September 15, 2009 (XIX:3) - Center for Studies in American Culture

September 15, 2009 (XIX:3)
Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger BLACK NARCISSUS (1947, 100 min)
Produced, directed and written by Michael Powell and Emeric
Pressburger
Based on a novel by Rumer Godden
Original Music by Brian Easdale
Cinematography by Jack Cardiff
Film Editing by Reginald Mills
Production Design by Alfred Junge
Costume Design by Hein Heckroth
Deborah Kerr...Sister Clodagh
Flora Robson...Sister Philippa
Jean Simmons...Kanchi
David Farrar...Mr. Dean
Sabu...The Young General
Esmond Knight...The Old General
Kathleen Byron...Sister Ruth
Jenny Laird...Sister Honey
Judith Furse...Sister Briony
May Hallatt...Angu Ayah
Nancy Roberts...Mother Dorothea
Academy Awards for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Color
(Alfred Junge) and Best Cinematography, Color (Jack Cardiff).
EMERIC PRESSBURGER (5 December 1902, Miskolc, AustriaHungary-- 5 February 1988, Saxstead, Suffolk, England, UK,
bronchial pneumonia). The Boy Who Turned Yellow (1972), They're
a Weird Mob (1966), Operation Crossbow (1965), Atlantic
Ferry/Sons of the Sea (1941), Spy for a Day (1940), The Spy in
Black/U-Boat 29 (1939), Parisian Life (1936), Mein Herz ruft nach
dir/My Heart Calls You (1934), Incognito (1934), Une femme au
Volant/A Woman at the Wheel (1933), A vén gazember/The Old
Scoundrel (1932), Une jeune fille et un million/A Girl and a Million
(1932), Eine von uns/One of Us (1932), Das schöne
Abenteuer/Beautiful Adventure (1932), Lumpenkavaliere/ Wiener
Lumpenkavaliere (1932), Dann schon lieber Lebertran/I’d Rather
Have Cod Liver Oil (1931), Das Ekel/The Scoundrel (1931),
Abschied/Farewell (1930), Die große Sehnsucht/The Great Desire
(1930). Won Oscar: Best Writing, Original Story- 49th Parallel
(1943); Nominated Oscar: Best Writing, Screenplay- 49th Parallel
(1943); Nominated Oscar: Best Writing, Original Screenplay- One
of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1943); Nominated Oscar: Best Writing,
Motion Picture Story- The Red Shoes (1949).
MICHAEL POWELL (30 September 1905, Bekesbourne, Kent,
England, UK-- 19 February 1990, Avening, Gloucestershire,
England, UK, cancer). Return to the Edge of the World (1978), The
Boy Who Turned Yellow (1972), Age of Consent (1969), They're a
Weird Mob (1966), Herzog Blaubarts Burg/Bluebeard’s Castle
(1963), The Queen's Guards (1961), Peeping Tom/Face of
Fear/The Fotographer of Panic (1960), Luna de
miel/Honeymoon/Luna de miel/The Lovers of Teruel (1959), 49th
Parallel/The Invaders (1941), An Airman's Letter to His Mother
(1941), The Thief of Bagdad/The Thief of Bagdad: An Arabian
Fantasy in Technicolor (1940), Contraband/Blackout (1940), The
Lion Has Wings (1939) The Spy in Black/U-Boat 29 (1939), Smith
(1939), The Edge of the World (1937), Something Always Happens
(1934), Red Ensign/Strike! (1934), His Lordship (1932), C.O.D.
(1932), Rynox (1932), My Friend the King (1932), Two Crowded
Hours (1931). Nominated for Oscar: Best Writing, Original
Screenplay- One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1943).
PRESSBURGER/POWELL [jointly produced/directed/wrote] 'I Know
Where I'm Going!' (1945), A Canterbury Tale (1944), A Matter of
Life and Death/Stairway to Heaven (1946), Black Narcissus (1947),
Gone to Earth (1950), Ill Met by Moonlight/Intelligence
Service/Night Ambush (1957), Oh... Rosalinda!!/Fledermaus ’55
(1955), One of Our Aircraft Is Missing /One of Our Aircraft Is
Missing/ The Story of - - - - - - one of Our Aircraft Is Missing
(1942), The Battle of the River Plate/Graf Spee/Pursuit of the Graf
Clayton—THE INNOCENTS—2
Spee (1956), The Elusive Pimpernel/The Fighting Pimpernel
(1950), The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp/Colonel Blimp/The
Adventures of Colonel Blimp (1943), The Red Shoes (1948), The
Small Back Room/Hour of Glory (1949), Tales of Hoffmann/
Jacques Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann (1951), Volunteer
(1943), The Wild Heart/Gypsy Blood (1952).
