Archive for Downsizer For an ethical approach to consumption
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Erikht
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A Canterbury TaleI saw this Powell and Pressburger classic again today - with a rather good commentary track (it was Criterion's). This is a film that I think many of you will appreciate, both for it's quality and it's philosophy.
The film starts with a band of pilgrims going to Canterbury in Medieval times (or at least very early renaissance and then shows a nobleman hunting with his falcon. The falcon flies high, takes a swing, and returns as a spitfire. We are back in the present (1943, the film was first screened in 1944), and we start to understand that this film is about modern pilgrims.
The film is the third of the four wartime films made by Powell and Pressburger, better known as The Archers. As relatively independent producers, they made some of the best films made in Britain during the forties and fifties. But A Canterbury Tale has some of the best Cinematography that I have ever seen (another Powell and Pressburger film, The Red Shoes, is possibly better). Also, as a wartime production, A Canterbury Tale plays on the emotional strings in a very special way. The meeting between the American sergeant and the local Englishmen was extremely idealised, but did nevertheless show that the two peoples was brought together by more than a common language.
The film also has some rather peculiar characters - foremost among them Mr. Colepepper, the gentleman farmer and naturalist, who has books on organic farming in his study and with a keen interest in local history (and yes, that is Lady Attenborough, or Sheila Sim as her name was then).
A note: Powell and Pressburger was not allowed to film inside the Cathedral (they managed to take one sneak shot of the cealing in the Cathedral), so the entire scene inside the Cathedral is shot on sets, or simply by using photographs.
As a nifty piece of wartime propaganda, this is a very, very English film (even if half the staff, among them the scriptwriter Emerich Pressburger, was from the continent and had earlier worked at UFA). I think many of you will enjoy it from that fact alone.
The version to buy is the Criterion Collection version. If you do not have a multi region DVD player, go for The Silver Collection edition.
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Gervase
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Thank you for that timely nudge, Erikht - I'm a great fan of Powell and Pressburger's films, and haven't seen the A Canterbury Tale for years.
On the subject of P&P, It's always saddened me that 'Colonel Blimp' is such a derogatory phrase, when their colonel was a much more nuanced and poignant character.
I'm a sucker for that whole era of film-making; essentially (ludicrously even) optimistic, generally left-ish in views and yet from a time distant enough to appeal to the innate conservatism in many of us.
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Erikht
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"The life and Death of Colonel Blimp" is off course a wonderful movie, but the character Colonel Blimp was well established before the war as just the type you mentioned; Jingoistic, extremely conservative, very colonial. In many ways, the term was already derogatory, and was used a bit by the Germans as wartime propaganda (he would be a very good Lord Haw-Haw, if he just wasn't so nationalisticly British, or what?). What Powell & Pressburger does is tackling that propaganda head on.
Colonel Blimp also stars the Austrian actor Anton Walbrook as the German officer Theodor Kretschmar-Schuldorff. Walbrook had played in the first wartime movie of P & P, the 49th paralell, as a Canadian-German religious leader who tells the German submarine crew - on the run in Canada - that Morality and humanity is more important than blood and nationality (the German leutenant was the same actor who played Colpepper in A Canterbury Tale). In Colonel Blimp, he tells Clive Candy that his ideas of gentlemanly conduct in war is now obsolete, and that the nazis must be crushed with all methods, as they will be more than willing to use those methods themselves. Churchill, who didn't like the film one little bit (maybe it hit him at home?), went so far as to give Walbrook his mind in Walbrooks changing room during filming. Walbrook, very cool, told Churchill that "No other country that Britain could make a movie like this in a time like this, and that is a sign of quality" (Colonel Blimp was made in 1943).
What I should say is that the Criterion edition of Colonel Blimp has some of the original Colonel Blimp cartoons as extra material, so if you have a region free player, that is the one to own. Also, if some of you have not yet seen "The Red Shoes" by P & P, wait a little longer. Powell's widow and Martin Scorsese has been working on a new restoration of that film, which is being finished about now, and is absolutetly stunning in colour, as far as I have seen from stills.
The 30-ties and 40-ties was a great time for filmmaking, and I must admit that it is the time before the mid 50-ties that I most appreciate when it comes to film.
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