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).

Fancy a Brew?

I recently watched two films made in the same year (1989) which told the story of the same historical Japanese figure (and many thanks to Helene for lending these to me). Sen no Rikyu was a tea master in the late 16th century and was a key figure in the development of this highly aestheticised ritual. He enjoyed the patronage of the shogun Hideyoshi, but became embroiled in the politics of the court and was obliged (or ordered) to commit seppuku. The two films, Rikyu and Sen-no Rikyu, can be seen to fit in with the widespread ascendance of the ‘heritage’ film in the 80s, a return to historical subjects with much attention to period detail. The retreat from the modernist experimentation and generic exploration prevalent in the 60s and 70s is particularly marked in Rikyu, given that it’s director is Hiroshi Teshigahara, who produced some of the most remarkable examples of this type of cinema; films such as Woman of the Dunes, Pitfall and Face of Another. He had taken over his father’s position as head of an ikebana, or flower arranging, school in 1980 and had thus reconnected with the traditional arts of his country. Many of these are showcased in Rikyu.

Sen-no Rikyu is another version of the story from the same year (the films were made to mark Rikyu’s quatecentenary). This features a late performance from Toshiro Mifune, star of many of Akira Kurosawa’s finest films, in the title role. The copy which I saw was dubbed into Italian, which made it a surreal and strangely enjoyable experience, perhaps enhanced by the fact that I don’t speak a word of the language and didn’t have the benefit of subtitles. With a knowledge of the general outline of the story gleaned from seeing Teshigahara’s Rikyu first (both are based on a novel by Yaeko Nagami and so share basic plot details) I was able to let the visuals carry the narrative. Seeing the still bodies of Japanese men in traditional costume soberly enacting measured ceremonies whilst speaking in Italian, a language normally associated with effusive gesticulation, was odd to say the least. Mifune, in his younger years a very physical actor, is here seen in repose, playing the ‘maestro di the’ with a stiff formality. His Rikyu has a much more severe bearing than the more humane and approachable figure portrayed by Rentaro Mikuni in Teshigahara’s film. He seems to be loftily disapproving of what goes on around him and more directly at odds with Lord Hideyoshi, who is here depicted as straightforwardly brutish. This is a very male-centred film, too, in contrast with Teshigahara’s version. Women play a very subsidiary role, generally as motivation for male action.

Sen-no Rikyu has a Citizen-Kane-like structure, with a young pupil of Rikyu trying to find out what led to his master’s seppuku (ritual suicide) by visiting various people involved in his life. There are many picturesque exterior scenes which note the passing of the seasons and various historical sites in Kyoto are used as backdrops. Battle scenes here are staged (as opposed to ‘Rikyu’, where they are merely reported) in a style reminiscent of Kurosawa’s films of this period such as Ran and Kagemusha, although much less expansively. It is notable that Mifune’s Rikyu is present at these battles to provide the necessary rituals to the soldiery, and shows little unease about this duty. This is a rather martial tea master. Scenes of seppuku are also more graphically presented (although they are not dwelt upon) and the film as a whole is a lot more corporeal than Teshigahara’s.

Teshigahara’s Rikyu is much more a film of interiors and of the domestic detail which fills them. Rentaro Mikuni plays the titular character as a gentle man, wholly absorbed in his aesthetically ordered existence, in which the tea ceremony represents a balanced and contemplative approach to life as a whole. He becomes embroiled in politics and the intrigues of court entirely against his will and despite his best efforts to remain apart. Any efforts to influence Lord Hideyoshi are made indirectly through the example of his art, which encourages its participants to cultivate values of restraint and simplicity. Hideyoshi and Rikyu here have a rather touching odd couple relationship. The scene in which a petrified Hideyoshi applies Rikyu’s lessons to serve tea to the Emperor demonstrates their closeness. When the ceremony has been successfully concluded, Hideyoshi comes out to relate his triumph to Rikyu and almost does a little dance of glee, such is his relief. Here they are simply pupil and teacher. He is like an excitable child, in this scene and others. As such, he elicits our sympathy, whilst remaining unpredictable and easily influenced by flattery and the manipulation of his everpresent insecurity. Hideyoshi tries his best to absorb the lessons of Rikyu’s ceremonies, but his worldview remains fundamentally opposed. This is evident from the moment he enters the tea house in his gold slippers. He has come from a peasant background which he feels the need to disguise, chiding his unimpressed mother for failing to observe the necessary airs and graces. He marks his victory over a recalcitrant warlord by building a golden tea room in his palace, demonstrating his failure to grasp the most basic tenets of the way of tea. It is a gesture which Rikyu accepts, but with a look of disappointment at the evident lack of understanding of his teachings. Hideyoshi is presumably someone who has experienced genuine poverty and is as a result too dazzled by the gaudy appurtenances of wealth to be able to accept a philosophy based on ascetic simplicity.