DEBORAH KERR (30 September 1921,
Helensburgh, Scotland, UK-- 16
October 2007, Botesdale, Suffolk,
England, UK, complications from
Parkinson's disease) The Assam
Garden (1985), Witness for the
Prosecution (1982), The Arrangement
(1969), The Gypsy Moths (1969),
Casino Royale (1967), The Night of the
Iguana (1964), The Chalk Garden
(1964), The Innocents (1961), The
Naked Edge (1961), The Grass Is
Greener (1960), The Sundowners
(1960), Beloved Infidel (1959), The
Journey (1959), Separate Tables (1958), Bonjour tristesse (1958),
An Affair to Remember (1957), Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957),
Tea and Sympathy (1956), The King and I (1956), The Proud and
Profane (1956), The End of the Affair (1955), From Here to
Eternity (1953), Julius Caesar (1953), Young Bess (1953), The
Prisoner of Zenda (1952), Quo Vadis (1951), King Solomon's
Mines (1950), Edward, My Son (1949), If Winter Comes (1947),
The Hucksters (1947), Black Narcissus (1947), I See a Dark
Stranger (1946), Perfect Strangers (1945), The Life and Death of
Colonel Blimp (1943), Major Barbara (1941). Won Oscar:
Honorary Award (1994): “An artist of impeccable grace and beauty,
a dedicated actress whose motion picture career has always stood
for perfection, discipline and elegance”; Nominated Oscar: Best
Actress in a Leading Role- Edward, My Son (1950); Nominated
Oscar: Best Actress in a Leading Role- From Here to Eternity
(1954); Nominated Oscar: Best Actress in a Leading Role- The
King and I (1957); Nominated Oscar: Best Actress in a Leading
Role- Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1958); Nominated Oscar: Best
Actress in a Leading Role- Separate Tables (1959); Nominated
Oscar: Best Actress in a Leading Role- The Sundowners (1961).
FLORA ROBSON (28 March 1902, South Shields, Durham, England,
UK—7 July 1984, Brighton, East Sussex, England, UK, cancer)
Clash of the Titans (1981), A Tale of Two Cities (1980), Les
miserables (1978), "Heidi" (4 episodes, 1974), Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland (1972), The Beloved (1970), Eye of the Devil (1966),
"David Copperfield" (8 episodes, 1966), Those Magnificent Men in
Their Flying Machines or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25
hours 11 minutes (1965), Young Cassidy (1965), 55 Days at Peking
(1963), "BBC Sunday-Night Theatre" (1 episode, 1955), Romeo
and Juliet (1954), Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948), Black
Narcissus (1947), Caesar and Cleopatra (1945), Saratoga Trunk
(1945), The Sea Hawk (1940), We Are Not Alone (1939), Wuthering
Heights (1939), Fire Over England (1937), I, Claudius (1937),
Anna Christie (1936), A Gentleman of Paris (1931). Nominated
Oscar: Best Actress in a Supporting Role- Saratoga Trunk (1947).
JEAN SIMMONS (31 January 1929, Crouch Hill, London, England,
UK—) Shadows in the Sun (2009), Thru the Moebius Strip (2005),
How to Make an American Quilt (1995), "Dark Shadows" (12
episodes, 1991), "Murder, She Wrote" (2 episodes, 1989), "Hawaii
Five-O" (1 episode, 1977), Rough Night in Jericho (1967), Divorce
American Style (1967), Mister Buddwing (1966), All the Way Home
(1963), The Grass Is Greener (1960), Spartacus (1960), Elmer
Gantry (1960), The Big Country (1958), Guys and Dolls (1955/I),
Desirée (1954), The Egyptian (1954), The Robe (1953), Androcles
and the Lion (1952), The Blue Lagoon (1949), Hamlet (1948),
Black Narcissus (1947), Great Expectations (1946), Caesar and
Cleopatra (1945).
