Emeric Pressburger’s screening room pass for the UFA film studios in pre-Nazi Germany

British cinema has always been a site of international collaboration and co-creation, to its great benefit. There are few more distinguished instances of this than the creative partnership of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the Kentish lad who cut his filmmaking teeth in the south of France and the Hungarian-born writer who’d worked in the European capitals of Berlin and Paris before arriving in Britain. 

They were brought together by renowned producer Alexander Korda to collaborate on The Spy in Black (1939), and thus was forged a powerhouse of film co-authorship, the two men going on to share the credits for writing, directing and producing a host of vibrant, bold and downright idiosyncratic hit British films of the 1940s, from The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) and A Matter of Life and Death (1946) to Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948). It was fitting that their visual identifier was an arrow thudding triumphantly into the centre of an archery roundel (a reference to their production company being called The Archers), since they managed to hit the target repeatedly and convincingly. 

But before that partnership began, Powell and Pressburger were busy with their individual careers in separate countries. This archival object is an especially evocative relic from Pressburger’s pre-British days, part of a collection of materials donated to the BFI National Archive by his family. It stems from Pressburger’s time working in the dramaturgy department of Germany’s foremost film company, UFA: the pass which gave the young screenwriter and script editor (looking winningly urbane and dapper in his photograph) access to UFA’s screening theatre. 

Issued in 1931, the year Pressburger worked with Billy Wilder on a hit adaptation of Emil and the Detectives, the pass remained valid (‘gültig’) for the following year, as Pressburger continued to build his reputation as an inventive screenwriter. Of course, the particular poignancy of the document comes from the knowledge of what was soon to happen in Germany. All UFA’s Jewish staff (Pressburger among them) were dismissed from their posts in 1933, in line with Nazi edicts.

Pressburger had seen many colleagues already depart to seek sanctuary and employment elsewhere. Despite his reluctance to leave, he knew he couldn’t delay any longer and took the second-class couchette from Berlin to Paris on the night of 1 May 1933. He was, as Kevin Gough-Yates says, just “one of many permanently scarred by the savage impact of Nazism and involuntary exile”. It seems characteristic that his parting gesture was to leave the key in the door of his Berlin apartment to “save the Gestapo the trouble of breaking it down”; an act of rebellious civility in the face of their barbarism.

A few years on and he would leave France for England, initially thinking of making his passage to Hollywood like many of his old UFA compatriots, but eventually finding a niche and ending up staying in England for the remainder of his life. The trauma of exile undoubtedly marked Emeric Pressburger, but he was eventually able to transfigure his painful experiences into powerful art, immeasurably enriching British film culture in the process.

Produced with the support of the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.