Rikyu is always accommodating to his lord, never offering a contradictory opinion and hoping that his example will bear fruit in a wise and considered leadership. Rentaro Mikuni’s performance is one of warm reticence, his expressions subtly evoking the hopes that the approach to life embodied in the way of tea will have some effect and the resigned disappointment when it becomes apparent that this will not be the case. His scenes with his wife Riki have a relaxed domesticity which portray him as a very human character, far from the forbidding figure of reverence represented by Toshiro Mifune in Sen-no Rikyu. Indeed, the active role played by women in Teshigahara’s film counters their almost complete absence in Sen-no Rikyu, which is much more focused on male power play. Rikyu assigns his wife, Riki, to teach Hideyoshi’s wife the way of tea, and this liberal breach of tradition is seen by courtiers absorbed in their own power plays as a potentially threatening act. Rikyu is just carrying out his philosophy in aiming to make the way of tea universal; if it represents a unified vision of life, then it must be open to all. But to some, this is clearly a philosophy with undesirable political ramifications.

The film thus addresses the way in which art, even when it attempts to distance itself from politics, becomes engaged by default. Given that it takes up some kind of aesthetic stance towards the world, suggesting a particular worldview, art becomes open to use and abuse by the powerful (or those who seek power) who would use it to underline (or stand in opposition to) an ideological position. The favour which Rikyu initially finds with Hideyoshi and the influence of his art and philosophy exerts is eventually used against him. In refusing to impose his views on others, he leaves himself open to the imputing of ignoble motives behind the attainment of his unsought-for authority. The tributes of Hideyoshi’s golden tea room and a statue at a local temple which he has accepted as honestly-intended gestures whilst clearly wincing at their ostentation are made to seem like the self-glorifying creation of symbolic edifices of power. When Hideyoshi’s brother Hidenaga, a trusted counsellor and unswerving advocate of Rikyu dies, the tea master becomes prey to the self-aggrandising plots of the courtiers who now manipulate the self-deluded ruler. The increasing imbalance of the world of the court as opposed to that of the tea house causes a rift between the former teacher and pupil and eventually leads to the order for Rikyu’s ritual suicide.

The lovingly recreated backgrounds over which Teshigahara lingers provide a compendium of the cultural details of the time. In addition to the rituals of the tea ceremony, we observe the casting of the ‘wabi’ ceramics used for tea, with their emphasis on rough, natural forms; a Noh drama representing Hideyoshi’s triumphs; and the art of Ikebana, or flower arranging, about which Teshigahara evidently knew so much. Other incidentals include the startling fashion for the cosmetic blackening of teeth.

Of the two films, I definitely preferred Teshigahara’s Rikyu, perhaps aided by its non-Italianate dialogue and helpful subtitling. It has to be said that the American dvd release treats the film in contemptible fashion, shrinking it to a panned and scanned travesty of the director’s original framing and passing us off with a notably faded and low quality print. There’s really no excuse for such shoddy treatment these days, other than inherent cheapness and lack of regard for both artist and viewer. Poor bloody show.

We leave Rikyu in both films wandering off into the beyond. Mifune passes into the world of the clouds, the cries of his disciple dwindling into the distance, whilst Mikuni walks purposefully through a bamboo grove, it’s boles seemingly floating in mid-air. Just passing through.

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.’

The Films of Val Lewton - Part Five

I Walked With A Zombie - continued (part three)

The rest of the film is essentially a working out of the consequences of this visit, which is really also the catalyst to finish the story which had been frozen in an uneasy stasis for some time. The completion of Sir Lancelot’s calypso (‘now you must see that my song is sung’) as well as a working out of historical forces long contained, but whose pressure has steadily built up. Back at the Holland Fort, Paul is there to meet Betsy and there is a recommencement of the romantic piano music which reminds us of the evening of their brief moment of connection. Paul tells her that he has no desire to have Jessica back, but that it’s like her to see things in such simple and goodhearted way; as near to a declaration of love as he can muster. This moment of elliptical tenderness is inevitably cut short once more by the intervention of the drums.