Nominated Oscar: Best Actress in a Supporting Role- Hamlet
(1949); Nominated Oscar: Best Actress in a Leading Role- Happy
Ending (1970).
DAVID FARRAR (21 August 1908, Forest Gate, London, England,
UK-- 31 August 1995, South Africa) The 300 Spartans (1962),
"The Dick Powell Show" (1 episode, 1962), Solomon and Sheba
(1959), Watusi (1959), The Son of Robin Hood (1958), I Accuse!
(1958), The Battle of the River Plate (1956), Lost (1956), Escape to
Burma (1955), Lilacs in the Spring (1954), The Wild Heart (1952),
The Golden Horde (1951), Night Without Stars (1951), Gone to
Earth (1950), The Small Back Room (1949), Mr. Perrin and Mr.
Traill (1948), Frieda (1947), Black Narcissus (1947), Lisbon Story
(1946), The Trojan Brothers (1946), The Night Invader (1943), The
Dark Tower (1943), Danny Boy (1941), A Royal Divorce (1938),
Silver Top (1938), Sexton Blake and the Hooded Terror/The
Hooded Terror (1938).
SABU (27 January 1924, Karapur, Mysore, India-- 2 December
1963, Chatsworth, California, USA, heart attack) A Tiger Walks
(1964), Rampage (1963), Sabu and the Magic Ring (1957), Jungle
Hell (1956), Buongiorno, elefante!/Hello Elephant (1952), Baghdad
(1952), Savage Drums (1951), Song of India (1949), Black
Narcissus (1947), Tangier (1946), Cobra Woman (1944), White
Savage (1943), Arabian Nights (1942), Jungle Book (1942), The
Thief of Bagdad (1940), The Drum (1938), Elephant Boy (1937).
KATHLEEN BYRON (11 January
1921, London—18 January 2009,
Middlesex, England) Appeared in
over 100 films and TV programs
and series, the last of which was
“Perfect Strangers” (2001). Some
of the others were "In a Land of
Plenty" (3 episodes, 2001),
"Casualty" (2 episodes, 19891999), Saving Private Ryan (1998),
Les misérables (1998), Emma
(1996), "Reilly: Ace of Spies" (1
episode, 1983), From a Far
Country (1981), The Elephant Man
(1980), "Edward the Seventh" (3 episodes, 1975), Craze (1974),
"The Golden Bowl" (6 episodes, 1972), "The Portrait of a Lady" (4
episodes, 1968), Night of the Silvery Moon (1954), Young Bess
(1953), The Gambler and the Lady (1952), Tom Brown's
Schooldays (1951), Scarlet Thread (1951), The Small Back Room
(1949), Black Narcissus (1947), A Matter of Life and Death (1946),
The Silver Fleet (1943), The Young Mr. Pitt (1942), Climbing High
(1938; uncredited: she is the model on sofa after cream pie fight,
glaring at Max).
JACK CARDIFF (18 September 1914, Yarmouth, Norfolk, England,
UK-- 22 April 2009, Ely, Cambridgeshire, England, UK) The TellTale Heart (2004), The Magic Balloon (1990), Tai-Pan (1986),
Clayton—THE INNOCENTS—3
Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), Cat's Eye (1985), Conan the
Destroyer (1984), Ghost Story (1981), The Dogs of War (1980), The
Awakening (1980), The Fifth Musketeer (1979), Death on the Nile
(1978), Ride a Wild Pony (1975), The Mercenaries (1968), Fanny
(1961), The Vikings (1958), The Prince and the Showgirl (1957),
The Brave One (1956), War and Peace (1956), The Barefoot
Contessa (1954), The Master of Ballantrae (1953), The Story of
William Tell (1953), The Magic Box (1952), The African Queen
(1951), Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951), The Black Rose
(1950), Scott of the Antarctic (1948), The Red Shoes (1948), Black
Narcissus (1947), A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Caesar and
Cleopatra (1945), Western Approaches (1944), The Great Mr.
Handel (1942), This Is Colour (1942), Plastic Surgery in Wartime
(1941), Main Street of Paris (1939), Wings of the Morning (1937).
