Original subtitles

But at my back I always hear time's winged chariot hurrying near.

And yonder all before us lie deserts of vast eternity.

Andy Marvel, what a marvel. What's your name?

Are you receiving me? Repeat. Are you receiving me?

Request your position. Come in, Lancaster.

The sublime British classic, A Matter of Life and Death,

begins with the camera panning through the solar system

before arriving in the burning shell of a doomed bomber in 1945.

At the controls is David Niven's British Squadron Leader Peter Carter,

relaying his final words to Kim Hunter's radio operator June.

In these fateful moments,

without having set eyes on each other, they fall in love.

He will plunge from the plane without a parachute and miraculously survive.

How does A Matter of Life and Death

embody the genius of Powell and Pressburger?

Powell and Pressburger, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger,

is one of the most unusual combinations

in British cinema, certainly, if not cinema full stop.

You've got a Hungarian Jew, Pressburger,

who fled to the UK from the Nazis,

and Michael Powell, a man of Kent,

who is steeped in traditional values,

working under Alexander Korda,

finding chemistry and going on to make a stream

of some of the most inventive, beautiful, wild films

I think that the world has ever seen,

and which are steeped, in one sense,

in a quintessentially sort of English-British tradition,

but at the same time have these wild stories

and immense sets of ideas that make them globally fascinating.

Powell and Pressburger make English films

about an England that only exists in the imagination.

They're beautiful because of that.

They're beautiful to people who are not English because of that.

These are very steeped in the ideas of Chaucer, Andrew Marvel,

who he quotes in the movie, and Shakespeare.

And it's this constant insistence on an inner life of England,

and if you think about it, at the moment of war,

this moment, people were on rationing,

didn't know whether the country was going to survive.

And Michael Powell and Pressburger

bring back this idea of this inner England.

And it's, it's immortal because it taps into the spirit of a people

that's kept the people going from the Conquest till now.

It's, the film is absolutely, I will use the word perfect,

but I'm going to go beyond that

because this film, every time you see it,

it gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.

It is just... and we use the word masterpiece for a lot of things,

this is a film that actually weaves together

the consciousness of a people.

It makes you when you watch it. That's how I feel about it.

Are you receiving me? Repeat. Are you receiving me?

Request your position. Come in, Lancaster.

You seem nice. I can't give you my position,

instruments gone, crew gone too,

all except Bob here, my sparks, he's dead.

The rest all bailed out on my orders. Time 0335, did you get that?

Crew bailed out 0335.

One of the things that's important about it,

and it's from the very beginning,

the opening scenes of the film, is its tone.

You'd think a film called A Matter of Life and Death

would be fairly serious.

It's actually conducted almost like a comedy.

You know, it's almost Noel Coward-ish

in the way they express themselves.

And I think that that is very significant

and it, it sorts of lets you know,

it gives you an entry point into the film,

so that even though it starts with a man jumping out of an aeroplane,

you know, without a parachute, going to almost certain death,

it's done with a sort of pragmatic, sort of stoical manner, almost...

Well, it makes you smile. I think that's part of the genius of it.

The people of Britain,

the people who would have been terrorised and forced to surrender,

they knew that every man, woman and child, in uniform or out,

would be Hitler's target in the onslaught

that might come at any moment.

They knew they had a job to do and not much time to do it in.

Powell and Pressburger also had this remarkable freedom,

given the constraints of the time, given rationing, given the budgets.

Everyone was so concerned in the British film industry

with sort of churning out wartime propaganda,

which Powell and Pressburger were asked to do,

but they did it in such a sort of interesting and unusual

and off-beat way, even in that period of the '40s,

that they just seemed to fly under the radar a bit.

And the stuff that they were allowed to make by J. Arthur Rank,

with The Archers, up until really The Red Shoes,

stands as this incredible moment of artistic freedom.

It just amazes me even now.

Like a Hollywood today would never let filmmakers

make such strange films with such innovative kind of ideas

and visual gambits in them.

