnership. Perhaps he was admitting to the failure of his high art pretensions when he had Moira Shearer murdered by the scopophiliac cameraman protagonist of Peeping Tom. He did go on to make an hour long film of Bartok’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle in 1964 for German TV, however. Powell always claimed that The Red Shoes was about being prepared to die for one’s art, a view repeated as orthodoxy here. But Vicky doesn’t die for her art, but rather through the mental torment caused by the competing attempts to control her exerted by Anton Walbrook’s dictatorial svengali Lermontov and Marius Goring’s Julian, her jealous young composer husband. The love story between Vicky and Julian doesn’t seem remotely passionate enough to inspire the wildly operatic act of self-immolation which forms the film’s abrupt conclusion. Marius Goring is frankly more convincing (and certainly more charming) as the foppish Conductor 71 wielding his barley sugar walking cane in A Matter of Life and Death than as an artist and lover who would drive a woman to despair and death.

Kathleen Byron

Moira Shearer is one of a triumvirate of Powell and Pressburger leading ladies in the film, and it’s great to see both her, Kim Hunter and especially Kathleen Byron, all of whom, sadly, have now passed away. During his years working in Hollywood, Cardiff enjoyed warm friendships with many of the most glamorous actresses of the era. He seems to have been the sort of person in whose company they naturally felt comfortable, and in whom they felt they could confide. Marlene Dietrich took a shine to the young Jack when they were both working on Knight Without Armour at the Denham Studios for Alexander Korda. He was fascinated by the way in which she directed her own lighting, applying her make-up to best advantage of its shadows and reflections, ending with a light sprinkling of gold dust in the hair. Cardiff evidently learnt from Marlene, and he discusses the great beauties with whom he worked with a coolly analytical eye. He falls under their spell yet also manages to maintain the degree of distance necessary for his work. His own photographic portraits are wonderful, although he dismisses them in a typically offhand manner as being the products of an amateur. The full face picture of Audrey Hepburn, whose dark eyebrows he finds a particularly distinctive feature, adorns the film’s poster. Marilyn Monroe specifically asked for him to take her picture, and the resultant portrait is gorgeously sensuous even by her standards, with windblown hair straying across her face. It was apparently Arthur Miller’s favourite photograph of her.

Personal portrait gallery

Cardiff also took super 8 films on set, and these give a fascinating insight into the informal behaviour of actors and actresses whose images have been fixed by their screen roles, or presented in carefully pre-determined contexts such as magazine shoots or Parky-style interview schmoozes. Some seem little different from their screen personae. John Wayne still wears his cowboy gear and practices his gunslinging, even when he’s in the Sahara to play the role of foreign legionnaire. Ava Gardner seems broody and a little sad. But Sophia Loren comes to vivid, gleeful life. Seeing her act up to Cardiff’s camera with such playful ebullience, it comes as little surprise to read in Magic Hour that they had a very close relationship, a chaste semi-affair conducted in secret on the set of the otherwise forgettable 1957 film Legend of the Lost. Cardiff also filmed Kirk Douglas doing his own stunts on The Vikings, tiptoeing lightly across the oars of a longship (and falling in the water) and climbing up the gate of the castle perched vertiginously above the Croatian cliffs and sea (which stood in with surprising conviction for the Norwegian fjords). Douglas broke with his general reluctance to be interviewed since his stroke in 1996 to take part in this film, and this, together with the participation of many others, is a testament to the respect and affection in which Cardiff was held. The contrast between Douglas’ frailty and age in his contemporary interview and the youth and physical daring evident in the old super 8 films (those stunts look genuinely dangerous) has an inevitably poignant effect (something which seems to be ingrained in the super 8 medium). Cardiff gives short shrift to the idea that cinema is inherently tragic, however, having fairly brusquely gone along his row of photographic portraits and pointed out how many of them are dead.

Ava Gardner in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman

Cardiff established himself as a major colour cameraman in Hollywood, and even if the films weren’t always of the finest quality (the 50s weren’t really a vintage era for American cinema) his visual contributions were always striking. We get to see glimpses of War and Peace (with its cavalry charge and dream-like duel in the dawn-lit snow), the fantasia of Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (with Ava Gardner’s otherworldly siren), a sped up run through a highly complex ten minute take in Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn, and of course, The African Queen, which offers its own rich fund of anecdotes based around the trying conditions of its shoot, with crocodiles and rapids and other hazards. Lauren Bacall, who accompanied Bogie for the filming, is on hand to provide wry recollections. Everyone got dysentery at some point, since the water filter from which they were drinking was singularly failing to effect any filtration whatsoever, leaving them to drink pure African river water. Bogart and John Huston remained unaffected, however, since they only drank whisky.