Won Oscar: Honorary Award (2001); Won Oscar: Best
Cinematography, Color- Black Narcissus (1948); Nominated Oscar:
Best Cinematography, Color- War and Peace (1957); Nominated
Oscar: Best Director- Sons and Lovers (1961); Best
visionary director’s silent productions: Mare Nostrum (1926), The
Magician (1926), and The Garden of Allah (1927). Working on
these films and subsequently on his own features in the 1930s,
Powell developed a penchant for expressionism that manifested
itself in several rather unique ways….
Finally, the use of color, which most critics cite as a
trademark of the Powell-Pressburger partnership, is shaped into an
expressionistic mode. Powell chose his hues from a broad visual
palette, and brushed them onto the screen with a calculated
extravagance that became integrated into the themes of the film as a
whole….
Thematically, Powell and Pressburger operate in a limbo
somewhere between romance and realism. The former,
characterized by technical effects, camera angles and movements,
and the innovative use of color, often intrudes in the merest of
details in fundamentally naturalistic films. In the eyes of some, this
weakens the artistic commitment to realism. On the other hand, the
psychological insights embodied in serious fantasies like A Matter
of Life and Death are too often dismissed as simply entertainment.
Most of the Powell-Pressburger efforts are, in fact, attempts at
fundamental reconciliations between modern ideas and the
irrational, between science and savagery, or between religion and
eroticism.
Although such mergings of reality and fantasy met with
approval by the moviegoing public, Powell and Pressburger were
less successful with the British film establishment. In a sense they
were alienated from it through their exercise of a decidedly nonBritish flamboyance….The film Peeping Tom was perhaps ahead of
its time–a problem that plagued the director and his collaborator for
most of their careers.
From World Film Directors V.I, ed. John Wakeman, H.H.
Wilson Co., NY 1987.
Cinematography, Color- Fanny (1962).
from The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia ed. Andrew
Sarris. Visible Ink Press, NY, 1998. “Powell & Pressburger”
[combined entry signed by Stephen L. Hanson]
Between the years 1942 and 1957, English director Michael Powell
and his Hungarian partner, Emeric Pressburger, formed one of the
most remarkable partnerships in cinema. Under the collaborative
pseudonym “The Archers,” the two created a series of highly visual
and imaginative treatments of romantic and supernatural themes
that have defied easy categorization by film historians. Although
both were listed jointly as director, screenwriter, and frequently as
producer, and the extent of each one’s participation on any given
film is difficult to measure, it is probably most accurate to credit
Powell with the actual visualization of the films while Pressburger
functioned primarily as a writer. The latter, in fact, had no
background as a director before joining Powell. He had drifted
through the Austrian, German, and French film industries as a
screenwriter before traveling to England in 1936.
Many of the gothic, highly expressionistic characteristic of
the films produced by the partnership seem to trace their origins to
Powell’s apprenticeship at Rex Ingram’s studio in Nice in the
1920s. There he performed various roles on at least three of the
In 1925, on his way to visit his father, who had acquired
a hotel on the Riviera, he stopped off in Paris to catch up with the
work of Buñuel and Dali and “that lot, involved in surrealism,” as
he put it to an interviewer, adding that “of course, all films are
surrealist . . . because they are making something that looks like a
real world but isn’t.” He entered the film industry the same year
when his father introduced him at a party to Harry Lachman, an
artist and filmmaker then working with Rex Ingram on Mare
Nostrum at the Nice studio.
Powell joined the unit and “worked all through” Mare Nostrum,
an extravagant spy story. He says “it was a great film to come in on
because, being a spectacular film, full of enormous tricks with a
great theme and an international cast, it gave you ideas which
stayed with you all through your life. . . .My first job was really to
stick around–that was how Harry Lachman put it. Then I was a grip,
but I was unofficially attached to Lachman as the strange, cultured
young Englishman who had a remarkable gift for falling over
things.”
Some of these qualities were put to work in Ingram’s next
two films, The Magician (1926) and The Garden of Allah (1927), in
both of which Powell had small roles providing “comic relief.”
