‘Made In England: The Films Of Powell And Pressburger’ Review: Scorsese Pays Tribute To British Cinema’s Visionaries – Berlin Film Festival
21.02.2024 - 15:25
/ deadline.com
It’s not often that a doc about the transformative power of cinema will deliberately use bad clips of the movies it’s talking about, but that’s part of the point of this insightful, sprawling film, corralled by director David Hinton. Though the masterpieces made by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger at the height of their big-screen, Technicolor powers were visually impeccable, their subversive emotional power could still pack a punch through a 16-inch TV screen, even from the most scratched, butchered, and washed-out black-and-white prints.
This is, famously, how the young Martin Scorsese discovered The Archers (as the pairing styled themselves), and in this lengthy discourse he gets to position them both as an influence on his own movies and as unsung heroes in the history of world cinema. Now, there are plenty of people who will immediately say that Powell and Pressburger have actually been sung quite a bit, and this film doesn’t really reveal anything new in that regard. But it does redress a balance, emphasizing how they never heard that praise until they were in the last reels of their lifetimes. Being stoic, they accepted that; in the film’s final moments, Powell even smiles, asking, “When did the British ever accept their great men?”
Scorsese is our tour guide here, and he never hands over the reins. There are no talking heads — not even his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker, who met Powell through Scorsese and subsequently married him — and Powell and Pressburger aficionados will recognize a lot of the footage, notably from British TV’s The South Bank Show, which aired Hinton’s unforgettable special about Powell alone in 1986. Instead, what we have here is a director’s commentary on an entire career, and
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