It’s fair to say that Cardiff’s work as a director, which occupied him through the 60s and into the 70s, never rose above an efficient journeyman quality, and often the material on offer was simply bad. Sons and Lovers, the DH Lawrence adaptation to which most attention is paid here, was well received by the critics in its day, but has not gone on to be thought of as an enduring classic. Scorsese’s reply to a question about Young Cassidy, the Irish-set film which Cardiff took over from John Ford, is ‘I’ve got a print’, a reflexive response which falls short of his usual instantaneous effusion. Cardiff puts up a half-hearted defence of Girl On A Motorcycle, his attempt at an erotic reverie with Marianne Faithfull and Alain Delon, claiming that some of its notoriously awful dialogue made more sense in French, but the US title, Naked Under Leather, gives a more honest account of its appeal. Unsurprisingly, no mention is made of his final directorial effort, The Mutations (1973), a woeful horror movie in which meddlesome youths poke about in a suspiciously ill-attended fairground, a-la Scooby Doo, and fall foul of Donald Pleasance’s experiment-happy mad scientist, who turns his failed hybrids into sideshow freaks. Tom Baker leadenly plays his hideously scarred assistant, walking with patent henchman lurch, fresh from working with Pasolini on Canterbury Tales and biding his time before the call up for Doctor Who a year or so later. It’s worth seeing only for period 70s London detail and atmosphere (and attitudes).

Perhaps realising that he had reached rock bottom with a film which took a prurient interest in showing real sideshow freaks, Cardiff returned to working as a cameraman in Hollywood. The films he made in this final period are hardly the stuff of legend, and are interesting chiefly in the complete contrast they offer with the cinematic climate of the decades in which he had previously worked in this capacity. There’s a certain perverse fascination in discovering that the man who shot Black Narcissus, Under Capricorn and The African Queen was also behind the camera for Rambo 2: First Blood, Conan the Destroyer and The Awakening. At least the latter, a turgid adaptation of Bram Stoker’s dull novel The Legend of the Seven Stars (Hammer did it slightly better – and with a much catchier title – as Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb in 1973), allows for the participation of Charlton Heston. Cardiff’s work was never less than efficient and professional, however, and he maintained a high reputation which kept him in constant demand. There’s something lacking in their flat photographic realism, however (other shortcomings of the films themselves notwithstanding). Perhaps his greatest work was done in the artificial environs of the studios. It was here that he could create his own romanticised and highly coloured visions of reality, cinematic dreams which endure to this day.

Ten Reasons Why A Matter of Life and Death is the Greatest British Movie Ever Made - Part Ten

10. Mysticism

Whilst it is always fairly clear that we are supposed to see the heaven which Peter envisages as a construct of his own imagination, there is nevertheless a sense in which it broaches real and universal questions of what lies beyond the surface appearance of reality and what might endure beyond death. When Dr Reeves asks Peter ‘do you believe in the survival of human personality after death?’ he replies ‘I thought you said you said you’d read my verses.’ Dr Reeves himself has ‘thought about it too much’, an admission of morbidity which foreshadows his own death. That death , when it comes, is all too palpably physical. We are spared the sight of Dr Reeves after his flame-engulfed crash, but the look of reflexive revulsion on the face of the ambulance driver, who is presumably no stranger to disaster, tells us all we need to know. It is particularly upsetting to realise that the Doctor upon whom Peter relies and whom we have come to see as a noble and self-effacingly authoritative soul has not only died, but done so in a fashion which has destroyed his body. He has been definitively erased from the Earth in a manner all too familiar to people coming to the end of a massively destructive war. Seeing him restored whole and unbelemished in the next world therefore carries a great emotional charge. It suggests something about the immortality and endurance of the human spirit, that element which transcends the physical. It can be no coincidence that the person who he is chatting with and who is clearly a fellow spirit turns out to be John Bunyan, the author of another classic English account of the journey of a soul.

A Matter of Life and Death is never explicitly Christian. It takes a more humanist approach to the religious spirit, suggesting the endless quest for knowledge and enlightenment which underpins the persistent need to find meaning, connection and a continuity of existence in the universe. That this is an ongoing quest is made clear by Peter’s rejection as defendants of the monumental philosophical giants which pass him at the side of the ascending staircase. These overbearing pieces of towering statuary represent the danger of being trapped in ossified systems of belief which crush the individual quest for knowledge and understanding based on personal experience and feeling. Peter has absorbed their knowledge but needs someone to represent him who knows of his feelings and the particularities of his time. ‘What do they know about the problems of today?’ he asks of these marble giants. He needs ‘someone with his head screwed on’. Naturally he chooses Dr Reeves, who replies ‘I hoped he would’ with a wry smile which covers his evident pride at being given this honour.

The core of mystical vision is the ideal of tracing connections, the unification of seemingly irreconcilable opposites into a transcendent whole. This is really the structure of the entire film. The unification of nations, of languages, of the individual and the masses, of tradition and modernism, will and determinism, objective vision and the imagination, the great and the small. This is represented on a cosmic scale by our opening tour of the universe, spiralling from the widest perspective into the particularity of a moment as experienced by two individuals. It is also embodied on a smaller scale by Doctor Reeves’ camera obscura, through which he observes the life of the village (itself a microcosm of England as a whole). As he so eloquently puts it, this is a visionary perspective through which ‘you see it all clearly and at once, as in a poet’s eye.’ It is also, of course, analogous to the way in which we watch a film and it is through this art that Powell and Pressburger effect their transcendent, unifying vision. Dr Reeves’ diagnosis of Peter’s hallucinations also describes our experience of the film and of cinema in general. ‘A series of highly organised hallucinations comparable to an experience of actual life…a combination of vision and hearing and idea.’

