ka-BUMP
A Director for Whom Nothing Exceeded Like Excess
By TERRENCE RAFFERTY
"THERE'S something in the atmosphere that makes everything seem exaggerated," someone says in Michael Powell's "Black Narcissus" (1947). And although the Walter Reade Theater is unlikely to remind anyone of the windswept Himalayan setting in which that line of dialogue is uttered, pilgrims to the Film Society of Lincoln Center's three-week Powell retrospective, which kicks off on Friday, may well begin to feel as if they were breathing a higher, thinner air than they're used to at the movies, and even, perhaps, to experience a (presumably) milder form of the hysteria that grips the nervous nuns of "Black Narcissus." In Michael Powell's movies everything seems exaggerated, because he turns every subject that interests him into a matter of life and death.
Powell, whose centennial this dizzying retrospective celebrates (he died in 1990), was one of those infuriating, invaluable film artists who wasn't happy unless he was tempting fate, pushing his luck: going too far, as one horrified production designer protested on hearing the director's ideas for "The Red Shoes" (1948). In that picture, his biggest worldwide hit, Powell's aversion to moderation serves him well. He captures the outsize emotions and the almost unimaginable physical daring of ballet in a way that says a lot about his own artistic values, his inclination to treat every shot in every film as an opportunity for death-defying, gasp-inducing virtuosity - one grand jeté after another.
This sort of approachto cinematic creation demands confidence bordering on hubris. Powell and his writing and producing partner, Emeric Pressburger, rode high in the British cinema of the 40's. The Archers, as they called their production company, were the ideal filmmakers for beleaguered wartime Britain, precisely because they so conspicuously lacked the politeness and the self-effacing modesty that are in less dire times thought of as the pre-eminent national virtues.
In their most ambitious wartime production, "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp" (1943), which follows its stolid military hero through four decades and three wars, they attempt the tricky feat of both mythologizing English decency and suggesting that this very quality has put the green and pleasant land at risk of losing the nasty current war. As calls to arms go, this is a corker, as stirring emotionally as it is dodgy intellectually: we British are inherently and incontrovertibly better than our enemies, so we're justified in using any tactics to defeat them.
A more timid filmmaker wouldn't have dared to frame a patriotic message that way. The cheek of "Colonel Blimp" is so breathtaking that you'd think it unsurpassable. Powell, naturally, sets out to surpass it in the next production, a home-front fable called "A Canterbury Tale" (1944), which extends "Blimp" 's vision of English exceptionalism into the areas of literature and religion, and is jaw-droppingly daft.
For Powell, there could never be too much of a good thing. (Even the autobiography to which he devoted the last 10 years of his life is immoderate: its two volumes run to well over 1,200 pages.) If you were to watch his films chronologically, from his early low-budget thrillers to his patriotic war pictures to his postwar love stories and high-art fantasias, you'd see an artist who time and again manages first to master a form, then to complicate it and finally to load it with so much visual weight that it collapses on itself. You can sense that happening in "A Canterbury Tale" and, later, in "Tales of Hoffmann" (1951), in which Powell tries to top "The Red Shoes" as a "composed film" by eliminating scripted dialogue and telling his story using only the resources of opera, ballet and, of course, his own supercharged cinematic technique. "Hoffmann" is gorgeous to look at, pleasant to listen to and murder to sit through.
It's this exasperating tendency to overwork his assets that makes Powell such a difficult filmmaker to evaluate. He has been accused of "inordinate ambition, bumptiousness and a general unevenness of judgment" (James Agee) and of being a "master purveyor of high kitsch" (Pauline Kael); he has been hailed as "a great director" (Martin Scorsese) and even as "the cinema itself" (Bernardo Bertolucci). And all those assessments are just. In a picture like "A Matter of Life and Death" (1946) - a romance that shuttles recklessly between a Technicolored "real world" and a black-and-white afterlife - Powell's greatness and his deep kitschiness are practically indistinguishable. The movie is dazzlingly inventive in the service of some genuinely dreadful notions, and in the end it is irresistible. "A Matter of Life and Death" (released as "Stairway to Heaven" here) wants us to believe that love conquers all, including the Grim Reaper, and in a strange way its maker's obvious, uncritical affection for his dubious material reinforces the theme: even if the object of love is unworthy of it, the emotion itself is what matters - the inspiration that can keep a pilot who has bailed out without a parachute miraculously alive, or keep a filmmaker without a defensible idea improbably aloft for nearly two hours.
But, then, Powell was a born daredevil, as his first important film, "The Edge of the World" (1937), demonstrates; that picture, set and filmed on a bleak island in the Outer Hebrides, features a tense sequence in which two young men race up the face of a steep cliff (one doesn't make it) and a climax in which an older man, unwilling to evacuate the island, clings to that same cliff and falls - literally dying for his belief in his home. That's the sort of conviction Powell understands, and that he smuggles into even his smaller-scale, more apparently frivolous works, like the charming Highland romance "I Know Where I'm Going!" (1945) - which contrives, before its lovers are allowed to walk off into the gloaming together, to test them with both an ancient curse and a deadly whirlpool.
And in the superb, too little known "Small Back Room" (1949), Powell raises the ante on an already heavily fraught emotional situation - the hero, a government scientist, has an artificial foot and a drinking problem and a girlfriend who's beginning to weary of propping up his fragile psyche - by giving his barely functioning protagonist an unexploded bomb to defuse. It sounds silly, but the picture is one of Powell's best, exquisitely balanced between naturalism and expressionist hyperbole. As the narrative of "The Small Back Room" unfolds, quietly but urgently, you realize that this director needs the possibility of disaster - for his characters or himself, or both - in order to tell a story at all.
After 20 years or so of courting and narrowly averting disaster, Powell did finally go too far in 1960. In "Peeping Tom" - a brilliantly lurid thriller about a young filmmaker who murders his female subjects so he can see the fear in their eyes and preserve it forever on celluloid - he takes the dying-for-art message of "The Red Shoes" to a perversely logical conclusion: it is possible to kill for art, too. The British press was scandalized, and the director worked only sporadically thereafter, and never again on the kind of high-risk material that fired him up. Powell did not in fact die for his art; he lived to 84. And he didn't kill for it, either - but there's something in the atmosphere of this amazing retrospective that tells you, with the insistence of the constant, deranging wind in "Black Narcissus," that he could have.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company |
― Dr Morbius (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, 3 May 2005 13:28 (twenty years ago)
five years pass...