These were great days in the film industry in France: “everyone was
mad about the cinema,”and in Nice Powell met celebrated painters,
sculptors and writers all eager to contribute to the medium. Then
Ingram decided to take a break from films. Lachman launched a
series of comedy travelogues featuring Powell, but this project was
ended after a few months by the arrival of the talkies and, Powell
Clayton—THE INNOCENTS—4
says, “we closed up the studio, said goodbye to the sun and headed
for the fogbelt.” Lachman joined British International at the Elstree
studios, where he found work for Powell also, first as stills
photographer on Hitchcock’s Champagne and then as a cutter on
Lupu Pick’s A Knight in London. Powell’s last assignment at
Elstree was as an uncredited contributor to the script of Hitchcock’s
Blackmail—he says it was he who
suggested the final chase over the roof of
the British Museum: “Being an East End
boy, Hitch had never been there.”
In 1930 Powell joined a young
American producer named Jerome
Jackson, then entering the the British
“quota quickie” market. Alarmed by the
fact that only about five percent of movies
shown in Britain were made there, the
government had instituted a quota system
that was supposed to improve the
situation. The result was a flood of
generally rubbishy cut-rate pictures, most
of them less than an hour in length, that
were shown as second features with
Hollywood movies. Some were churned
out by small independent producers like
Jerome Jackson and many, in fact, were
made by Hollywood companies through
British subsidiaries….
One of the last of Powell’s
“quickies” was The Man Behind the Mask (1936), made for an
American producer named Joe Rock. Powell says that the script was
very poor but “I did my best to make it into a rather German type
expressionistic thriller….The only good that came out of it was that
I met Joe Rock.” For five years—ever since he had read a
newspaper report on the depopulation of the Scottish islands-Powell
had been trying to find backing for a film on that subject. Joe Rock
encouraged him to write a script, and then sent him off to the
remote Shetland island of Foula to make what became The Edge of
the World, his first personal film. ...that has reminded some critics
of Visconti’s La terra treme….In 1937 it was chosen by the New
York Film Critics as the best movie of the year….
At that point Powell was considering going to Hollywood,
but Alexander Korda, impressed by The Edge of the World, offered
him a contract. His first film for Korda was The Spy in Black
(1939), a fast-moving and often amusing spy thriller set during
World War I….It opened just before the beginning of World War II
and, Powell says, “during the run of the picture a submarine did get
into Scapa Flow and torpedoed one of our best battleships. It just
made people go more, because at least it was about what was
happening. It was such a success that it was immediately retitled UBoat 29 and sent to America where it cleaned up.”
More important, The Spy in Black began Powell’s
collaboration with the Hungarian-born scenarist, Emeric
Pressburger….[In] 1942 Powell and Pressburger established their
own production company. The Archers, under the financial
umbrella of J. Arthur Rank’s Independent Producers. Most of the
films they made for the Archers credited Powell and Pressburger as
joint directors, producers and scenarists, though it seems fairly clear
that Pressburger dominated the writing, Powell the directing. The
latter told an interviewer that “what we always did was that he
would write the script and then I would rewrite in completely in my
version, sometimes with very little change and sometimes with a
very great deal of change. The changes would be because I was
naturally interested in how to present it, how to create the actual
atmosphere of the place, and how to get over Emeric’s story line in
the most effective way.”...
Black Narcissus (1947), in which Anglican nuns set up a
new mission in the Himalayas, was also shot in the studio, Powell
having decided that pictures made partly on
location “are nearly always pastiche or hotchpotch.” Like I Know Where I’m Going, the
film centers on the conflict between a
“civilized” (here specifically Christian)
notion of order and pagan nature, personified
in the flailing Himalayan winds, local
superstition, and a naked holy man. Nature
wins when one of the nuns (Kathleen Byron)
is driven to homicidal madness by her
repressed lust for the hairy knees of David
Farrar.
Powell worked out the climactic
final scene with his composer Brian Easdale
(who was also in charge of the film’s sound
effects) and prerecorded the scene’s
soundtrack before filming the images. He
took this decisive step towards the
development of a musical structure for his
movie because he believes that “composers
and filmmakers think very much alike. Their
tempos are very closely related to our cutting
tempos, their longeurs and their statements are very similar to ours.
Whereas, even with a writer as clever and subtle as Emeric, I
always had this continual battle with words.” Jack Cardiff’s color
photography for the film won him an Oscar.