It is a mark of a great screenwriter that you come away from a film with lines of dialogue firmly embedded in your memory: ‘Politics – Conservative by nature, Labour by experience.’; ‘Boy oh boy, home was nothing like this’ – ‘mine was’; ‘stupidity has saved many a man from going mad’; ‘If he gets onto politics, I’m sunk’ – ‘who isn’t’; ‘One is starved for Technicolor up there.’

It is a mark of a great director that scenes live on in your mind’s eye: Trubshaw and the heavenly receptionist looking through a porthole window onto a bureaucratic cityscape; Peter wandering over the sands and dunes of a heavenly beach, morning sea-mist drifting away behind him; Peter and Conductor 71 discussing philosophers as their monumental statues drift past on an endlessly ascending escalator; Entering an inner world of pulsing blood vessels as a giant eyelid closes, before colour leaches away and the moving dots below resolve themselves into crowds of people walking to take their places in a vast arena.

A writer/director collaboration which attains true greatness is one which occurs when the creators of these separate elements of magic know and communicate with each other to create a work of art which exceeds what either could do individually. This integration of two very different perspectives (Michael Powell an Englishman to the core, Emeric Pressburger a well-travelled Hungarian émigré) into a transcendent whole is embedded in the very themes and structure of A Matter of Life and Death. It can thus stand as an artistic testament to their partnership, a film which acts as a signature of the most remarkable British film-makers of all time: Powell and Pressburger

Now give yourself a treat and go and see the film.

Ten Reasons Why A Matter of Life and Death is the Best British Film Ever - Part Nine

9. Optimism and Ideals

A Matter of Life and Death was made at a time when the war was all but over and people were starting to think about the future once more. What sort of a world did they want to build? What had they been fighting for? There was a general sense that what came next would have to give meaning to the terrible destruction which had dominated people’s lives for so long. The film embodies this yearning for a better world to come, but also gives that longing a wider and more expansive historical, cultural and philosophical context. This optimistic outlook is clearly laid out in the philosophical to and fro of the celestial courtroom scene. Abraham Farlan, the American revolutionary soldier who is chosen as the prosecution witness, is enmired in the historical hatreds of a past which for him has become set in stone, ineradicable. His world has been shaped by war and has remained rigidly formed by the experience of those violent, disruptive times. He argues for cultural separatism, for people to remain, either literally or figuratively, on their own islands. For him, people are the product of their culture and the history (and climate!) which has created it, an almost Calvinist espousal of predetermination which definitely puts free will on the backburner (or the rear gas-ring if we want to play his game of cultural exclusivity). These arguments are seriously flawed by the undying flame of burning hatred which lies behind them and for which they act as mere rationalisations.

To his bitter cynicism and high nationalist rhetoric, speeches which had been all to familiar to people in recent years, Dr Reeves eventually offers a more personal approach. His ‘only real piece of evidence’, June’s tear, represents the emotional core of a new world, building from personal connections over the rubble of nationalist clashes. Love, truth and friendship, ‘those qualities alone can build a new world today and must build one tomorrow’ Dr Reeves states in summary of his case, a sense of urgency giving force to his voice. Peter and June’s love has become emblematic of a utopian future in which people matter above all. America is taken as an example, as if to confound Abraham Farlan by agreeing with his own nationalist fervour. Dr Reeves’ request for a new jury is one which is made up of representatives of the new America with its high ideals of a melting pot of all nationalities and races mixing together to recreate themselves afresh. The resentments of Imperial subjects are replaced by the varied citizenry of a new society in which they are active participants. This is a prescient admission (and one coming from a director/writing team who come from the conservative end of English Romanticism) that the days of Empire are over. A new model is required. That model needs to be built on the highest principles, the power which drives people’s most noble thoughts and deeds. It is the power that connected Peter and June in the face of mortality and which was made physically manifest in a frozen tear balanced between rose petals. It always was and it always will be.

Ten Reasons Why A Matter of Life and Death is the Greatest British Film Ever Made - Part 8

8. Romantic Landscapes

When Peter drifts back into consciousness after his parachute-less plunge from the bomber’s cockpit, he finds himself on a wide expanse of sand, with the waves which have washed him ashore creating long, successive overlaps of undulant lines when seen from above. Naturally, he believes himself to be in the afterlife. In fact, he is on Saunton Sands in North Devon, which locals may always have suspected was a gateway to paradise. In a haunting scene, Peter, having divested himself of the more cumbersome of his earthly garments and walked up to the dunes in bare feet, comes across a naked goatherd playing an ethereal melody on his flute (the Phrygian mode?) ‘I always hoped there’d be dogs’, he says, as the boy’s Labrador runs up to see him. The atmosphere of some kind of Elysium is created before a plane roaring overhead shatters the idyll. And yet the feeling remains that such landscapes breathe of a heavenly air, an English Romantic paradise. As Peter runs down the dunes to the boardwalk and greets June as if they were already lovers, we feel that such full-blooded emotions are a natural extension of such wild, elemental surroundings.