The following morning, Alma lets slip to Betsy that the voodoo sword priest is ‘making trouble’. As Paul puts it, the islanders want her back for their ‘ritual tests’. They have a doll dressed like Jessica at the ready. The island commissioner is also closing in on the Hollands, suggesting Jessica be sent to an asylum for her own safety. Carrefour is meanwhile given the doll by the sabreman and instructed to bring her back. His big dumb eyes are wide with programmed need. The sound of the drums now forms a direct connection between hounfort and Fort Holland.

Paul meanwhile confesses to Betsy that he has tried to destroy her feeling of enchantment, from the moment on the boat taking them to the island onwards. ‘I was trying to hurt you’, he confesses. He has seen that love can be ‘fine and sweet’ and fears destroying it, and thus wants her to leave ‘so long as I have this fear of myself’. This again leaves a huge gulf of ambiguity. Is his perverse attitude towards love and feelings of attachment a result of his having been hurt by Jessica and Wes, or was the presence of such a twisted outlook what caused them to turn to each other in the first place? The fact that Lewton tended to cast Tom Conway in the role of characters attracted towards the darker side of love (notably his Dr Judds in Cat People and The Seventh Victim) merely adds to the uncertainty.

Betsy sleeps in Jessica’s room this night, keeping guard underneath Boecklin’s Isle of the Dead. Once again, Lewton and Tourneur create a beautiful sense of a night infused with the atmospheres of the uncanny and otherworldly. A curtain sweeps against the harp, the wind reaching in to play a chord as it had blown hollow notes through the occarina earlier. The dry, hot wind is, as noted earlier, like an embodiment of emotions and buried histories which remain unspoken by human voice. Its playing of chords on these different instruments from separate cultures also serves to link the interiors of Fort Holland with the world of the islanders. The shadow of Carrefour is cast against Boecklin’s Isle of the Dead painting in a wonderful poetic image (it makes a great still) which once again serves to link separate cultures, as well as highlighting their different approaches to death. Carrefour’s shadow blends with those cast by the curlicued ironwork of the gates. This furthers the idea of the play of shadows being an intimation of a world beyond, a parallel reality tenuously glimpsed through its reflections. Jessica will later pass through the real gates which cast these shadows to walk to her death.

When Betsy goes out into the garden to investigate, and the nocturnal mood is created by the silence and the light on the paving stones leading to the deep blackness of the entrance to the tower, which is open. Night creatures look on dispassionately; an owl and a frog, which plops into the pond. Carrefour appears from the tower, his shuffling feet sounding loud in the deathly quiet. As Paul appears, he stumbles towards him, arms held out in an almost imploring manner. It takes Mrs Rand’s appearance to dismiss him by commandingly addressing him by his true name. A close up of his face reveals a look of blankly despairing hunger before he disappears into the night.

The next morning brings the news that the Commissioner is to instigate a legal investigation. This forces the hand of events and causes Mrs Rand to make her confession. Her statement that Jessica is dead and that she was responsible is an admission that for her voodoo is more than a set of primitive beliefs which she employs to achieve her benevolent ends. If you take on the integuments of a culture and religion, you cannot remain wholly apart from it; it will affect your way of being in the world. Mrs Rand claims that she asked the houngun to make Jessica a zombie because she ‘was beautiful and used that to tear her family apart’. Again, we get a highly coloured and subjective view of Jessica as a femme fatale, but from a mother who will obviously tend to favour her sons. Besides, her moral authority and objectivity is somewhat undermined by her admission that her unconscious was so filled with hate for her that it prompted this murderous impulse. Her mendacity in using the power of the houngun for her own purposes, no matter how well intended, also muddy the waters of truth and further serves to indicate the complex moral universe which Lewton depicts.