There was a sense they were leading up to this film.

All the things they've done up to this point,

this is the great expression of all of the experimentation.

To London's Denham Film Studios comes a group of Canadian repats

to see how big movies are made in Great Britain's Hollywood.

On Sound Stage 5, a feature picture is in the making.

Produced by the famous team of Powell and Pressburger,

it is titled "A Matter of Life and Death".

On a giant moving staircase set costing £36,000,

the scene portrays a dying airman's idea of a court of justice

in the other world.

Michael Powell, the co-producer of the picture, plays host.

He directed the picture 49th Parallel in the Dominion

a few years ago.

The Canadian Army newsreel cameraman shooting this story

worked with him on that picture.

Oh, I always hoped there would be dogs.

Let's try and get the plot sorted out.

What actually happens in A Matter of Life and Death?

Well, it starts with the whole of the universe,

so that's a great setup,

this incredible sweeping shot of the universe,

and then to one of the greatest meet-cutes in romcom history,

which is a pilot on the doomed Lancaster, speaking over the radio

to an American girl in a US Air Force base,

who is trying to talk him down, and as they talk, they,

in a short period, five minutes, quite a long period of film

but a short period of time for two people,

they fall in love with each other's voices, conversation.

And that sets up the whole film. Critically that has to work.

At that... after that, the pilot, David Niven,

jumps out of his aeroplane and miraculously survives.

The next person he meets, after a brief dalliance

with a wonderful naked goatherd,

is the girl he's just been speaking to.

Hello. Hello yourself.

What's wrong?

You're June.

You're Peter.

How did you get here?

I'm glad you're safe.

What did you do? What happened? I don't know, I just don't know.

Are you hurt? My head feels a bit queer.

Well, there is a little cut in your hair. It's nothing much.

Oh, Peter, it was a cruel joke.

If it was, it was on me.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger reached for cosmic heights

with this, their 9th film, yet made the most intimate epic.

Released in 1946, the film is almost dizzying in what it encompasses.

A romance, a war story,

a mischievous comedy,

a timely celebration of Anglo-American relations,

and a vivid fantasy that teases us with a rational explanation.

I've been crying so ever since we said goodbye.

Don't cry, darling. Oh, Peter, darling.

91,716 invoiced, 91,715 checked in.

It's sort of like, where is this thing going?

Because obviously this plane is going down,

and this guy, there's a big hole in the plane,

and he shows you this hole with a dead man in it,

you think, all right, whoa, and where is he going to go?

He says, I'm getting out, I'm jumping out.

Without a parachute. Yeah. You are?!

And he does. So it's sort of set up

in a way where you don't know what's going to happen next.

That is one of the geniuses of the film

and how they were allowed to do that I have no idea,

but there it is.

Many love stories, particularly of this time,

would have followed a pattern of the obstacles

through the course of a declaration of love.

But the declaration of love happens right at the beginning of this.

They've not even seen each other. Yeah, this beautiful shared moment,

this flirtation and instant connection

that has to happen because he's doomed.

- She says, I could love a man like you, Peter. - Mm.

And so this idea that, you know, the love is never in question.

The only real obstacle to their love

is the fact that he might in fact be dead, right?

And so he has to spend the film

trying to convince the celestial court

that he deserves a chance at life, simply because he's in love.

And there's something that's so wrong-footing about that.

You're starting in a place

where that's not the central issue of the film.

The fact of their love is a given, really.

- You've been waiting all day for your pilot. - Yes, ma'am.

Over the Channel, we ran into this ruddy pea-souper.

Aha. Oh, excuse the language, ma'am.

But it was so thick, you could have stepped out

and walked about on it.

The skipper ordered everybody to bail out over the coast.

He knew his brolly, chute, had been written off.

It got a direct hit as he was bandaging me.

But he didn't tell the others.

I knew about it because I'd bought it by then.

I mean, I was... dead.

