Tellers of Tales: The Films of Powell & Pressburger at The Academy Museum
by CHAD KENNERK
K.J. Relth-Miller, Director of Film Programs.
All images courtesy the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.
When Michael Powell combined his dynamic directing powers with the percipient writing of Emeric Pressburger, the production company known as The Archers was born. Pressburger focused on story, while Powell played the key role of directing each piece. The Archers brought their collective talents together to create some of the most colourful, quintessential, and controversial films ever made. Following Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds of Powell and Pressburger – the BFI’s retrospective and celebration at BFI Southbank and across the UK last fall – the films of Powell and Pressburger have made their way west from New York’s Museum of Modern Art to The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.
Featuring restorations and screenings of archival prints, Tellers of Tales: The Films of Powell & Pressburger highlights the dazzling imagery and inventive designs of Britain’s foremost filmmaking duo. Film Review is joined by K.J. Relth-Miller, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures’ Director of Film Programs, to discuss the Archers and the art of crafting a filmmaker retrospective.
In conversation with K.J. Relth-Miller
Director of Film Programs, The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures
Film Review (FR): Thankfully, there seems to be an even greater focus today on repertory programming, which The Academy Museum has been doing since day one, giving audiences the opportunity to experience classics on the big screen and perhaps through a new lens.
K.J. Relth-Miller (KJ): Repertory film programming has been my focus since I started as a film programmer. I think it's really always sort of an endless font of possibility; to dive into the past, to present older films with new context and in juxtaposition with either current events or contemporary developments in the cinema production landscape. So it's always an exciting opportunity to unearth discoveries for audiences, and also to present old classics in new ways. That's kind of the case with Powell and Pressburger, in that we’re really excited for the opportunity to import some of these titles from a major retrospective of Powell and Pressburger works that originated at the BFI.
We've screened The Red Shoes before, and we've screened some of these other titles in different ways, but to have a collection of their films, to really represent a body of work by the Archers, is a new experience for Los Angeles. I don't know when the last time a Powell and Pressburger retrospective was presented in the city. I'm so grateful to the BFI and to our colleagues at MoMA, who are taking some of these films before we are and then sending them over to us. We have the opportunity to really take advantage of the program that they presented earlier and sort of ride the coattails of that promotion into the success of our series.
(FR): In our last chat, you talked about your decision-making process for a series beginning with watching, reading, and talking. What was the process like for this series?
(KJ): For a filmmaker retrospective, it is a little different. There's usually a finite body of work to draw from. Whereas, if we're thinking about a thematic series, for example, our Summer in the City program where we're looking at Los Angeles location films, there's endless possibilities. With the Archers, the two filmmakers made 24 films together and then each of them also made their own films and some shorts. We initiated this idea with a meeting with the BFI and with MoMA to make sure that it was all timed out correctly. It originated at the BFI with a program called Cinema Unbound, which was really comprehensive. Then that same program, maybe almost in-full, moved to MoMA. We knew from the beginning that we couldn't possibly screen all 40 works that were available. We have other commitments during the season. But we did want to screen a collection that was representative of their filmmaking output as a whole.
My colleague Hyesung ii, our associate director in the department, and I watched a number of their films. I was already very familiar with their work, but there were a few I hadn't seen, for example, Gone to Earth was a discovery for me in putting this program together. I know it's one of their lesser screen titles for various reasons; one of them being that Gone to Earth was originally conceived in one version and then the co-producer of the film, David O. Selznick, took the original picture, recut it, shot new scenes, and re-released it under the title The Wild Heart in 1952. So it's very rare to find an uncut, original version of Gone to Earth from 1950 that maintains the original vision of the Archers. To find that original version, be completely overwhelmed by it – not just because of its colour, but because of its theme of a woman torn between two possible futures – it was so moving and so beautiful that I knew that this had to be part of the series. Especially because we were being offered a 35mm print from the BFI National Archive of the original version. Hyesung and I had that conversation about which films we really wanted to include and which films were essential to telling the story of the Archers. From there, we wrote the notes based on our experiences of watching the films. Some of them that I was a little bit more familiar with I tackled, and then Hyesung dove in and wrote some of the notes for those that she really connected with.