Back at the hounfort, the sabreman draws Jessica’s doll towards him on a thread, and Jessica correspondingly moves outwards towards the gates. Again, the reality of the supernatural seems to be confirmed. Wesley is on the outside of the gates which bar Jessica’s way and seems lost in a zombie-like reverie himself. ‘They have charms that can draw a man half way around the world’ he intones, clearly now a believer. Paul calls it ‘cheap mummery’, but as the drums stop and Jessica can once more be controlled, his words seem to have been instantly mocked. But he will not depart from his cold rationality, his remark that ‘I saw nothing that would convince a sober man’ acting as denial and putdown in one.

After another use of the Saint Sebastian statue as punctuation and signifier of sorrow and suffering, Betsy comes into the garden to comfort a disconsolate Wesley, who tries to convince her to commit euthanasia on Jessica. She refuses, because ‘her heart beats, she breathes’. She doesn’t go as far as to say ‘she lives’. A shadowy screenwipe (a blackout?) reveals Wes alone at a table. The drums start up again and Jessica comes out of her tower and drifts over to the gate. Wes opens it for her and deliberately walks over to the statue of Saint Sebastian, pulling one of the arrows out of it with some effort. We cut to the sabreman skewering Jessica’s doll, before Wes is seen rising from Jessica’s corpse on the sands, arrow in hand. It is as if his actions have been directed, predetermined. He seems as much a puppeteered figure as Jessica. He carries her out into the sea as Carrefour approaches, and the pitiful zombie is left with open arms empty, hunger unfulfilled, outlined against the horizon and then the sand as the waves crash against his bare feet. His story is unresolved. The closing of the circle which his seeking of Jessica represented has not been completed. The failure seems to be as much on the part on the voodoo priest as on Wesley. The symbolism of the use of Ti-Misery/Saint Sebastian’s arrow to kill Jessica seems to be not so much to put an end to the sorrow as to mark its continuation. After all, there are arrows left, and the statue still gushes its watery tears.

As the fishermen bear the corpses of Jessica and Wesley into the courtyard in a very religiose procession, a solemn preacher’s voice intones a summation of their fall in terms of old testamentary moral absolutism; ‘she was dead in the selfishness of her spirit - the man followed her – her steps led him down to evil’. But what we have seen leads us to reject such a crassly spelled out interpretation, which stands as an ironically inappropriate summation. As the unknown preacher utters his final prayer, asking the lord to ‘forgive them who are dead and give peace and happiness to the living’, we focus on Betsy and Paul embracing. But the camera then zooms in on the statue of Saint Sebastian, and this is the image with which we are left. It’s body is still pierced by two arrows (Betsy and Paul?) and the water still pours over it. The water which reminds us that this was the figurehead at the prow of a slave ship. Sorrow and unhappiness still prevail.



This takes us back to the beginning. Unconnected as the opening scene of Betsy walking with Carrefour seemed at the time, in retrospect it seems to offer some kind of resolution which offers a counterbalance to the pessimism of the actual ending. The ease with which Betsy strolls along the tideline with this shambling giant seems to suggest a genuine engagement with island culture. It is an engagement which it was hinted that Jessica also enjoyed and to which Mrs Rand had also partly committed herself. But Mrs Rand had maintained a distance measured by her assumed superiority. Betsy came to the island essentially as another household servant, with no moral agenda for ‘saving’ the souls of the islanders as Mrs Rand, the wife of a missionary, had done. Betsy’s openness and lack of social pretensions or ambitions make her a figure who offers the possibility of rapprochement, of reconciliation on both a personal and historical level. She is another of Lewton’s strong female figures, who both act decisively for their own part, and galvanise the male characters to rise from their melancholic stupour. It is perhaps significant that she comes from the neutral country of Canada, rather than from the Old or New Worlds of England or America, both of whom are seen as tainted with the blood of colonialists using slave labour. In a sense, her romantic viewpoint, delusionary though it may often be, also marks a determination to see the world in the best light possible. In so far as we set about creating the ideal worlds which our imaginations envisage, this is preferable to the fatalistic acceptance of decay and decadence (in the style of French writers like Baudelaire) which Paul has adopted, and which excuses him from the need to act . He has shown signs of being drawn into the orbit of Betsy’s world-view, of resigning his need to control all the elements of his world. In the beginning lies the ending, then, and the hope for a closing of the circular retelling of a sorrowful story.

next...The Leopard Man

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.