Carter has missed his rendezvous with the afterlife

due to a clerical error,

a dilemma that will culminate in a divine court case

to see whether he will be allowed to remain on Earth.

Visions that could equally be the result of a brain injury.

Once they've moved to the village

where he is going to stay with this doctor,

who suspects there's more to his story

than simply I've fallen out of a plane

and I've, I'm being summoned up to heaven.

He thinks that there could be a medical problem at foot here.

But when we meet the doctor,

the doctor is looking through a camera obscura at his village

like the eye of God itself.

There's "Is that necessary? Probably not

but it's wonderful" moments in this film.

OK, so we have life and death, heaven and earth,

we have huge amounts of romance and Britain and America.

So how did this film come about? How did they dream it up?

Well, the beauty of this...

I mean if you think about the Renaissance,

where people were given firm instructions from above

to do certain tasks and out of that comes

some of the great art of the world,

this film fits very much into that category.

Jack Beddington at the Ministry of Information

wanted a film that would convince Britain and America

that they were friends. The Cold War is beginning, really.

I mean, and that's one of the sly references in the opening sequence,

to a galaxy blowing up and someone saying

someone's messing around with the uranium bomb.

This is very much a film that's also about the Cold War

as much as it's about the Second World War.

US foreign policy during World War II

was around dismantling the British Empire.

So the British needed to secure the American allies, if you like,

and they wanted to make sure

America and Britain worked hand in hand.

So this film is about love between a British airman

and an American radio operator,

and the fight that takes place in the celestial court

between a traditional American and a traditional Brit,

over whether this should happen.

And it's about drawing the two nations together.

That's the instruction they got

but where they went with that was fantastical.

In the nation's movie capital,

Mary Pickford and Paramount British Production chief David Rose

give impetus to Bundles for Britain.

Mr Rose, before returning to his post in bombed London,

also sees Dorothy Lamour do her share.

In this mecca for entertainers from every corner of the world,

there are many linked by birth to the Empire's cause.

Britain's Merle Oberon uses spare dressing-room time to advantage.

Madeleine Carroll enlists Fred MacMurray.

Mm. Fun, then, Fred?

In Manhattan, cafe society's reported going big for the campaign.

Our cameraman found many a debutante hand bending to Britain's aid.

And so from East, West, North and South,

the bundles pile up for shipment out of New York.

Letters repeat one word — courage.

Even the youngsters send notes of cheer.

Miniature starlet Carolyn Lee shows the way.

Volunteer Bundles for Britain.

Off with the tide to help tide over a Britain under siege.

The film both laments the fallen and celebrates the living.

It is about science versus religion,

about what it means to be English, and to be American.

And ultimately about the power of love.

It is also about two filmmakers testing the limits of their medium,

a magisterial poetic work,

filled with ground-breaking visual effects,

things they could only have dreamed up.

What about... him?

Lincoln?

No, it's hardly fair to drag him in.

I don't believe he'd be prejudiced.

Plato.

How would you like to be defended by Plato?

Nobody knew more about reasoning than Plato.

He was 81 when he died.

He might be too old to think love important.

Do you think so?

Anyhow, Plato had very elementary ideas about love.

And it's sort of done in this really beautiful way of exploring

the humanity and the shared love and humanity

between these two people, and then also putting aside petty grievances

between these two nations.

There was a real sense in England at the time,

the Americans were latecomers to the war,

there was a lot of resentment.

There was quite a hostile attitude towards American GIs

in England at the time.

And so some of this also in the short term

was about kind of looking at those differences

and allowing the British soldier to get the American girl

instead of maybe the other way around.

And so there are kind of, on the micro and macro level,

in both intrapersonal politics of Brits and Americans,

as well as the kind of macro foreign policy

and, how do we go forward into the future in our shared democracy?

What do we do with the future that we've now won?

Urm, you know, it has things to say on both of those levels, I think.

And technically I think one of the clever things

is that they, they do it by reversing the norms.

In other ways, as you said, it would be normally it was the GI

who took a British bride and took her back to the States,

but this is the other way around.

