Michael Powell and Britain’s deeply conflicted attitude to cinema | Letter
I was privileged to act as consultant on David Hinton’s Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger, enthusiastically reviewed by Peter Bradshaw from the Berlin film festival (21 February). As welcome as Martin Scorsese’s heartfelt tribute and Bradshaw’s response are, it’s also important to challenge the claim that Michael Powell “had become an un-person in British cinema during the 60s”, after Peeping Tom.
Critics may have professed their shock, as they did about many provocative films of the era, but the truth is that Powell wanted to make films that went against the grain of the decade. Projects such as the kind of artistic experiments that Ken Russell was able to make for television – a first-person biopic of the composer Richard Strauss; a Kensington love story with Paul Scofield, based on a novel by William Sansom. And when he set his heart on a surreal adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in the 1970s, it’s hardly surprising that he could find no backers.
Derek Jarman, a longtime enthusiast for Powell’s work, would eventually make his ultra-low-budget Tempest in 1979, which was when Powell and Pressburger’s work began to be rediscovered in Britain, thanks to the BFI’s full-scale retrospective, later seen in New York. Jarman would help raise funds for the restoration of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, not achieved until 1985, by which time a new generation of film-makers, critics and audiences was discovering Powell and Pressburger.
Made in England offers an eloquent, superbly edited introduction to much of their work, but it can’t tell the whole story, which would involve probing Britain’s deeply conflicted attitude to cinema.
Prof Ian Christie
Birkbeck, University of London
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