The Films of Val Lewton - Part Four

I Walked With A Zombie - part two



Betsy’s first glimpse of her patient, Mrs Holland, the wife of Paul, comes when she sees her drifting through the night garden, white gown wafting behind her in the breeze in a spectral fashion. The tower to which she glides is a classic gothic folly, which looks like it has been uprooted from the gardens of some early 19th century aristocrat’s house. It’s another artefact of the Old World which serves to root this home in an ineradicable past. As Betsy returns to her bed, there is a punctuating shot of the Ti Misery/Saint Sebastian statue. As with the drums, this will serve as a constant reminder of the realities which underpin the romance which is overwritten on the Holland home. They are the foundations which will give the form of tragedy to any attempt at creating something new.

In the first of the film’s atmospheric night walks, in which people move in a balletic way as if blown on otherwordly nocturnal breezes, Betsy follows the sound of sobbing into the dark tower. Here she comes face to face with the ghostly figure of Mrs Holland, who follows her up into the inky blackness of the stairwell. Again, the classic gothic elements are incongruously superimposed on the tropical setting, creating an effective counterpoint of cultural backdrops; Haunted ruins of ancient stone and the drums of voodoo ritual. In this environment, in which both have collided, they each inform each other. The ghost of the tower is a product of voodoo and voodoo itself is a reconfiguration of African beliefs with Catholic elements. The film itself is a stew of differing generic ingredients too, of course. The sense of an inverted world is underlined by Betsy’s discovery of the source of the sobbing. It is the maid Alma, who is crying for the birth of her sister’s child. She makes it plain what the statue of Saint Sebastian means for her and the island’s inhabitants: ‘our people came from the misery and pain of slavery. For generations they found life a burden. That’s why they still weep when a child is born and make merry at a burial.’

Betsy is awoken by Alma the following morning, and the following exchange shows the film at its most Rebecca-like. Alma brings breakfast just as she used to for Jessica (Mrs Holland) and her tone suggests that a closeness existed between the two. Alma is no Mrs Danvers, though, and is a friendly and warm presence. Her cheerful reference to Mrs Holland as ‘a great big doll’ shows an acceptance of tragedy as an everyday reality, to be accommodated into the daily routine.

Betsy meets Paul in her nurses uniform and stands up to him as expresses his doubts in a dismissive manner. She points out to him that if she were the terrified creature he is implying she is, she wouldn’t have gone alone into the dark tower. He warns her against the contagion of superstition, adding that ‘some people might let it get the better of them – I don’t think you will’. Clearly he has been won over.

We are introduced to Dr Maxwell, a genial and self-effacing character, who was a friend of Jessica’s. It is he who first utters the ‘z’ word, when he says ‘she makes a beautiful zombie’. His explanation gives us the rational diagnosis of her condition, a physician’s perspective which prefers to locate physical causes rather than metaphysical ailments. As Irena pointed out in Cat People, doctors don’t know how to treat illnesses of the soul. So Jessica has succumbed to a fever which burned out parts of her spinal cord. Our first glimpse into Jessica’s room also gives us a hint as to her personality. A rather opulent bed and neat dressing table, along with a harp. This latter could be merely ornamental or indicative of a thwarted artistic temperament. It is a traditionally female instrument synonymous with airy romanticism and music summoning up dreamily bucolic worlds of afternoon sun or moonlit waters. On the wall is a copy of Arnold Boecklin’s Isle of the Dead, perhaps indicating the morbid flipside of the Romantic personality, the preoccupation with mortality. It is another indication of the influence of the visual arts on Lewton’s imagination (we have already seen a Goya picture on Irena’s wall in Cat People) and will indeed lend its title and suggest the set design for his later film ‘Isle of the Dead’.

Having met her patient, Betsy has another encounter with Paul, who will evasively admit of his wife that ‘many people found her beautiful’. He asks Betsy whether she considers herself charming, and when she modestly replies that ‘I’ve never given it much thought’, he replies ‘don’t’ with cynical curtness. This is his elliptical way of suggesting that he feels his wife was full of narcissistic self-regard. But as ever in this repressed, claustrophobic family environment, nothing is ever directly stated.