They would seem more of an aberration in the cool, distanced spatial order of the monochrome heavenly world above. Trubshaw gamely tries it on with Kathleen Byron’s angelic receptionist during the trial sequence, but you sense that he’s never going to get past first post, and he is soon distracted by the cricket commentary which drives everyone else mad with boredom. The contrast of English Romanticism and heavenly modernist distance is also symbolically shown in the transition of Conductor 71’s rose from black and white into heightened, painterly Technicolor (and later, freighted with June’s precious tear, back again). Conductor 71 is an unabashed romantic in the French mould and will later help Peter’s case in the name of l’amour. His first meeting with Peter takes place in a bower of flowering rhododendrons. At this point, however, he is too concerned with the possible repercussions to his position resulting from his error to allow his mistily sentimental romantic side to take the upper hand, although he does dreamily sigh ‘exquise’ at the sight of June’s frozen form. Nevertheless, Peter senses some sort of affinity when he says, just prior to the Conductor’s departure, ‘you know, I think you’re not a bad chap’.

The English landscape can also be seen from the perspective of Dr Reeves’ hair-raisingly authentic motorcycle rides through the countryside. As his bike threads the lanes bracketed with hedgerows and overhung with oak and beech boughs, we feel the sheer exhilaration of being out in the open air. These English landscapes are contrasted with the European Romantic sublime of heaven, monumental landscapes which inspire awe and even terror and against which human scale is dwarfed. Perhaps an appeal for a more tempered modernism on a human scale is being sought. The kind of modernism which A Matter of Life and Death’s costume designer Hein Heckroth experienced during his time teaching at Dartington Arts College, with its classic 30s white-walled buildings such as High Cross House, designed by William Lescaze, set against the rolling hills of the Dart valley and the wild backdrop of the moor. Modernism and romanticism combined.

Ten Reasons Why A Matter of Life and Death is the Best British Film Ever Made - Part Seven

7. Voices and Accents

I would love to have an accent like Roger Livesey. It has the soft, slightly rasped but perfectly balanced quality of a fine malt whisky. Possessed of a gentle, unassuming authoritativeness, it is like a beautifully played musical instrument. There is another Powell and Pressburger film, ‘I Know Where I’m Going’, in which he translates a Highland song for Wendy Hiller, who is trying to stick to the righteous path of marrying into money. Suddenly, Livesey turns to face her directly as he comes to the line ‘you’re the one for me’. She is doomed from that moment on. When Dr Reeves arrives in heaven (chatting with fellow-spirit John Bunyan) and is told that Peter has chosen him as his defending counsel, he gives a quietly satisfied, humourous smile and says ‘I hoped he might’. The understated quality of his response (no whooping and punching the air here) is full of the warmest affection.

There is much play with accents in A Matter of Life and Death. They are seen as embodying national characteristics but never fall into condescending stereotyping. They are too characterful for that. After all, they were created by a writer (Pressburger) who, as a European Jew between the wars, had been buffeted from country to country by the winds of history and who therefore had friends of many different backgrounds. He unfailingly found the best in these varied nationalities to the extent that even during the war, when propagandistic purposes might dictate otherwise, he was able to create sympathetic German characters. But he was never above a little gentle mockery as well. As we see newcomers reaching the top of the elevator into the celestial reception hall, there is an animated exchange in which a French airman wildly gesticulates as he re-enacts the final moments before his demise. The Englishman who is patiently listening to him and clearly understands not a word, nods as his tale concludes and says ‘bad luck old boy’. Two national stereotypes are painted with broad brushstrokes but there is a rather touching conclusion that such superficial differences of language and behaviour can be overcome by common experience and understanding.

There is much amusement to be had in the misunderstandings between Conductor 71 and, in heaven, Trubshaw and on Earth, Peter, but again they find that they all get along just fine in the end. After an initial misunderstanding over what ‘ ‘ad a few’ might mean, The Conductor and Trubshaw look like they are both ready to head for the bar as they bond over beer (‘ah, la biere’). And Peter and the Conductor eventually end up firmly on the same side as the Conductor’s romantic affinities lead him to give a little help at the trial.

The importance of voices is emphasised from the beginning. They are the first indications of human life that we encounter as we drift downwards to Earth and hear words emerging from both the English peasouper and the obscuring electronic fog of the radiophonic aether. Peter and June fall in love with each other’s voices. June says to Dr Reeves that ‘it’s his voice. I fell for that before I saw him’, whilst Peter tells the court that ‘we fell in love before we met’. People’s voices manage to convey much of their character, although they can also be used deceptively or strategically.

For English people, Churchill’s voice had come to represent the spirit of their country at a particular time, just as Hitler’s voice had seduced so many in Germany and beyond. This propagandistic use of the voice can be heard in the trial scene, in which Abraham Farlan indulges in some high nationalist rhetoric which serves to stir up certain sections of the crowd (although Trubshaw looks distinctly peeved). This is enhanced by the fact that he is striking noble poses looking outward from a striking rocky promontory. Another seductive voice using intoxicating language against a monumental backdrop to rally troops to a terrible and destructive cause. Facing each other across a literal gulf, Farlan and Dr Reeves are divided by time and by inclination. Farlan, in his American revolutionary uniform, is a soldier with a conscience rooted in war and a strident, hectoring and jingoistic voice to match. Dr Reeves stands in his tweed jacket, cardie and woollen tie and speaks with a reasoning, conciliatory voice, appealing to compassion and hope. His is the civilian voice of peacetime, of the future rather than the past (recent or otherwise).