...The Red Shoes seems to Roy Armes “Powell and
Pressburger’s most explicit statement of the relationship of art and
life,” “the high point of their career in both commercial and artistic
terms….All [their] central themes and stylistic concerns find
expression in The Red Shoes: the Romantic opposition of art and
life, the concern with a choreography of film whereby
overwhelming passions are acted out rather than expressed through
words, and the creation of a dynamic inter-relationship of vivid
visual imagery and an immensely rhythmic soundtrack….”
The Archers’ last two productions, both unexceptional war
films, were The Battle of the River Plate (Pursuit of the Graf Spee,
1956) and Ill Met by Moonlight (Night Ambush, 1957). Working
separately, neither Powell nor Pressburger ever really established a
consistent pattern of production again. Powell’s next picture,
another ballet film called Luna de Miel (Honeymoon), was made in
1961 in Spain. Then he met a writer and former cypher expert
named Leo Marks, who proposed a picture in the sadistic horrormovie genre then being exploited by Anglo-Amalgamated. The
result was Peeping Tom (1960). ...The movie becomes an extremely
complex essay on the voyeurism involved in making and watching
films, as Powell clearly recognized….For many Peeping Tom is
Powell’s masterpiece, though in Britain in1960 it virtually ended
his career, while the shortened version seen in the United States was
largely ignored….Back in Britain, and re-united with Pressburger,
Powell made a prizewinning children’s film, The Boy Who Turned
Yellow (1972)….
Durgnat suggests that Powell “remains an upholder,
through its lean years, of the Méliès tradition...a school of ‘Cinema’
which is always exquisitely conscious of not only its cinematic
effects but its cinematic nature.”
Clayton—THE INNOCENTS—5
Michael Powell Interviews. Ed. David Lazar. University of
Mississippi Press, Jackson, 2003.
Does a film like Black Narcissus present certain fantastical
aspects?
MP: Not so to speak. The success of the film surprised me; it’s all
based on a question of atmosphere; first the education of the girl, in
Ireland, in a simple family, an almost religious education. The
entire novel was built on the idea that the house was full of painful
things, wind, evil, etc. The fact that this made for a good movie,
because this was a good movie, is rather surprising. This is the first
film in which the music plays an integral role in the atmosphere;
this was the first time I worked with Brian Easdale, who did the
music for The Red Shoes and a few other films. We prepared
several sequences together with the themes already composed, not
the music; therefore when I filmed a scene, I knew what was going
on in his mind.
The image was equally very interesting?
MP: Marvelous! This was Jack Cardiff’s second film, and one of
his best.
Completely unreal. . .
MP: Yes; I think that the fact the film was filmed entirely in studios
and in England, gave the film the style of a novel. When I read the
book, I immediately thought that we were going to the Indies and
that we would bring back some good shots to then try and match the
others filmed in England. The result would not be brilliant. It
worked better to film everything in England. This is what created
the atmosphere of the film….
For Black Narcissus, you adapted for the first time a novel which
was already published.
MP: Yes, in fact an actress who wanted a role in the film proposed
the subject to me during the war. I had been seduced by the plot and
I told her: “We should talk about it after the war.” And it’s very
strange because after the war, Pressburger got married, and it was
his wife who talked to us about it again after she read Rumer
Godden’s book.
What interested you it the story? The confrontation between the
morals of the Western world and those of the Oriental world?
MP: It was a very beautiful love story. In an unusual setting. But I
didn’t want to go shot in India. Because this kind of film had
always been done that way with studio scenes and link scenes on
location, with real actors, or sometimes stand-ins. I didn’t like that
at all.I was convinced that everything had to be done either in India
or in the studio.
And you filmed it entirely in a studio?
MP: Except for a few scenes. You know,you can find anything in
England. And since we had been an empire for a long time, there
were always people bringing back things from all over the world:
trees, flowers, rocks! Extraordinary things! I was able to find great
gardens with rocks, and mountains at the edges; and all the colors in
the world! And all the flowers from the Himalayas. The great
vegetation and even the torrential rains! In Sussex! (Laughs.) And
the rest was filmed in a studio.
The results in the change of scenery are astonishing.
MP: We had built the great castle outside at Pinewood. It was
Junge’s idea. All around this enormous décor he had a big plaster
background built at a 20 degree angle from the ground. That way,
all day long when the sun moved...there never was any shadow on
the background! It was always well lit. And on the background we
had painted the Himalayas: Everest, the great valleys, the forests.