And similarly on a bigger scale,

heaven would have been represented, or the other world,

would have been represented by colour

and the real world would have been sort of black and white

because they do it the other way around.

You know, the Wizard of Oz does it in reverse.

They've actually turned it on its head.

Because Powell said, you know, we live in a world of colour.

It's very subtle as well, that court-room sequence.

My late father was here,

stationed here in World War II as a very young man,

and those, those guys sitting there, American soldiers, are my dad.

And what is so subtle about it, and I love the court-room scene,

because, yes, he is saying we are together,

but he's also saying very gently,

look at the country, look very, very carefully at the country.

Look how it is, and he does it in a very cool way,

and I mean cool as in cool.

So they play beebop, he plays beebop.

The voice of America in 1945.

♪ Shoo, shoo shoo, baby

♪ Shoo shoo shoo, baby ♪

And he shows all of the different entities of the United States,

to let an American audience know we know you, we know you,

we're not silly, we're not romantic, we know you.

And so we're going to show you you,

which you could not show in an American film.

So this is what, to me...

I don't even know how they got it released in America,

because of that. It is just a mighty piece of work in that sense.

They also in that sequence, they also show British people

that they are not necessarily beloved by the world.

So they will haul out all of the people of the world

who have a grievance against the British and British Empire,

which I think is, for quite a conservative filmmaker

like Michael Powell, and at that particular time in British history,

the audacity to say... It is, it's pretty ballsy that, isn't it?

- Yeah. - But he did it before, remember, in another film.

He's, he's, he's very aware of the fact that

England is his home,

it's a beautiful place, but it isn't perfect.

Endlessly re-watchable, endlessly fascinating.

A Matter of Life and Death is a feat of cinematic daring.

Come back!

Peter, Peter, come back!

Peter, Peter, come back!

Peter. Peter, come back.

Peter, Peter.

Peter, my darling, come back to me.

Remarkably, the film is based on the true story of a bomber pilot,

who jettisoned from a burning plane without a parachute, and survived.

However, Pressburger's ingenious script

dances between reality and fantasy,

a metaphysical tale of the pilot who misses his heavenly roll call,

or the earthly survivor who may be hallucinating.

With the Ministry of Information insisting Powell and Pressburger

help promote Anglo-American relations,

they added the central romance with an American radio operator.

The film teases us with the idea of reality and unreality,

- and it's based on a true story, isn't it, in some respects? - Yeah.

Yeah, it's based on, well, it's based on sort of two true stories.

I mean, there are a few examples of pilots falling out of planes,

or, you know, leaving planes without parachutes, and surviving.

So that was kind of, you know, in the knowledge.

But there is another source, which was a Hungarian novel by Frigyes,

who was a writer and he had undergone brain surgery

and at that time he was awake when you had this particular operation,

and he hallucinated and had sort of very weird dreams,

awake, while it was happening,

and wrote it, included it in a novel.

Emeric Pressburger had that novel,

and he gave it to Michael Powell

because it was translated into English,

and that was the basis for

the kind of neurological issue for the script.

And so they sort of somehow welded it together,

Pressburger mainly, of course. He did all the writing.

But it was a gift because it gave them

that opportunity to play with fantasy and reality,

rationality, and irrationality,

in the context of a love story.

Yeah, because it could all be going on

- in the head of David Niven's character. - Yeah, yeah.

But when the book...

when the book lands up in his pocket, the chess book,

that's, that's Powell saying, no, no, no, no, no,

this is real, you know, this is in his pocket.

If you think he's hallucinating, the film says he's not,

because here comes that book, it's a chess book,

and Niven loved chess, so, and he was a great chess-player,

so in it comes, and you know you have to then go back and think,

whoa, what's actually happening here?

So, is this a fantasy film or is it only pretending to be a fantasy film?