Ten Reasons Why A Matter of Life and Death is the Best British Film Ever Made - Part Six

6. Undidactic Inclusiveness
A Matter of Life and Death started with a propaganda dictate that the film should seek to bridge the gulf between the British and Americans and alleviate tensions which had arisen from the presence of so many American G.I.s on British soil. In the end, of course, it did so much more and transcended any limitations of propagandistic purposes rooted in a particular historical moment. And yet that initial impetus remains in the delight which the film takes in representing so many different types of people, not only of different races, but of different historical times and cultures. The differences are treated with wry humour but always with uncondescending acceptance. Powell and Pressburger enjoy these national and historical quirks and quiddities, and are not above having a poke at their own too. England is denounced as a country of dismal weather and interminably dull sports, before we are reminded that it is also the country of Donne, Dryden, Pope, Shelley and Keats. It is a country that Emeric Pressburger, a Hungarian Jew who had led an involuntarily peripatetic life, settled in and wholeheartedly adopted as his own. His outsider’s eye gave him a good perspective on the oddities of the national character and like many immigrants who find a new home on foreign soil, he eventually took on many of these characteristics to become more English than the English themselves, whilst retaining his Hungarian soul.

The feeling of belonging which Pressburger found in England forms the core of the ideal society envisaged by Dr Reeves in the trial scene. He notes that the jury has been ‘selected from many races, creeds and nationalities’ but requests a change in order to counter the divisions and resentments emphasised by Abraham Farlan. The jury shifts from a representation of the wounds of empire to a projection of the hopes for a future which has learned from the lessons of history. Dr Reeves offers a vision of people who merely happen to be of Irish, Chinese, African, French or Russian descent, trumping Farlan’s naked nationalism by rooting that vision in contemporary America. The national and racial descent remains largely the same in his jury but in this modern civil society, their identity resides in the roles they play. The uniform of a Napoleonic soldier is exchanged for a chef’s hat and apron; a Russian’s fur robe give way to the cap and badge of a taxi driver; a Chinese peasant’s traditional dress transmutes into modern clothing with a book of art history tucked under the elbow, the intellectual armoury of the inquisitive student; the Indian’s turban becomes the hard-hatted helmet of the African American soldier (a slight transmutation of race required for the cross-Atlantic change of scene); and the Irishman’s trenchcoat is replaced by a policeman’s uniform. All can take part in building the new world on either side of the ocean.

The celestial courtroom itself exemplifies this welcoming of difference and multiplexity. The vertiginously ascending aisles of this otherworldly colosseum are filled with all manner of people, sitting in their groups the better for us to identify them, but leaning across to talk to each other. The groups represented span historical and also racial, sexual and religious divides (and incidentally acknowledge the role played by women, and Indian and African American soldiers during the war) and in this immense, overarching space there is clearly room for everybody. As Doctor Reeves, always an advocate of the individual against the system, triumphantly states after victory has been won: ‘the rights of the uncommon man must always be respected.’

Ten Reasons Why A Matter of Life and Death is the Best British Film Ever Made - Part Five

5. A Universal Scale
The opening scene of A Matter of Life and Death finds us drifting calmly through the gulfs of interstellar space. A soothing, amiable English voice says ‘this is the Universe. Big, isn’t it?’ From the very first time I saw it, this overwhelmingly reminded me of ‘The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.’ Indeed, I feel certain that Douglas Adams paid homage to these lines in the rather more prolix introduction to his fictional encyclopaedia: ‘Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’ just peanuts to space. Listen….’

Opening a film in the furthest reaches of space is clearly not usual (unless you follow it with a giant spaceship roaring overhead) and immediately sets what is to follow in the widest possible context. Our interstellar tour guide shows us points of interest as our journey continues, including a star which explodes because people ‘must have been messing about with the uranium atom’. The feel is of a lighter-toned version of Olaf Stapledon’s overarching, disembodied tours of human and cosmological evolution and decline, ‘Last and First Men’ and ‘Star Maker’. These books were written as war was looming, necessitating in his mind an apologia and justification for such flights of speculative fantasy, which could also be applied to A Matter of Life and Death. The tour spirals in past the moon towards the Earth, plunging in through the cloud layer and into an English fog, before rooting itself to very particular specifics of date, time, place and historical moment. Thus we’ve been introduced in the most brilliantly imaginative way to the themes of universality and particularity which run through the film. The war seen from the god’s-eye view which we are granted seems as uninvolvingly tragic as the unknown planetary civilisation whose destruction we have passingly witnessed in the blink of an eye. But then we are in the cockpit of a flame-filled bomber, and listening to the distressed voice of a young American servicewoman. Suddenly it becomes personal and we start to care.

