They shared “written, produced, and directed by” credits, but native Briton Michael Powell mostly directed, and Emeric Pressburger, a Hungarian Jew driven out of the German film industry when Hitler rose to power, largely wrote the scripts. Together they were known as the Archers, a moniker that applied to the entire collective of talents working below the line on their films, including cinematographer Jack Cardiff and art director Alfred Junge. If you’ve been to a film exhibit at the Harry Ransom Center, which holds the latter’s collection, you may have seen some of his sketches foretelling the dynamo images to come – the scrolling stairway to the afterlife in existential romancer 1946’s A Matter of Life and Death, the sky-high Himalayas in 1947’s nuns-go-mad psychodrama Black Narcissus (joke’s on us: shot just outside London, the “mountains” were achieved via matte painting).
David Hinton’s biographical survey runs through not just these two high spots but the whole of the Archers’ breathtaking CV, providing useful context to their WWII run making the most artful propaganda films you ever did see (or maybe the most propagandistic art films?), then their increasing experimentation, and eventual gentlemen’s parting as their special brand of radical romanticism fell out of favor with a British moviegoing public getting hip to kitchen-sink realism.
But the title doesn’t tell the whole story. Perhaps the more accurate summation would be Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger and Their Impact on Martin Scorsese. That’s a clarification, and a bit of a complaint, too. An executive producer, Scorsese gets a “presented by” credit and is positioned front and center throughout. He opens the film in direct camera address, explaining his own intimate history with the filmmaking duo, and returns on the regular to add more commentary and point to the explicit influence of Powell and Pressburger films on his own pictures. (He also provided Hinton with footage and other materials from his personal archive.) For fans of the Archers and Scorsese both, it’s a giddy thrill to hear, say, of the direct line connecting the former’s The Red Shoes to the latter’s The Taxi Driver. But Scorsese’s outsized presence in the documentary – its very framework built around his relationship to Powell and Pressburger – ends up jamming an immovable object between viewer and subject. For someone who’s long loved the Archers, I felt pushed to the outs, craning my neck to get a better look at the guys the movie’s ostensibly about.
This article appears in August 2 • 2024.