Betsy takes time off in the town square, where she meets Wes. It becomes evident from his consumption of rum, which she is able to measure with her nurse’s eye for dosages, that he has a drink problem. Another unspoken family issue which she immediately addresses. It is here that we first hear of the tale behind the bitter sibling rivalry of the Holland brothers, as conveyed through the calypso sung by Sir Lancelot, an actor who will also appear in The Ghost Ship and The Curse of the Cat People (Lewton had something of a repertory company). His beautiful lilting and light-toned voice tells the story of Wes, Paul and Jessica. When he is informed that one of the subjects of his song is present, he stops and is terribly apologetic, but as Wes slumps into an alcoholic stupour and the evening shadows draw in, he resumes the tail in a faintly aggressive manner, apparently for Betsy’s benefit. The way it is evidently told by the islanders (through Alma?) Wes was seduced by Jessica ‘from up in her tower’, they wanted to leave the island together but Paul prevented them, and then the fever came which ‘burned her mind’. The last verses bring the story up to date with Betsy’s arrival; thus she is drawn into the story, and into the world of island gossip. The insistence of the calypso singer on finishing his song also indicates once more the way in which stories and histories, personal and collective, cannot be suppressed or erased from memory. It is also another subjective point of view. Our perspective on Jessica is warped by the fact that she is now absent from her own narrative. As with Welles’ Citizen Kane, we can only see her through other’s eyes, and the views we get are infused with the complex (multiplex?) cross-currents of personal and historical experience.

It is at this point that Mrs Rand, Paul and Wes’s mother, intervenes and saves Betsy from this song attack. She is an immediately sympathetic character, but we are beginning to sense that this is a world in which appearances and alliances are carefully cultivated. She asks Betsy to ‘use her influence’ over Paul to get the whisky decanter removed from the table, which suggests both that she has been keeping a close if remote eye on developments at the Fort, and that she can see beyond her elder son’s surface cynicism.

Paul’s immediate reaction to this request is to reply that ‘it’s always stood there’, a reflexive response which once more reveals the dead weight of tradition which hangs heavily over the house. Betsy once more refuses to acquiesce with the family in maintaining a stoic silence about any problems and directly addresses Wesley’s incipient alcoholism. Paul refuses to move the decanter, but nonetheless, come the next mealtime it is not there. Again, actions have to be taken by indirect routes in an a surreptitious fashion.

At the evening meal for which the whisky has been removed, tensions threaten to erupt. This emotionally charged scene is underpinned by the sound of the drums. These act once more as the underlying ground of reality which threatens to break through the effortfully maintained surface of repression and wilful blindness. The hot dry wind also acts as an externalised metaphor for the passions which Betsy’s presence is catalysing into action in the two brothers. As Sir Lancelot’s calypso suggested, the story which they had previously played out is a recurrent one, like a cyclical myth, and she is now enmeshed in it. The subject of voodoo is brought up for the first time here. Again, it is demystified and portrayed as a part of everyday life, as functional and almost banal. Betsy observes that ‘I thought voodoo was something everyone was frightened of’, to which Paul dismissively (and regretfully?) replies ‘I’m afraid it’s not very frightening’; Fear arising from cultural ignorance as much as from superstition.

Later that evening, Betsy watches Paul playing piano through the slats of the door. There seems to be little real privacy here, perhaps another reason behind the guarded nature of all the exchanges in the house. As Betsy enters the room, the piano music gains strings and becomes lushly romantic. Again, Betsy’s perspective seems to affect the atmosphere of the scene, and infuse it with her own fantasies. This time, Paul begins to comply, however. He reveals some of his inner torment, his fears that he drove his wife mad with his efforts to control her. In reply to Betsy’s attempts to comfort him, he darkly hints at his wife’s nature (or his perception of it) by saying ‘you never knew Jessica as she was’. The mood of intimacy is broken by the re-introduction of the drums, which occlude the romantic strings. The reality of the island replaces the hazy romanticism of Betsy’s projected fantasy, and Paul immediately snaps back into his former icy mode.

