"A Life in Movies", Michael Powell

Michael Powell (1905-1990) was a British filmmaker, for many the most important one right after Alfred Hitchcock (for whom he worked as a still photographer), and a big influence on the movie brats generation, namely in Scorsese and Coppola. His first films as a director were quota-quickies, that is, about one-hour films made with modest resources and quickly, in order to force exhibitors to show more British films and to stimulate the national film industry. It was in 1937 that he made his first major film (as he himself defines it in his memoirs), The Edge of the World, a film of pictorial beauty and rural mysticism, filmed on the island of Foula, where the wind in the local vegetation and the clouds in the sky shape and reflect the turbulence of the characters' emotions. Such pastoral visuals would be repeated in at least three of the best films he signed with Emeric Pressburger, A Canterbury Tale, I Know Where I'm Going!, and Going to Earth.

It is by the films he made with him that he is most remembered. Powell met Pressburger on the production of The Spy in Black, and after working on two more films together, they decided to form the company The Archers. In their films, Pressburger wrote the first draft of the screenplay (which he later discussed with Powell), Powell directed the finished script, and they both produced the film. Some of their most notable and remembered works are The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Pressburger's favorite), A Matter of Life and Death (Powell's favorite, whose American title was rebaptized to Stairway to Heaven), Black Narcissus (“that rare thing, an erotic English film about the fantasies of nuns, ”as David Thomson put it), and The Red Shoes (a film about dying for art, something that Powell really believed). In these films, Pressburger's written eloquence is matched by Powell's romantic aesthetic, whose detailed imagination, use of color and perspective-oriented angles create visually rich films of a fantastic atmosphere and hybrid nature, where escapist fantasy and artificialism can cohabitate with the realism of its human stories.

In 1957 they ended their collaboration (although they reunited for two more films in the 1960s and 1970s) and pursued individual careers. Powell made yet another masterpiece, Peeping Tom, which would go back to The Red Shoes' theme of an obsession with an art form to the point of being willing to die (and kill, it’s a study of a psychotic mind) for it. Although it is now seen as a classic, it was so controversial at the time for its perverted character, and sexual and violent images that it ended Powell's career in England. The end of his filmic work would be made in Australia, and his last full-length feature film, the exotic The Age of Consent, although far from his best achievements, can still be visually dazzling and present interesting thoughts on the arts with all the inspirational and opportunistic relationships that they can create.

In his last years, Powell wrote his two-volume autobiography, A Life in Movies and Million Dollar Movie. They are friendly garrulous, barrier-free, and important records of the changes that the film industry went in the twentieth century since the time of silent films, told by someone who worked on it. They are full of anecdotal material featuring various characters such as Hitchcock, David Lean, Selznick, Orson Welles, but also creative solutions that reveal Powell's boldness, determination and creative genius at work in the various productions in which he was involved, as well as his own personal reflections on the medium. A Life in Movies is the first and the one that describes Powell's career from the very beginning until the late 1940s.

Excerpts:

“In my films, images are everything; words are used like music to distill emotion. The ballet sequence in The Red Shoes, the whole of The Tales of Hoffman, the defusing of the bomb in The Small Back Room, the movement of ships at sea in the Graf Spee film, the whole of The Edge of the World, more than half of Black Narcissus, the trial in Heaven in A Matter of Life and Death, are essentially silent films.”

“If you lived and worked in the movies in those days, when the camera could lie and lie and lie, you could never take the sound camera seriously, tied down as it was to dialogue, sound effects and music. We never did. Our business was not realism, but surrealism. We were storytellers, fantasists. This is why we could never get on with the documentary movement. Documentary films started with poetry and finished as prose. We storytellers started with naturalism and finished with fantasy.”

“[In a discussion about using matte paintings in Black Narcissus, instead of going to India] I think the backing should be just impressionistic areas of colour. We’ll use matte shots as well as glass shots, of course, but we’ll keep them to a minimum. We can do that because we have the whole design of the film here in our hands, or least Alfred has. The atmosphere in this film is everything, and we must create and control it from the start. Wind, the altitude, the beauty of the setting – it must all be under our control. If we went to India and shot a lot of exteriors, according to the usual plan, and then came back to Pine wood and then tried to match them here, you would have two kinds of colour and two kinds of style.”

“As you know the Archers’ famous credit title read: ‘Written, produced and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’. Let’s analyse it. ‘Written’ came first, because if you haven’t a good story and a good script, you have got nothing. ‘Produced by’ came a comfortable second, because you can’t turn a good script into a good film without money and know how. A producer has to find the money and have the last word. We two did better than that. We had the first and the last word. ‘Directed by’ comes last, because it is a tradition in the film business to have the director’s name last on the titles. I hope that you will all have realized by now, how right I was, when we founded the Archers, to go fifty-fifty with Emeric – credit, fees, the lot. Nobody understood it at the time, and nobody understands it now.”

Link to the complete book in PDF:

https://mega.nz/#!kKon1Q5D!x25KN-ykDz3IaHDXlns1p6K-JhE2_JtmH92cvnoswWU