I think Powell and Pressburger want to sort of, or the audience,

to sort of have their cake and eat it too

in that there is enough there with the doctor character,

played by Roger Livesey,

with the kind of various neurological disorders

that they looked at as research,

to say that Peter Carter

is suffering from some sort of brain damage,

- or this is a death dream or a hallucination. - PTSD, or...

Yeah. A lot of things you can look at and clues within the film,

even the fact there is a brain surgeon

who appears in the celestial court and is played by the same actor.

So you can, you can put that all together if you choose to.

On the flip side, it seems to me often that Powell and Pressburger

are intentionally leaning towards the tender-hearted, the poetic.

The whole thing of Carter is that he's an aspiring poet and, you know,

the way that that love is proven in the celestial court

is by capturing a tear on a rose.

So we're also looking at something which is favouring

the sensitive and the irrational, I think.

So personally I think it enjoys the fact that the audience member

may not be sure where to land.

Look, don't let anybody fool you into giving up this case.

You've been allowed to appeal, promised a fair trial.

Don't give in to anybody, promise? I've got no counsel.

We'll find one. They can't start your trial without counsel.

They might appoint some stooge. Nonsense.

Or let it go by default. I tell you we'll find somebody.

They can't star till then. Nobody famous.

No, that would be the worst thing we could do.

The casting is impeccable.

In the role that made his name,

David Niven brings pathos to the British Squadron Leader

resisting the call of the afterlife.

American actress Kim Hunter gives him the reason to remain earthbound.

Powell and Pressburger regular Roger Livesey

features as the rational doctor treating Carter,

a whimsical Marius Goring as the angelic conductor

who has misplaced him,

and a stern Raymond Massey as the American prosecutor

in the film's climactic tribunal.

The counsel for the defence will take its place.

Now we must talk about David Niven,

because the film is unthinkable without him.

I think for me David Niven is the romantic ideal

of a heroic Englishman.

The shearling jacket, the moustache,

the kind of vulnerability combined with a real romanticism,

his quoting Sir Walter Raleigh

as he is about to jump parachute-less from this bomber,

but also kind of having that stoic stiff upper lip,

must get on with things, attitude.

He's just, he's just so wonderful in this role, and he's so charming.

But also he's, at this point in his life,

he is an actor who has also been a soldier.

So he was, his Hollywood career started before the Second World War,

he was doing quite well,

starring in The Charge of the Light Brigade with Errol Flynn,

and as soon as war is declared, he stops, goes back home,

and joins the military.

So he's the very first of the Hollywood Brits to go right,

I'm going to go and fight for my country and...

and everyone in Britain knows,

so they know that he's a warrior as well as an actor.

He's really been away from the screen,

he's done a few films,

he's been away for roughly six years.

- Six years. - So this is his comeback, and it's an amazing comeback.

- And he is so sort of symbolically British, isn't he? - Yes.

He has that kind of rather transcendent level,

which I know Powell would have tuned into.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. He's just got the sort of, the right carriage.

He's got the right attitude,

he's got the right kind of way of addressing things,

and he's got the right history, you know,

and a lot of people would have known that history.

Towards the beginning of the war when his career in Hollywood

was really starting to pick up and, you know,

as you said, you know, Dawn Patrol,

and his quintessential one at that time was Raffles,

which kind of brought together all his elements

into this sort of slightly rogue-ish...

Very debonair. Very debonair.

And I think that was the perfect sort of thing for him,

to be led, finally, into A Matter of Life and Death.

I told Peter. What?

Who you are, what you are.

Mmm, tall order. And I told you all about him.

Has she read your poems? What poems?

Well, didn't you know, this is Peter Carter.

I didn't know. We hadn't got around to that yet.

I haven't much modern stuff in my library. You're there.

- Oh, good. - I like your point of viewand I like your English,

- and I hope we shall have some talks together. - So do I.

Now Kim Hunter is comparatively unknown at this point, isn't she?

And, you know, I watched the film, certainly the first time,

and she comes on and you think, oh, I'd love it to be Deborah Kerr,

love it to be traditional Michael Powell, the beautiful face and voice.