Betsy’s voiceover returns as she stands dramatically silhouetted on a wild shore at night. The hazy view of the rocks and sea, is seen as if through a romantic mist. It is distorted view through a fogged lens, and her determination to restore Jessica to Paul is based on the misconception which arises from this tendency to give romance priority over reality. This cure is first attempted scientifically, with Dr Maxwell’s kill or cure insulin shock treatment (it does neither) before Betsy hears from Alma of the doctors, or houngan, at the Houmfort, which is the voodoo central which is the island analogue of Fort Holland. Betsy’s ease as she joins with the islanders in admiring Alma’s sister’s baby is in contrast with the aloofness of the Holland brothers from all local life. Alma’s evident affection for Jessica displayed earlier indicates that she too may have stepped beyond the confines of the Holland compound and taken an interest in the lives of those amongst whom she lived. This failure to observe the required aristocratic hauteur may have been another element which added to the perception of her as being wild and uncontrolled.

Having gained Mrs Rand’s equivocal blessing (Betsy states that ‘I’m not easily frightened’ to which she replies ‘that may be the pity of it’) the film embarks on its central night walk scene. The night walk is an important feature of all Lewton’s horror films. They are as much sustained exercises in creating an atmosphere of the uncanny as of inspiring terror. Betsy leaves Fort Holland with Jessica, evading the attentions of the brothers, who are occupied in their own characteristic ways (Paul working busily at his table, Wes lounging and smoking). They meet Alma, who draws them a map in sugar which she spills onto the earth, a neat reminder of the economic staple which underpins all of their destinies and upon which their fates are drawn. She issues them with the voodoo patches which will act as their badges of entry and enable them to pass Maitre Carrefour, the guardian of the crossroads. These tokens look very flimsy things to pin your fate on. The trip to the hounfort is really the central scene of the film.

The otherwordly feel which Lewton and Tourneur conjure is created from a mixture of elements. There are a number of ominous tokenistic objects which they pass, which could be signposts or gateways; an animal skull on a stick, a hanging dog, a human skull surrounded by a circle of stones. The roads they travel are avenues cut through swaying walls of sugar cane. Their journey is accompanied by an eerie soundscape; the wind through the cane, the sound of a conch shell being blown, and a hanging ocarina acting as a stringless version of a wind harp (a music made by no human agency). The ominous and yet strangely beautiful atmosphere is intensified by the fact that Betsy unwittingly loses her voodoo patch on a protruding piece of cane.

When they come across Carrefour, we first see only his feet in the beam of Betsy’s torchlight. This is an old horror film staple, the use of a limited field of vision or partially glimpsed form (often a hand rather than feet) to create a sense of dread over what may be about to be revealed. And as the light plays upwards, we see that Carrefour is big, a statuesque giant, standing as still as a statue at his guard position. He is catatonic, unseeing. Indeed, his demeanour, despite his size, is far from frightening. It is calm, pacific, completely vacant. Betsy passes unmolested with Jessica, despite her loss of her token. And then, Carrefour becomes animated. But he turns and takes another path, as if called on for some other duty.

At the Hounfort, Betsy looks on fascinated at the rituals being enacted, the invocations of Papa Legba and the sword dancing. As the drums kick in and things really liven up, Jessica looks into the distance with her dreamily catatonic stare, a still counterpoint to the animation of the scene unfolding around her. Betsy takes her turn to consult the houngun through the hole in the wall of the central hut, which is located in the middle of a painted web; another symbol of entrapment which parallels the everpresent shadowed bars of Fort Holland. She is dragged inside and discovers that Mrs Rand is playing the role of the houngun. An essentially humane person, she has realised the uses to which religion and superstition can be put. She can dispense good medical advice under the guise of holy pronouncements. As she says, ‘it seemed so simple to let the gods speak to them’. Admitting the need for moral relativism as well as religious ecumenicalism in a complex and varied world, she concludes that ‘there’s no easy way to do good’. This is a pragmatic and yet not a dismissive view of religion, or of the people who follow its creeds. It sees it as a way of embodying knowledge in a mythos which imbues it with greater meaning and coherence; Giving objective and empirically tested knowledge form and context within the story of the world.

Jessica’s state, her non-participation in the spirit of the moment, causes a reaction amongst the voodoo celebrants outside. The voodoo priest sticks his sword in her arm and she doesn’t bleed, thus seemingly giving physical creedence to her zombie state. Lewton always blends the objective and rational world with the supernatural, giving hints that the latter is an actuality, not an illusion or imaginative projection. We have already seen in Cat People that Irena’s problems are not merely psychological; she really does turn into a leopard. Here, we seem to be presented with the incontrovertible truth that Jessica is a zombie.

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.