(FR): Powell and Pressburger often courted conflict and controversy in making and distributing their films. Recutting and renaming was also not uncommon for imported titles in general.
(KJ): What's so interesting about the Archers is that they are certainly quite well known today. But even as recently as the late 90s, these are filmmakers who, in a way, had fallen into obscurity. It's really thanks to Martin Scorsese and his love of their filmmaking, as well as his connection specifically to Michael Powell, that these films really became well known again and preserved in many cases. Scorsese’s longtime editor and collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker was married to Michael Powell until the end of his life. It's really thanks to Scorsese that their works are being made available again in their complete versions, so we really have him to thank for that.
These were filmmakers that were consistently pushing against sort of the modes of filmmaking and narrative storytelling that were common at the time, but within a fully supported studio system, which is so rare. Scorsese said they were, “the only independent filmmakers who managed to work within the system and still get away with making truly experimental films,” which I think is such a beautiful way of thinking about their really subversive approach to storytelling and to conceiving of narrative in the mid-century, when we see such a major studio output, not just in, of course, Hollywood, but in Britain. In the case of Black Narcissus, specifically, the Archers worked with Jack Cardiff who worked with him on several of their films.
(FR): I’m glad you mentioned cinematographer Jack Cardiff, who worked with Powell on the films A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus, and The Red Shoes. Colour is incredibly important to Powell. They made great use of Technicolor.
(KJ): Jack Cardiff won his first Oscar for Cinematography for his colour cinematography in Black Narcissus, but they were in constant battles with the Technicolor adviser on the film, because Cardiff was making certain decisions about how to light a scene and how the production design would be showcased within the scene that were outside of Technicolor’s, sometimes quite rigid, standards for what colour should look like on film. Even in the production process, they were butting up against the traditional studio sanctioned ways of creating works and ultimately they prevail. That will be beautifully showcased on the opening night of this series on 18 July, with our screening of Black Narcissus on 35mm nitrate – it’s an incredible miracle that this print still exists. It's coming to us from the Academy Film Archive.
(FR): What can you share about the print and the process for storing nitrate film?
(KJ): Michael Powell passed in 1990, Pressburger two years before that in 1988. The film archive at the Academy was established in 1991, so it's very likely that the print was acquired in the early days of the archive, though I'm not quite sure of the provenance or the date of the acquisition. What I do know is that it has been kept in nitrate storage. Nitrate storage requires very specific cooling systems. In some cases, dual sprinkler systems in case the nitrate spontaneously ignites. It's usually kept in much smaller vaults, so that if there is an outbreak of spontaneous combustion, that fire can be contained quite quickly and not spread to other prints. Nitrate film is incredibly flammable. It's so flammable that it actually produces its own oxygen. When you submerge a nitrate print in water, it still continues to burn underwater, that's how flammable it is. So it's very important that this highly-flammable film stock is kept under very careful conditions. That also requires a very specific set of rules and circumstances under which it can be projected. Nitrate storage is one thing, nitrate projection is another.
(FR): What are the rules and circumstances that allow for nitrate film to be safely projected?
(KJ): Nitrate film stock, which was the most common form of 35mm celluloid that was produced up until, I believe, 1950 or 1951. So many of the film prints in cinemas were nitrate film stock — few of them exist today. They're so rare today because of their highly flammable nature. They're also organic materials, so they can shrink over time. A 35mm print has sprocket holes along each side that have to lock in perfectly with a 35mm projection system. If those sprockets are misaligned, because the film print has shrunk, even 2%, that can cause the film to go out of alignment, maybe get stuck in the projector, and increases the risk of a fire, given the nature of the bulb that's projecting the light through the celluloid and onto the screen. We measure our film prints at the film archive on a regular basis, just to guarantee that they can safely run through a projector, but that shrinkage rate can change over time. If a print was projectable in 2019, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's projectable today in 2024. That print can become unpredictable, which means that we may never see it again. The very special thing about nitrate is the richness and the vibrancy and the variance of colour that comes through — especially on a Technicolor nitrate film print.