Yet you watch that opening scene again,

and I think this is all about Kim Hunter.

She's superb, she sort of keeps it going,

she punctuates the potential sentimentality of that moment.

Totally. She brings a sort of reality to it.

But she... How was she discovered for the film?

She was this... Well, in America,

she was a reasonably distinguished stage actress.

She had started in film, she had small parts in about four or five.

I mean, I think the most impressive film

she had made up to this point was The Seventh Victim,

a Val Lewton movie, but it was Hitchcock

who suggested to Michael Powell when they went over.

They were going to look at somebody else, an actress called Betty Field.

Alfred Hitchcock said, I think you should look at this Kim Hunter.

He hadn't cast her in anything,

but he was using her to read lines off camera

for Ingrid Bergman, in Spellbound,

a Bergman screen test actually,

and he introduced them, and Powell and Pressburger,

I mean, they almost took one look at her, spoke to her

and said, she's the one. I mean, she carries the film

and she does it in a way where you don't realise she's doing it.

She pulls of the threads of the film together

and when you first see the film you think it's a Niven film.

She is so generous in the way she performs

and allows him to be the movie star and sort of moves around him.

But drives everything forwards

in a way that I think is very skilful and very,

very much a stage actor playing for the team.

And building a great movie.

Well, look at that freeze moment in the ping-pong, table tennis thing.

Look how much Michael Powell freezes her, look what she looks like.

She's going to kill, kill Livesey if she gets the next shot.

He... and he shows her like that, he doesn't show the one afterward,

he shows her with a lion face and this is a table tennis match, OK?

And he could have chosen any shot, any way to show who she was.

And he shows her right there.

She's going to, she's going to kill for this guy,

and she demonstrates it toward the end,

where, I mean, I'm his, I'm going to die for him if I have to do that.

Now if something anchors it in Powell and Pressburger tradition,

it's the presence of Roger Livesey as the doctor.

His wonderful voice, his incredible presence,

he sort of gives it a reassuring quality, doesn't he?

Roger Livesey has also got this quite chameleonic quality.

Like he's unmistakeable in his carriage and his mien,

but when you see him in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp,

for instance, it's just this remarkable change in him over time

and not just physically, someone who is ageing,

but in terms of what life does to you,

the ways in which he's been worn down by melancholy, pride, regret,

and although it's a much smaller role here,

it also has a slightly dual quality, right,

because he's this very cocksure, certain, rational man of science

and medicine, and then he has to enter another plane

where he uses that reason and that kind of,

the moral force of his intellect, in a very, very different way.

Now the strangest and perhaps phoniest character

is Marius Goring, I think he's Conductor 71,

I think is his character name. He is essentially the angel,

although it's not specific in the film,

and he is the guy who has missed David Niven.

It was his job to escort him to heaven.

And he's now got to sort of make up for it.

But he, he seems to be on a different wavelength to everyone else.

Well, it's... Well, he's, you know, he's a French aristocrat

who lost his head and he comes on as a fop. I mean a dandy.

Lots of make-up, sort of outrageous clothes, outrageous accent.

- Goring actually wanted to play Peter Carter. - You can imagine.

He petitioned Powell and Pressburger to play it,

and they said, no, they said you've got, you know, you've got to play...

And they said, if you don't do it, we'll get Peter Ustinov to play it.

Kind of thought, oh, well, perhaps I'd better.

And he does a magnificent job of it.

He's so funny. He gets of course the, you know,

one of the great lines in the film,

which is as he moves from the other world,

which is in black and white, holding a rose,

and it turns into Technicolor.

He looks at the rose, which has gone pink,

and says, "One is starved of Technicolor up there."

- Up there. - It could be an ad-lib. - The legend has it as an ad-lib.

The legend is that he improvised that line,

and you know the next bit, which is that if you look at it,

the words don't quite match his lip movements.

