Fantastic Life

"There is not a British director with as many worthwhile films to his credit as Michael Powell" - David Thomson

If 20th-century cinema is characterised as a battle between 'realism' and fantasy, then Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, at least after 1943, allied themselves with the forces of fantasy. In this respect, they found themselves at odds with almost the entire British cinematic tradition, which helps to explain why their work largely fell out of favour with British critics until a National Film Theatre retrospective played a key role in reviving their reputation in 1978.

Like Alfred Hitchcock, Powell cut his teeth on silent films, and he carried into the sound era a strong sense of visual storytelling. Powell, too, eventually found himself in Hollywood, though some forty years later and on rather different terms. Born in Bekesbourne, near Canterbury, Kent on 30 September 1905, Powell served his apprenticeship with arch stylists Rex Ingram and Harry Latchman before graduating, via still photography on Hitchcock's Champagne (1928) and Blackmail (1929), to directing a number of so-called 'quota quickies' - small-scaled, medium length films designed to help cinemas meet their legal obligations to show a proportion of British material.

Pressburger, born 5 December 1902, Mikolc, Hungary, was almost penniless when a published short story brought him into the German film industry as a scriptwriter, working on early productions by Robert Siodmak and Max Ophüls. He arrived in England in 1935, having fled Germany for France following the Nazis' rise to power in 1933. In 1938, he joined the Hungarian coterie of Alexander Korda, and like his compatriots he had much to invest in the dream of England as an outpost against tyranny and beacon of decency in a Europe turning to fascism. It was Korda too, who 'discovered' Powell, after his first substantial work, The Edge of the World (1937), and partnered the two for Spy in Black in 1939.

The duo spent the early part of the war making inspiring propaganda films, notably 49th Parallel (1941) for which Pressburger won an Oscar, although Powell's collaboration on the spectacular fantasy Thief of Bagdad, released in 1940, was an indication of their later direction. In 1942 they established their own production company, The Archers, with its distinctive target logo, and thereafter their films carried the label "Written, Produced and Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger". It was all but unprecedented for a director to share credit in this way.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), a domestic success despite earning the displeasure of Churchill (who tried to ban it) marked the beginning of Powell and Pressburger's departure from realist orthodoxy, with its non-linear chronology and its use of the same actress - Deborah Kerr - to play the three women in the life of its hero. They went further with its follow-up, A Canterbury Tale (1944), which imbued the Kent countryside with an almost pagan mysticism in its tale of three modern pilgrims pursuing a haphazard path to spiritual awakening. The film was their first flop, and an early sign that they couldn't depend on carrying either critics, audiences or industry along with their most ambitious explorations. Moreover, in its central conceit, the hunt for the 'glue man', a bizarre character who puts glue in young women's hair to deter them from fraternising with American troops, it sowed the seeds of the critical hostility that would emerge following Powell's Peeping Tom (1960).

In a similarly mystical vein was their second, and Powell's third, trip to the Scottish islands (following Edge of the World and Spy in Black), "I Know Where I'm Going!" (1945), a strange love story with supernatural overtones. Undeterred by the failure of critics and audiences to appreciate their increasingly individual vision, Powell and Pressburger turned an assignment from the Ministry of Information to make a film to further Anglo-American relations into their most extravagant fantasy yet. Memorably contrasting a monochrome afterlife with a real world of radiant technicolor, A Matter of Life and Death (1946) was a feast of cinematic invention, from the appearance of a camera obscura to the celebrated moving stairway to Heaven, to the closing of the huge eyelids as David Niven's romantic pilot succumbed to anaesthesia.

The pair continued to explore this new terrain of fantasy and their next film, Black Narcissus (1947), further estranged them from the British cinema establishment. Rebuilding a Himalayan palace on a Pinewood sound stage, the film was a sustained erotic tour-de-force detailing the conflicts of a group of English nuns beset by a hostile environment and an unruly local population, and featuring an extraordinary scene-stealing performance from the virtually unknown Kathleen Byron.

The ballet extravaganza The Red Shoes (1948) was a deceptively simple tale of a young dancer torn between love and her career, based on a story by Hans Christian Anderson. The film's centrepiece was a seventeen-minute ballet which is still perhaps the most concentrated imaginative sequence in British films.

The Red Shoes was a high-water mark for Powell and Pressburger. They found themselves at odds with the industry, falling out first with Rank, then with Korda. They continued to make interesting films - The Small Back Room (1949) was an unexpectedly straight thriller, albeit with touches of fantasy, while Gone to Earth (1950) was a visually sumptuous, if flawed, rural melodrama. Tales of Hoffman (1951) attempted, with some success, to recapture the magic of The Red Shoes, and contained some stunning sequences; a further musical, Oh... Rosalinda!! was less satisfying.

By 1957 the two were pulling in different directions, and the partnership came to an end. In 1960, Powell scandalised critics with Peeping Tom, an intense study of a voyeuristic killer - a film cameraman who photographs his victims as they die by the sharpened leg of his tripod - portrayed with disquieting sympathy by young Austrian actor Carl Boehm. It was a highly sophisticated film, but despite being released in the same year as Hitchcock's Psycho - and arguably a better film - it was too much for a Britain yet to leave behind the conservatism of the 1950s, and it attracted universal condemnation, not least for a sequence in which Powell himself played the killer's father, with his own son playing the boy.

The backlash was such that much of The Archers' earlier work from A Canterbury Tale onwards was damned retrospectively for its supposed 'morbidity'. The film all but ended Powell's career: he managed to make a few more films, including two more with Pressburger, then languished in obscurity until Francis Coppola invited him to become 'director in residence' at his Zoetrope studios in the early 1980s. By the time of his death in 1990, however, Peeping Tom had been recognised as a masterpiece: as Powell ruefully commented in his autobiography, "I make a film that nobody wants to see and then, thirty years later, everybody has either seen it or wants to see it".

Despite their separation, Powell and Pressburger remained friends until the latter's death in 1988. Theirs was a truly complementary partnership: Powell was English through and through, but with an international spirit and an imagination which owed nothing to English reticence; Pressburger brought the insights of an outsider, and had a delight in the language and culture of his adopted home. Powell had a rich visual sense; Pressburger wrote dialogue crackling with wit and energy. Powell was exuberant and confident; Pressburger shy, but with a fierce intelligence. Above all, they were both tireless and inventive storytellers.

Powell's own favourite of their films, A Matter of Life and Death, struck a chord with a British public starved for fantasy and romance in the immediate aftermath of war. But the Archers' films became too rich for British palates; audiences preferred American escapism, while the British film industry was more comfortable with smaller, realist pictures than the baroque - and costly - experiments of Powell and Pressburger. They left behind a set of films unlike anything seen before or since in the British cinema - at least five masterpieces among them - and a sense of what is possible in film that will continue to inspire well into the medium's second century.

Mark Duguid is Project Development Manager of Screenonline, which features video extracts, scripts, stills, posters and production designs, audio interview extracts and other materials relating to British film and television history. Six Powell and Powell / Pressburger titles are featured on Screenonline.