A bewitched reality
Chris Petit
A LIFE IN MOVIES by Michael Powell Heinemann, £15.95 Michael Powell was born in 1905 and so grew up with the cinema. The industry was barely a decade old when he joined and he worked through each of its great periods: silent, sound, colour. For this alone his autobiography is valuable. It ends prematurely in 1949 when, it could be argued, Powell had achieved everything, with the exception of Peeping Torn, he'd set out to do. Although he worked through the 1950s, he was unfashionable by the 1960s and his career as a British director was typical only in that it ended early. He has every right to be bitter after a quarter of a century in which to brood. Yet he is not. Powell started when cinema was in its innocence and perhaps some of it rubbed off because he bears no grudges. Certainly his films however technically ambitious always retained a little of the naivete of those silent days. Powell always insisted on putting the sense of the story into the pictures and even without a soundtrack his movies would still make sense, unlike most. Along with his friend and rival Alfred Hitchcock, he is the most accomp- lished film director this country has pro- duced.
That Powell managed to escape his destiny in the world of some middle-class profession was largely thanks to the bad example of his father. Powell senior was footloose and selfish, an adventurer and gambler who deserted the family farm in Kent for the pleasures of France (he had one hotel at Chantilly for the racing, another at Cap Ferrat for the winter season) and through him young Powell was introduced to a bunch of film-makers in Nice. That Powell never fulfilled his ob- vious destiny in movies by going like many of his British colleagues to America, whose cinema he openly preferred, was probably because of his mother who stayed in England after her husband's defection and instilled in her son, with whom she shared a lifelong attachment, a deep love of his native landscape. Her early influence shaped Powell's work and gave it a lasting value: no other English film-maker has explored the British countryside so thor- oughly and as a topographer he is without peer. A sense of place and his remarkable recall make much of this book, in particu- lar his Kent childhood, extraordinarily haunting and precise.
Powell had three early qualities that would serve him well in his profession: good memory, a knack of seeking out others more colourful than himself, and a passion for lists. The one illustration in the book is a list, typical in its thoroughness, for a boyhood camping trip. From an early age Powell was a great organiser (when he wasn't daydreaming). Although he claims not to be a practical man he was clever enough to realise that much of the skill in his job lay in organising others. He relished the strategies of film-making. 'Prepare a filM like a battle,' wrote the French direc- tor Robert Bresson, who also advised to pay heed, and Powell's anecdotes support both, to what happens in the junctures: `The great battles . . . are nearly always waged at the points of intersection of the staff maps.' Thus the crucial moment for Powell's film The Spy in Black came long before the cameras turned when the studio boss Alexander Korda stalled a squabble between Powell, the producer and the writer (soon to be fired) by putting Powell together with Emeric Pressburger, an Hungarian refugee who became Powell's constant collaborator (to the extent of sharing producer, writer and director cre- dits) for the next 16 years.
Powell, who throughout his book stres- ses the importance of collaboration, im- mediately realised that Pressburger under- stood how scripts needed to work: if necessary chuck out the novel and keep only the title, which is just what they did with The Spy in Black. This new part- nership came as an enormous relief to Powell who was never entirely at home in the English cinema which seemed stuffy and suburban after his cosmopolitan apprenticeship in the south of France where the great silent director Rex Ingram had given him a taste for the bizarre. Powell frequently opposed what English cinema had to say precisely because it tried to say too much and show too little. Pressburger led Powell away from the pitfalls of class and realism, and encour- aged him to let his imagination run. Their work together became increasingly daring.
Pressburger in particular and the second world war in general gave Powell a purpose and direction he had hitherto lacked. In answer to the call to arms Powell formed his own army and fought his own cam- paigns, most of them as arduous as any in the actual theatre of war, and if Powell himself didn't come under fire he was prepared to risk his life to get the shot he needed; his films are always brave. Work- ing for the Ministry of Information and ostensibly producing propaganda material, Powell and Pressburger in fact spent the next six years making the most individual and sustained collection of movies to emerge anywhere in the world from that period: Contraband, 49th Parallel, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Canterbury Tale, I Know Where I'm Going and A Matter of Life and Death. While most propaganda of the time stressed the isola- tion of the moment Powell and Pressbur- ger's projects were defiantly international and remarkable for an emphasis on con- tinuity rather than rupture. Thus Colonel Blimp concentrated on the lifelong friendship between a German and an Englishman (which incurred Churchill's wrath and probably cost Powell a knight- hood); A Canterbury Tale dealt im- mediately with Anglo-American relations and more searchingly with a mystical En- glish landscape; and A Matter of Life and Death, their most ambitious project, opened with a shot of the universe and proceeded to shuttle a bomber pilot be- tween this life and the afterworld.
Powell is now 81 and writing towards the close of his life: 'If I am spared, I shall tell the rest . . .' One hopes so. This immense- ly detailed book (no technician too insigni- ficant to remember) is an essential sum- mary of the first ages of cinema. Too little of worth has been written by its practition- ers: Louise Brooks, Buriuel, Hitchcock by Truffaut, Godard come to mind, and now Powell. Cinema needs chronicles like his, capable of explaining something of the mysterious process that goes into the busi- ness of making movies.
The only aspect left undone is Powell's verdict on himself. Was he an artist or a craftsman? Both, he'd probably answer, but the question was never fully resolved by his career. He never became the seam- less entertainer that Hitchcock did. On the other hand, he lacked the single-minded vision of Buriuel or Bresson, probably because he was too aware of others' contributions to his work. That said, a bad Powell film (and there aren't many) is still more interesting than a good film by many lesser directors. His greatest gift to cinema was an ability to create, in Bresson's phrase, 'A bewitched reality'.
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