Set in a gorgeously photographed Technicolor England and a monochrome heaven, A Matter of Life and Death took the imaginative daring of jointly credited writer-producer-directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger to new heights.

David Niven plays a British airman who survives a plane crash and falls in love with an American radio operator (Kim Hunter), only to be summoned to the afterlife by a heavenly ‘Conductor’ (Marius Goring). But is heaven just a hallucination brought on by brain injury?

Powell and Pressburger layer breathtaking visual tricks on top of this whimsical premise, such as a celebrated point-of-view shot in which our hero’s eyelid closes over the camera lens. The film also works as a sly satire on Anglo-American relations at the end of WWII.

“There are more stunning ideas in this one film, concerning a mistake made in heaven about a WWII pilot who should be dead but isn’t, than the whole of British cinema can usually muster in a decade.” Nick James

“A most peculiar and potent cocktail of romance, theology, global bridge-building and national tub-thumping, this thoughtful drama about one pilot’s deferred mortality remains, if nothing else, a definitive monument to the power of Technicolor. The vivid imagery and the cineliterate style(s) deployed by a creative team at the top of their game express the film’s intricate worldview. It searingly conveys a world grappling with uncharted new places, trying to pick up the pieces after unimaginable calamity.” James Healy

Film	Year	Director
Daughters of the Dust	1991	Julie Dash
The Virgin Suicides	1999	Sofia Coppola
CHUNGKING EXPRESS	1994	Wong Kar Wai
Psycho	1960	Alfred Hitchcock
His Girl Friday	1939	Howard Hawks
Moonlight	2016	Barry Jenkins
The Colour of Pomegranates	1968	Sergei Paradjanov
A Matter of Life and Death	1946	Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Shatranj-e Baad	1976	Mohammad-Reza Aslani
Days of Heaven	1978	Terrence Malick

Anahit Behrooz

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