And all of it sunlit! And when a cloud went by, it was magnificent!
It was so simple! Alfred Junge: a great master. …
When I was very young, before I got into the film
business, but still loving it, the great films in those days where the
original work was being done—were the early German films; and
Alfred of course was trained by UFA and so he had all these
grandiose images and marvelous effects in his head. When I asked
him to pull them out of his head for things like Colonel Blimp and
Stairway to Heaven, he was delighted. I think his masterpiece was
the film you’re showing here, Black Narcissus. Extraordinary. You
give Alfred a very difficult task, he would rise to it and make
something marvelous out of it. In that case, to create an entirely
imaginative place in the Himalayas. Always his imaginative things
were dealing with naturalistic sets, if you follow me. I mean, even
heaven in either monochrome or color in Stairway to Heaven is
based upon naturalism.
...When Powell thought of the money it would cost to go to India to
make Black Narcissus, that simmering tale of sexually repressed
nuns in the Himalayas, he said Heigh-ho, hired Deborah Kerr and
shot it all on a British soundstage. The result—as designed by
Alfred Junge, shot by Jack Cardiff and directed by Powell—is an
expressionist masterpiece.
“They said to me, But surely you’ll want to shoot some
establishing shots in India? That’s a very insidious phrase,
establishing shots. They said, You can’t do Mt. Everest in a studio.
I said, A studio is exactly where you can do Everest, and avalanches
and Tibetan horns. Wonderful studio stuff. And if we go and shoot
a lot of real stuff to cut into the studio stuff, it’ll make all the studio
stuff look terrible. And vice versa: if we do wonderful work in the
studio, the exteriors will look like something from a documentary
dragged in by the
cat!”
from the
Criterion
Collection Black
Narcissus. 2000.
Dave Kehr
When
Black Narcissus
opened in England
in 1947, Great
Britain was barely
emerging from the
agony and
exhaustion of
World War II.
Nothing could be
further from gray,
hungry postwar London than the India imagined by Michael Powell
and Emeric Pressburger: here was a land of high mountains, lush
forests, and fields of flowers exploding in deeply saturated
Technicolor, a tempting landscape of overwhelming plenty. And
though perhaps less-renowned within their body of work than The
Red Shoes or The Tales of Hoffman, Black Narcissus’ reputation has
grown over time; it now stand clearly as one of the highest
Clayton—THE INNOCENTS—6
achievements in British filmmaking, as witty as it is sensual, as
ironic as it is sweepingly romantic.
Powell and Pressburger had been collaborators since The
Spy in Black in 1939. Though Powell specialized in directing and
Pressburger in screenwriting, they felt that their contributions
overlapped enough to give themselves the joint credit, “Written,
Produced and Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric
Pressburger.” They called their production company , founded in
1942, “The Archers,” and their logo—an arrow hitting a target—
was also their way of rating their work. If the arrow fell on the
periphery of the target, that meant they felt they’d missed their
mark. If the arrow struck the bull’s-eye, it was their way of
signaling that they were happy with their work. Their partnership
continued until 1956, and yielded some of the most distinctive and
enduring work in the British cinema, including The Life and Death
of Colonel Blimp and A Matter of Life and Death.
Based on a 1939 novel by Rumer Godden, Black Narcissus
follows a group of British nuns, the Servants of Mary, as they
attempt to transform the former palace of a Hindu potentate into a
dispensary and school for the local children. But the palace, perched
on a mountaintop eight thousand feet above sea level, resists
transformation. Once the site of joyously sensual feasts And orgies,
the old palace exerts its influence over the sisters, and particularly
over Sister Clodagh (Deborah
Kerr), the group’s leader, who
finds herself dreaming of the
young man she left back in
Scotland. Less innocently romantic
are the reveries of Sister Ruth
(Kathleen Byron), who becomes
erotically obsessed with the British
overseer of the district (David
Farrar).
There is little surface
action in Pressburger’s script for
Black Narcissus. The film is
composed as a succession of small
incidents and casual encounters,
each of which adds to the slowly
growing sense of erotic tension.