And Michael Powell thought that it was a great line,

but because there was a Technicolor expert on the film at all times,

monitoring Jack Cardiff, who says that will only work

if you use the word Technicolor.

So they dubbed in that we have, you know,

one is starved of Technicolor up there.

As opposed to colour. A meta joke in a film from 1946.

One is starved for Technicolor up there.

- Being taken for a ride, am I, by any chance? - What a suggestion.

Take that bit of barley sugar away. I don't like your suggestions.

- I think I'll go back before it's too late. - Peter. Peter.

Peter! Peter!

Peter, this way, come back!

Peter!

Peter! Come back!

A Matter of Life and Death is a work of thematic and visual wonders.

The likes of cinematographer Jack Cardiff,

and production designer Alfred Junge,

outdid themselves depicting the afterlife in a pearly monochrome,

and earth in luscious, almost surreal Technicolor.

The celebrated 106-step motorised stairway to heaven

was constructed with the help of the same engineers

as the London Underground.

But we should talk about someone very British,

and that is the genius of cinematographer Jack Cardiff.

You know, Powell and Pressburger were the minds behind it all,

but Cardiff created the look of this film,

which is so extraordinary, you know, he is, you know,

the Third Musketeer in a sense. Yeah.

He takes fantasy and turns it into something,

well, you know, he makes the pragmatic choices,

this absolute whizz with the camera

but also someone who understood the kind of orange light

that would be cast on Niven's face, how moving that looks,

it's the light of the fire on his, you know, crashing plane.

or the way that, you know, he needed to

breathe onto his camera lens to create fog,

this incredible combination of forward planning,

and well thought out shots,

and also just ingenuity in the moment,

this resourcefulness that he had.

Because the demands from his director

were extraordinary. "I want half the film in monochrome

and I want half the film in lush Technicolor."

But he filmed heaven or the other world,

wherever we're placing it, in, on Technicolor film,

but with the colour drained from it

so that they could A, blend together more successfully

as a single piece of film, but also so when the two worlds merged,

gradually you would add a layer of colour as the two films,

so the transition from black and white to colour was gradual.

But as a result, that's why the other world has this pearly sheen.

It's not black and white,

it's Technicolor with colour leached out

and it's just incredible. It is incredible.

And he can do that in sort of little shadings,

you know, the table tennis scene, for example,

it's got slightly shaded in yellow.

Am I seeing things? But no, it's deliberate, it's, you know,

it is his ability not only technically,

and the reason that he became able to do

and was trusted by Technicolor, which was relatively new,

I think it was that when he went to his audition or his interview,

he didn't talk about film at all, he talked about Vermeer and Caravaggio,

and all those painters who used light in very interesting ways,

and then persuaded him that he should be their man on the spot.

And obviously the other great behind the camera personality

or sort of artistic genius is production designer Alfred Junge,

because he is responsible not only for this, the earthly delights,

but that extraordinary Fritz Lang-esque futurescape

if you want, of the other place.

So Junge worked at UFA Berlin before the war, which of course

was the great purveyor of the sort of German Expressionist films,

and had a very good understanding of not only how to use black and white,

but how to use angles, shadows, to create geometric space,

to use negative space, and all of that comes hugely through

particularly the depiction of the afterlife in this film,

which has this kind of grandiosity,

but also this cold, sterile kind of feel to it.

That it's beautiful but in an unnerving and quite cold way.

And so you see outlines of things like Fritz Lang's Metropolis,

you see, I think, the British adaptation

of H.G. Wells's Things to Come from the 1930s,

which has a similar look.

And that's all down to Junge and his incredible drawings,

obviously his sketches of the production.

And again, like Cardiff, he was set these unbelievable challenges.

To create this stairway to heaven,

which is a mighty piece of physical accomplishment, isn't it,

physical engineering.

Well, it's also the staircase is the thing that breaks, it's the thing,

it's the expression of the afterlife

that cannot physically function when true love reveals itself.