Even with a black and white film print, there's almost a silver quality to the greys. With the nuance that you see between the blacks and the whites, it's almost like the print is breathing. It's like the people on screen are even more alive and real. There's just more depth to the image, so a nitrate film screening is a special visual event. It's also such a rarity. It's only the second time that we've screened a nitrate film print for a public audience at the Academy Museum, so it's a really incredible opportunity. We're hoping to do more of it, but as I mentioned, nitrate film prints are rare to find in projectable condition. We are fortunate that here in Los Angeles, we have a number of cinemas [that are capable of screening nitrate,] including the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum, The Egyptian Theatre (which is run by Netflix and the American Cinematheque), and then ourselves at the Academy Museum. We can project nitrate safely. There are also collections of nitrate throughout the country, including the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York. But shipping a nitrate film print requires an extreme amount of care and caution – and it's just an expensive endeavour. They're also quite costly to ship. We're really trying to look at nitrate collections, including our own, and the nitrate collection at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, to bring those prints to life for audiences in our cinemas.
(FR): What a special collective experience that screening will be. You have Thelma Schoonmaker joining you as well, what's going to be the focus of the conversation with her?
(KJ): We're so, so excited that Thelma Schoonmaker is available to come out to be with us for the opening night screening of Black Narcissus. She'll introduce the film. We worked with her very closely on this series in selecting which materials to screen because of the renewed interest in the Archers that, as I mentioned before, was really foregrounded by Scorsese and his love of this filmmaking duo. There are many instances where, for example, I Know Where I'm Going! has been preserved in 4K. A Matter of Life and Death has been preserved in 4K. The Tales of Hoffmann and Gone to Earth, and The Elusive Pimpernel are on 35mm prints.
We worked with Thelma to approve whether we were screening the 35mm print or the new restoration. She is really adamant on the best image quality possible and for the films of her late husband to be presented in the best quality possible. So Thelma and I have been in touch for the past couple of months, just sort of working through those details. We learned that she was available, and so she'll be introducing the film screening and talking a little bit about how special this film was in the careers of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Then afterward, we will sit down with Thelma and have a discussion about Michael Powell’s career and also specifically about some of the creative decisions that went into the making of Black Narcissus, including, I'm sure, the cinematography by Jack Cardiff.
(FR): I want to mention film techniques too, because Black Narcissus is a great example of matte paintings, then there’s the whirlpool scene in I Know Where I’m Going!, and the list goes on. Powell really used every trick in the book to create some of those shots.
(KJ): They were really working with the best technicians available and some incredible artists, who they collaborated with over multiple projects. When you're thinking about the set design for something like Black Narcissus, these are artists that they had worked with several times. The art director on that film, Alfred Junge, was a frequent collaborator of theirs. By this point, I'm sure they had a shorthand with which to describe exactly what they were looking for. I really think that if we go back to Scorsese's insistence that they were kind of experimental in their approach to narrative cinema, we're thinking about individuals who aren't necessarily interested in reproducing reality in their work. They're interested in pushing the limits of the cinematic form to create truly unique worlds that are heightened and maybe, in a way, sort of theatrical. I think that when you think about opera, and specifically in relation to The Tales of Hoffmann, or ballet and dance, and specifically in relationship to The Red Shoes, these are artists who are working within the theatrical experience of an opera or of dance to translate that to the screen in a purely cinematic form. I can't think of other filmmakers who did that as effectively and as consistently.
(FR): In your career K.J., what have been some of the most memorable moments of sharing films with your audiences?
(KJ): I think with every opportunity, especially to bring in a guest to present a certain film — whether they worked on the film themselves, they have a personal connection to it, or just an affinity for it — it's always interesting to hear how another individual might interpret a work. Because it's always going to be different from the way that I might interpret it or that you might interpret it. I'm always interested in presenting films within a specific context, but allowing the audience to make their own conclusions or draw their own connections. I think that a film series can do that as a way of presenting a body of work. We can offer a context through our film notes, through our introductions, guests can offer a context, but we can't dictate how an audience is going to experience something or how they're going to walk away from a screening feeling. I think that’s what is particularly interesting: being able to do a career retrospective like the Powell and Pressburger program, and allowing for multiple avenues into a body of work and into a filmmaker’s output. That's just a nice way to allow for a full experience of a filmmaking career for an audience. So while there isn't one that stands out specifically, I do love the opportunity to present a series as almost a syllabus or a roadmap into a certain context on film history.
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