The use of immense scale is paradoxically employed to emphasise the importance of individual, ordinary lives. By showing us the vast and impersonal spaces of the universe, Powell and Pressburger show how precious and rare the personal and particular really are. In the court scene, we pull back from the massed ranks of the heavenly amphitheatre and as it grows more distant in perspective, we see that it is the retina in the eye of a spiral nebula.

The stairway which the court has taken to see the defendant (Peter) is a thin filament linking the impersonal level of celestial justice with the world of individual events, in this case Peter’s operation. One can almost imagine this staircase being cast like a fishing line across the cosmos, connecting with any of a myriad individuals or events. It is also like a perilously tenuous thread, at the end of which can be found three nurses, the fates who are attendant upon Peter’s life or death operation. When the court arrives at the operating theatre, colour in their cheeks for the first time, they tower over Peter, who stands at the foot of the staircase in RAF uniform once more, with poses of regal authority. And yet the power which they represent, which is the power of the universe we have been shown in all its immensity, is matched by the power of the individual here on earth. June’s gesture of self-sacrifice as she takes Peter’s place on the staircase at Dr Reeve’s behest (and with a stirring upsweep of Allan Gray’s score) brings the escalator to a juddering halt. The power of the heart, the tear on the rose, can counter the power of the law, the unerring mechanisms of the universe, as we knew all along in our own hearts.

Ten Reasons Why a Matter of Life and Death is the Best British Film Ever Made - Part Four

4. Cinematic Playfulness

As A Matter of Life and Death presents itself from the outset as a story of two worlds, one of which ‘exists only in the mind of a young airman’ (it doesn’t say which one though) Powell and Pressburger allow themselves to delight in the visual trickery of the cinema in order to present this inner vision. The division of the two worlds into black and white and Technicolor is the most obvious device and one which allows them (and cameraman Jack Cardiff) to display the merits of two very different approaches to cinematography.

This is set up right from the pre-credits sequence, as we see the Rank gong being struck in black and white followed by Powell and Pressburger’s traditional Archers logo, also in black and white, which unfades into the bright colours of the target as the arrow thuds into the bullseye inside a circle of radiantly vibrant red. The act of seeing is represented in several self-referential scenes. Dr Reeves is first encountered viewing the activities of the villagers on his tabletop camera obscura. He is like the benevolent directorial god of this small realm, guiding the movements of the camera with his overhead handlebars whilst giving a commentary to his two attentive spaniels (a type of dog which Michael Powell himself was fond of).

Later, the camera takes on the subjective point of view of Peter as he is wheeled semi-conscious through the hospital corridors towards the operating room where his life will either be saved or lost. Our immersion in his subjective perspective is such that we even see his eyelids slowly closing shut after he has been given anaesthetic, and we drift downwards into a red haze of blood and nerve-endings. We have entered an inner landscape which slowly resolves, as the camera eye floats downwards and fades to gray, into the celestial courtroom. This view from behind the drawn curtains of the eyelids, inviting us onto a different stage, tells us visually what Dr Reeves has already made clear in his forceful assertion of the vital importance of what goes on in this subjective world. The inner eye of the imagination is equally as important as the outer eye of objective vision.

The construction of a giant eyelid to accomplish this extraordinary moment of visual symbolism points to a pleasingly traditional British element of ‘let’s see what we can knock together’ garden shed inventiveness. Thus it partakes of a noble lineage of make do and create which manifests itself in Joe Meek, the Radiophonic Workshop and the late-lamented Oliver Postgate, with his Smallfilms workshop quite literally located in the garden shed. It may appear a little clumsy and papier-mached by the digital standards of today, but it serves the symbolism perfectly and it is noticeably a real construct, which somehow makes it more magical. A giant eye of a different sort is seen when we pull back from the celestial courtroom as Peter’s trial nears its culmination. As we gain a godlike view, we see that the courtroom is centred in the core of a spiral nebula, the remote, impassive eye of heavenly justice – and of the director.

Ten Reasons Why A Matter of Life and Death is the Greatest British Film Ever - Part Three

3. Philosophy with a Light Touch

A Matter of Life and Death is a film about ideas and philosophies, which, if we didn’t know what a joyfully visual playground it is, might make it seem a little dull. A scene which perfectly visualises this grounding in ideas and debates is the one in which Peter lies sleeping in a chair in Doctor Reeves’ library. His head is surrounded by a halo of books, which also lie scattered around on various surfaces. He has obviously been reading voraciously and widely. Indeed, the disarrayed, actively used library is an outward model of the ideas racing around in his mind. The library is separated from yet has a window looking into the games room where June and Dr Reeves play ping-pong - suggesting there is not a rigid divide between the two.

Indeed, Peter’s chosen game (also favoured by Conductor 71) is the highly intellectual pursuit of chess, often seen as analogous to various aspects of calculated real world interactions. The to and fro of the ping pong game is also a reflection of the play of opposing viewpoints which pepper the film’s debates and which takes centre stage (or court) in the match between Doctor Reeves and Abraham Farlan, facing each other from opposing promontories in the celestial struggle over Peter’s fate. This trial sequence takes the form of a classic Socratic dialogue, in which every point is answered with an ‘ah, yes, but…’ All the themes of the film are distilled in this intense intellectual debate, and yet still, despite the weighty themes and the thicket of dialogue, the tone remains light and witty.