Characters come and go—
including an impossibly beautiful Jean Simmons, as a ripe 17-yearold bride who has been repudiated by her husband, and Sabu (the
Indian child actor who was a mainstay of British movies about the
Raj), as a preening local prince who forces his way into the school.
The “Black Narcissus” of the title turns out to be not some poetic
allusion out of Rudyard Kipling, but the name of the pungent
aftershave with which the prince perfumes himself—a product he
imports from England.
But if there is little action on the surface, emotions are
seething just beneath it—or, more accurately, just behind it—in the
form of fantasy landscape that the Archers and their collaborators
have created out of purely cinematic means. Despite its dazzling
visual sweep, not one frame of Black Narcissus was filmed on
location. Instead, the film was shot at the Pinewood Studios in
suburban London, with a few daytrips to an Indian garden in
Sussex. The mountains and the castle are the creations of
production designer Alfred Junge, with matte paintings executed by
Peter Ellenshaw; the special effects were coordinated by W. Percy
Day, who had apprenticed with Méliès; and the magnificent color
photography, surely among the finest work ever produced for the
medium, is the contribution of Jack Cardiff. (Both Junge and
Cardiff won well-deserved Oscars for their work.)
Powell builds Black Narcissus as a series of moods created
through space and color. He contrasts the boxy interiors and blank
walls of the British colonial offices with the curved multi-leveled,
spatially indefinite chambers of the old palace. British certainty and
sterility cedes more and more to Eastern mysticism and sensuality;
the sister in charge of the vegetable garden can’t help but plant a
crop of flowers instead, their exploding primary colors providing a
dizzying contrast with the black and white habits of the nuns.
Gentle, green hillsides—reminiscent of the Scottish landscapes we
see in Sister Clodagh’s flashbacks—suddenly turn into vertiginous
canyons when viewed from another angle. The ground literally
opens beneath the feet of the characters, inviting them to take the
plunge—to abandon their twin faiths in God and the British Empire,
and turn themselves over to more ancient and dangerous powers.
For Powell, who had always placed great value on music
in his work, Black Narcissus is
perhaps his breakthrough to a
musical conception of the
medium (the Archers’ next
film would be The Red Shoes).
Building on the great wit and
character of Pressburger’s
dialogue, Powell worked as a
cinematic composer, an artist
who used contrasts in tone and
rhythm rather than purely
literary or dramatic means. The
carefully developed tensions
between monochrome and
color, between closed, coherent
spaces and aching, cosmic
voids, reach a crescendo in the
bravura climactic sequence. It
is enough to see the bright, red lipstick that Sister Ruth has put on to
know that the apocalypse is near.
British audiences in 1947 may well have seen Black
Narcissus as a last farewell to their fading empire. World War II
had altered colonial relations forever; in its wake, nationalist
movements would grow and British authority would collapse. India
achieved independence on August 14, 1947, and the final images of
Black Narcissus of a procession down from the mountaintop,
seemed to anticipate the British departure. For Powell and
Pressburger, these are not images of defeat, but of a respectful,
rational retreat from something that England never owned and never
understood. It is the tribute paid by West to East, full of fear and
gratitude.
Clayton—THE INNOCENTS—7
COMING UP IN BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS XIX:
Sept 22 Jules Dassin Du rififi chez les hommes/Rififi 1955
Sept 29 Kenji Misoguchi Akasen chitai/Street of Shame 1956
Oct 6 Richard Brooks Elmer Gantry 1960
Oct 13 Roman Polanski Nóz w wodzie/Knife in the Water 1962
Oct 20 Stanley Kubrick Lolita 1962
Oct 27 Carl Theodor Dreyer Gertrud 1964
Nov 3 Eric Rohmer Ma nuit chez Maud/My Night at Maude’s 1969
Nov 10 Andrei Tarkovsky Solaris 1972
Nov 17 Arthur Penn Night Moves 1975
Nov 24 Abbas Kiarostami Nema-ye Nazdik/Close Up 1990
Dec 1 Bela Tarr Werckmeister harmóniák/Werckmeister Harmonies 2000
Dec 8 Mike Leigh Topsy-Turvy 1999
CONTACTS:
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The Buffalo Film Seminars are presented by the Market Arcade Film & Arts Center
and State University of New York at Buffalo
with support from the Robert and Patricia Colby Foundation and the Buffalo News