So there's the wonderful moment where the staircase,

which appears to be able to move through time and space,

but it's going down into the operating theatre,

and when June says, "I'm prepared to sacrifice my life for this man"

and gets onto the staircase. It starts to go away,

and you're thinking that she's going to go,

and suddenly the staircase judders and halts,

and that's the moment that the staircase itself

makes the final decision.

Recognised as a masterpiece,

the meaning of A Matter of Life and Death

is still being discussed today.

When it was released in 1946,

it offered solace to those grieving loved ones,

but there is also a sense of renewal.

It speaks to any age, transcending time.

There is no other film like it, in every sense life-affirming,

A Matter of Life and Death

is one of the great monuments to the potential of cinema.

Where do we see this film in terms of the legacy of Powell and Pressburger?

Is it their greatest moment, or is that a foolish thing to ask?

I mean, some people may say The Red Shoes,

some people may say Black Narcissus, the film to follow.

Looking at filmmakers who lean towards the darker Black Narcissus

sort of speaks to that, right, that to me is at least on the face of it,

if you look at Scorsese's work, which is about obsession,

and repression and sort of sexual urges, religion,

you can see all of that more clearly in Black Narcissus

than you can in A Matter of Life and Death.

But I think it's A Matter of Life and Death for me certainly,

which just speaks to this moment of wish fulfilment,

without, as you say, ever being kind of sentimental

or pandering to an audience,

that feels beautiful and unique and it's sort of an insane film,

there's no reason why it should work.

It should be silly, really, the way that it's pitched.

But you always, you take it seriously right from the start

and I just think that's amazing. I think no-one has before or since

made a film like this in any way. I mean, no-one comes close to this.

This was a moment of whatever magic there was in the water

when they made it, they created something unique,

something truly of cinema and, in a way, occasionally, about cinema.

But incredibly cinematic,

where they understand the scope of the screen, storytelling,

the ability to play with the fantasy and reality,

the practical and the metaphysical, and deal with horror and hope.

And it's just... No-one's done anything on this scale,

with this level of creativity.

Everything in it is a first,

- and it's also the only, in many cases. - The last. Yeah.

I couldn't agree more. I think the film is completely unique,

and universal in its message, actually, the messages,

and I doubt very much if anybody will ever be able to equal it.

I agree.

And even though for me,

Black Narcissus is, I mean, OK,

you can talk about it, it's so stunning, and The Red Shoes,

but this film made the money, and it is what it is,

because the ordinary person could talk about this film.

You could talk about the thing that's in it,

and it's about their love story, and you can talk about that.

And that they understood that, that they knew that that would happen,

and that they intended that to happen,

and then we can talk about all of this,

all of it that goes into making that love conquers death,

which is the greatest love conquers death film of all time.

Nothing will top this film, nothing,

in that thing and people, people believe it.

That's what keeps us going as human beings, we believe that.

We believe that.

I think you're right.

I think that Pressburger's greatest film

was The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp,

that was the... he could consider that his film

because it is, you know,

it's all about the war and Britishness, but it's real.

This one, A Matter of Life and Death, is Powell's greatest film

because it allowed him to take flight into a fantasy,

but a legitimate fantasy because of that ambivalence.

And Powell had always wanted to do that.

I mean, he started off in silent films making fantasy films,

or being involved with them.

And when he worked on Alexander Korda's Thief of Baghdad,

he was one of three directors on that,

it opened his eyes to the possibility of going beyond reality.

And I think he had probably been itching to do this for years.

Absolutely.

To me, you know, the most extraordinary films

are the ones I can't quite grasp.

You know, they are, they're sort of smoke from a candle.

And this embodies that idea, to me.

I watched it again obviously,

and I, it was like watching it for the first time.

I hadn't... I had forgotten all these incredible things it does.

And I proudly say I don't understand it fully,

but I am so moved by it, and I think that's art,

and I think that's greatness.

That is the essence of Powell and Pressburger.

There's something spiritual going on.

Hello. Hello.

We won. I know, darling.

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