Reeves vs Farlan includes philosophical rallies on the nature of national character, the importance of the artistic imagination in shaping culture, the distinction between law and justice, the influence of history and culture on the individual, and the importance of the individual within the sweeping tides of history. The humour with which these matters are addressed does not lessen the seriousness with which they are considered. But it is of a piece with the serious playfulness of the film as a whole. Dr Reeves’ wry, quietly stated approach opposes the high rhetorical poses struck by the embittered, hate-fuelled Farlan and thus holds out the hope for a more joyful world.

Their battle is amusingly exemplified in their appropriation of radios to provide a contemporaneous voice of Britain/America snap (or voice) shot. The British radio provides a dull cricket commentary, like John Arlott with the flu. Trubshaw immediately perks up and pays attention. As usual, Powell and Pressburger adopt a tolerant each to their own attitude. But Trubshaw aside, this is clearly a fairly damning assessment of national character. At this crucial moment, Conductor 71 magics his way onto Dr Reeves’ promontory with his own radio, an elegant wood-encased wireless which trumps Farlan’s transistor in an amusing ‘my set’s bigger than yours’ moment. He has clearly decided that his allegiances lie with the forces of romance. The radio is tuned to an American bobbysoxer singer in the early Sinatra style. Farlan grimaces in distaste at his ‘shoo-shoo baby’ lyrics. He concedes that he can’t understand a word that’s being said. The black GIs in the audience smile and nod with pleasure, however (although why they should go for this sub-Bing nonsense is a mystery). Again, each to their own, and an argument about cultural relativity is neatly encapsulated, with added laughs.

Ten Reasons Why A Matter of Life and Death is the Greatest British Film Ever Made - Part 2

2. Characters
It’s no doubt as easy to mock the characters in A Matter of Life and Death as it is the thwarted lovers in Brief Encounter, and equally misguided. Their breezy cheerfulness and dated language set them up as easy targets for a modern sensibility which only takes account of surface superficialities. In fact, these details cover up a nobility and underlying pain along with an all-pervasive self-effacement and open friendliness which I find eminently admirable. David Niven’s opening torrent of words as his plane plummets to a fiery doom are genuinely moving, as if he is trying to elucidate a whole lifetime’s philosophy in the few moments left to him. And his request to June to write to his mother in her own words to let her know that ‘I’ve always loved her, but never really showed it’ is beautifully done, conveying how much remains unsaid in any life. It’s probably at this point that June falls in love with him, I should imagine.



The characters are all types in a sense, and yet Emeric Pressburger’s dialogue and the playing of the actors bring them to life (and afterlife) and make us care for their plight. David Niven’s Peter is an idealist caught up in war, his mind focussed on the world which could emerge from the conflict. He is clearly bursting with ideas and has an intensely serious mind lying beneath a light-hearted exterior. His inner torment has the possibility to do him real harm. As Doctor Reeves puts it, ‘he has too fine a mind’, and that mind is riven with the conflicts of the age. Kim Hunter’s June is a practical, caring young woman whose optimism has remained stubbornly intact in the face of her experience of the blood of war. She has a friendly relationship with Dr Reeves and is unafraid of questioning his medical approaches.

Roger Livesey’s Dr Frank Reeves is a quietly authoritative figure who feels a sense of propriety over the villagers he watches through his camera obscura. Deeply committed to his work, he is a figure whose work during the war is merely a continuation of the calling which would place him at the centre of civilian life. Up above, Trubshaw is the good old boy, the loyal companion, simple but goodhearted, taking pleasure in beer, women and cricket, possibly not in that order. Conductor 71 is a dandified official with a heart and an overrefined sense of style, whose initial duplicity in the face of bureaucratic rebuke is gradually replaced by his romantic advocacy of Peter’s case.

The numerous characters who play a less significant role are all imbued with a sense of personality, even if this is only conveyed through one line (Dickie Attenborough’s awestruck airman realising ‘this is heaven, isn’t it’ as he looks down on the cityscape of bureaucratic records offices). There is a comedy vicar, New Joisey Yanks brushing up their Shakespeare, the icy cool of Kathleen Byron’s heavenly (in both ways) receptionist, and the beaky dignity of the celestial, impressively bewigged judge. These characters are all created with a sense of generosity and lack of condescension which deflates any potential stereotyping. Only the prosecution counsel Abraham Farlan fails to win our sympathy. He was the first soldier shot by an Englishman in the American War of Independence, and he has clearly failed, in the modern parlance, to ‘get over it’. His twisted, hate-fuelled soul is ably conveyed by the facial grimaces of Raymond Massey. Just as the story pits the universal against the personal, these characters and the actors who bring them to life ensure that real people lie at the heart of the colourful fantasy which surrounds but doesn’t overwhelm them.

