I saw the film
The Red Shoes last week, and since, I've sat in admiration through five other of Michael Powell's films. I've quickly become a Powell addict. He's explored so many facets of film and so many different genres and subjets, the first more fascinating, daring and avant-garde than the next. I find myself living through his characters, using their emotions as my own.
In
The Red Shoes (1948), Powell and Pressburger explore the coming together of the three elements needed to give life to a ballet (music, direction and dance), and their doomed leaders: the music composer, the tyrannical director, and the lead dancer in between. This forms a chaotic triangle; not quite one of love, but of obsession for the art, in which the dancer is forced to choose between her love for the musician and her utter devotion to ballet and to her director. Tragically torn in two, she chooses death instead. The choreography of
The Red Shoes seen in the film is breathtaking, beautifully filmed, and paralleled with the dancer's own melodramatic trials. The ballet itself tells the tale of a dancer who slides on diabolical red shoes that dance on and on forever. The dancer eventually tires, but the shoes never do, until death do them part.
In
A Matter of Life and Death (
Stairway to Heaven), Powell and Pressburger give us their invented image of after-life, a subject that is completely avant-garde in 1946, and yet quite relevant considering the post-war period during which so many deaths were mourned. An intellectual WWII soldier jumps from his burning plane without a parachute, and miraculously wakes up on a beach, alive and well. It was his time to die, but an error up there was made. The soldier meets the woman he was talking with through the radio right before his jump, and they fall madly in love. Now the "angel", portrayed as a dandy frenchman, can't take him away without a trial in which the soldier tries to win rights to his life through the argument of newfound love and responsibilities. The "other world", shown in black and white in contrast to life on Earth's technicolor, is represented with such precision and imagination, and the directors' vision of each detail is surprising and refeshing.
Peeping Tom is another amazing feature, and extremely daring for the year 1959. Many critics trashed it, and many theaters refused to show it on their screens. Powell explores violent subjects of psychological, sexual and homocidal nature.
Peeping Tom is about a man who gets off on filming his murders, not because he's a bad man, but because he can't help his obsession; he feeds on fear, more precisely the fear that one expresses while watching their death as it happens. A sick voyeurist is murdering young women, and yet we feel pity for the protagonist, on the grounds that he's suffering through this mental illness that can't be helped. But when he falls for a girl, he must go to extreme mesures to keep himself from turning his camera towards her. What's revolutionary about this film is that the violence isn't bluntly shown: we know what's going on, but we don't quite see it all, which makes our imagination go in frightning directions. Here, the combination of brutality and subtlety is key.
Age of Consent,
A Canterbury Tale,
I Know Where I'm Going (which I especially like because it takes place on a small Scottish island)... I can't talk about all of them, but one thing Powell's films have in common, besides the fact that they're works of a genius, is that love is always the strongest force, whether it compels the film to end with a kiss, or to conclude in bloodshed.
And now, I'm going to go watch another one.
