Art, Life and Death: Three Films by The Archers

The third film in the College of St. Scholastica’s “Art, Life and Death” series is the 1946 British fantasy romantic drama A Matter of Life and Death, introduced by CSS professor Nathan Carroll.

World War II Royal Air Force pilot Peter Carter crashes, but not before falling in love with June, American radio operator. However, it turns out Carter’s guide to the ‘Other
World’ missed him in the dense English fog. Carter finds June, but is soon ordered to leave for the ‘Other World.’ Refusing, Carter requests a trial to stay with June. Meanwhile on Earth, a progressive doctor believes Carter is hallucinating, suggesting brain surgery. This operation is paralleled with Carter’s heavenly trial as he struggles for life, love and sanity.

“The Archers” was a unique filmmaking partnership formed by British film director Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, a Hungarian writer who fled Nazi Germany and emigrated to England. Powell worked through the 1920s learning his craft by way of creating a series of short “quota quickies,” before being matched up with Pressburger by legendary film producer Alexander Korda. From the mid-1930s through the mid-1950s the two were inseparable as a creative team, creating their own production company, The Archers, and collaborating on some of Britain’s most renowned films of the period. Along with a regular troupe of actors, Director of Photography Jack Cardiff, Production Designer Alfred Junge and Art Director Hein Heckroth, The Archers’ cinema embraced fantasy, subjectivity and artificiality as ironic means to create what Powell termed “Total Cinema,” a concept born in the search for artistic truth. Often bathed in three-strip Technicolor and staged with sublime effects, their regularly astonishing films of this period include the three chosen for this film festival.