Ten Reasons Why A Matter of Life and Death is the Greatest British Film Ever Made - Part One

1. Imagination vs. Realism
Britain seems to have something of a problem with using its imagination when it comes to film-making. Films often seem to come with the epithet ‘gritty’ built-in and documentary-style social realism is the ne plus ultra of critical worthiness. Indeed, if anyone strays from the path of drab, grey realism, they are usually thought to have retreated from the real world, possibly into genre realms at which respectable critics would wrinkle their noses in distaste before putting aside their lengthy bargepoles. And yet it was not always thus.

Director Michael Powell and screenwriter Emeric Pressburger were a collaborative film-making team who, under the very English nom-de-plume of The Archers, were active from the 1930s through to the fifties. Probably their best-known and most popular film, A Matter of Life and Death, is a riot of colour (and black and white) and fantasy and yet it never loses sight of the real world. The opening words, ‘this is the story of two worlds’, resonate on so many levels. It is the story of Earth and Heaven, of inner and outer realities, of the universal and the personal, the historic and the individual, New and Old Worlds, and of imagination and realism, and ultimately it is about how all these dualities can be transcended through the vision which comes through an active and enquiring imagination.

The seemingly opposite approaches of imagination and realism (we could also call it the opposition of romanticism and realism) are embedded in the very form of the film, with a sly and knowing twist. The black and white cinematography which has come to represent a certain type of realism is used for the scenes set in the fantastic surrounds of Heaven, whilst the sumptuous, heightened reality of the colour scenes are saved for Earth (and the Universe). It is as if Powell and Pressburger are saying that there could be nothing LESS realistic than a world depicted in black and white. The world is not drab and dull, it is glorious and vibrantly alive with colour (well, unless that ‘ruddy peasouper’ rolls in). As Conductor 71 says, with a wistful sigh, ‘one is starved for technicolour up there’.

Peter’s inner world is presented to us on the screen as if it were real, and Dr Reeves makes it clear that in effect it is. The world of the imagination impacts on the world outside, not least because it allows us to see how the world could be rather than just accepting it as it is. In a sense, Peter’s view of Heaven is his view of what the real world could be. It ‘starts where this one could leave if only we’d listened to Plato, Aristotle and Jesus’. The clean, ordered white spaces and curved lines certainly suggest that this is a Modernist heaven; indeed, Peter worries that he might have a modernist design of ‘prop’ wings rather than the traditional model, but fortunately his heaven mixes the traditional with the new. The view through giant ceiling portholes of the vast bureaucracies of heaven could be an architect’s plan of a model city to be built over the rubble of blitzed ruins. This is clearly also a socialist world of equality for all; When an American troop bustles in to the reception room and their leader signs in demanding ‘Officer’s quarters, of course,’ he is met with the calm response (from the beatific Kathleen Byron) ‘we’re all the same up here’. One of his soldiers immediately nudges him to one side with the words ‘excuse me…Brother’.

The vital necessity of Peter winning his case, which Dr Reeves forcefully states, is partly the need for the reconciliation of the ideal and the real, a reality which has been dominated by the destruction and chaos of war for years. It is the need for the readmission of hope and optimism. It is also centrally, of course, about the importance of love and therefore of the highest of individual values which gives meaning to life in the face of vast and often depersonalised historical forces. Powell and Pressburger’s unashamedly (for there is nothing to be ashamed of) Romantic view of the World embodied in June’s tear caught in the petals of a rose. A tear with the strength to bring the vast mechanisms of the Universe grinding to a halt.

A Matter of Life and Death amounts to a manifesto for the primacy of imagination in the arts. Through references both direct and allusive, Powell and Pressburger locate themselves in the English tradition of romantic writers and artists who have manifested inner worlds in the forms of the fantastic. One of Doctor Reeves’ defences of England in the face of prosecutor Abraham Farlan’s assaults is to assert its lineage of poetic visionaries, citing Donne, Dryden, Pope, Shelley and Keats. Pope is the satirical voice who weights the balance of the unfettered imagination with the need to maintain a practical sense of realism. Dryden was also very much engaged with the political realities of his times, the post-Cromwellian Restoration period.

The film sustains a similar balancing of imaginative and realistic forces, grounding moments of extravagant fantasy with gently sardonic humour. Thus, Conductor 71’s summoning up of an instantaneous (and instantaneously terminated) tempest to illustrate his opinion that time is ‘mere tyranny’ is greeted with Peter’s request ‘you’ll let me know if you’re going to do that again’, and his earlier metaphysical assertion that ‘we are talking in space, not in time’ is met with the abrupt response ‘are you cracked?’ Peter himself is a young poet and Dr Reeves suggests that he may take his place in the continuing line of the English poetic tradition – if he is given time.

Other nods to the imagination in arts are alluded to in the classical pastoral of the beach scene, the production of A Midsummer Nights Dream which the vicar is struggling to put on, and the visual antecedents in Blake, and Gustave Dore’s illustrations to Paradise Lost, The Divine Comedy and others (in black and white, of course). Dr Reeves, the character who serves to give voice to the film’s themes more than any other, gives what amounts to a guide to the creation of successful imaginative fantasy in his assessment of Peter’s created world. ‘He never steps outside the limits of his own imagination. Nothing he invents is entirely fantastic. It’s invention, but logical invention.’