I did not make it to the Brattle's screening of A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
I did. Excellent short speech by Thelma Schoonmaker (filmed earlier today in New York): she said she would have gone up that stairway for Michael Powell, as he would have for her. She said that the war freed Powell and Pressburger to do as they wished: all they were asked, she said, was to make something good for morale; and in this case, something good for Anglo-American relations, which reaction to the war had soured. ("Over-paid, over-sexed, and Over Here.") The black-and-white of heaven, she said, was actually monochrome: clever Jack Cardiff filmed it in technicolor, then printed it without dye. If you see a good print, she said, it's pearly.
Well, this wasn't a print, but 4K.
The restoration did look gorgeous, though——especially the beach. All beautifully acted, wittily written, and Archerly askew. No one else would have thought of those lovely mischievous bits: the goat boy; Conductor 71; the great theatre of heaven dwindling into a galaxy, tinting as it shrank; and the vicar rehearsing A Midsummer Night's Dream with GIs; and the camera obscura, with our doctor as benevolent spy. The Archers always were drawn to the act of gazing. And of course, the--what do you call a freeze-frame that ghosts can walk around in?--the stopped tsble-tennis match, the stopped neurosurgery is form of spying. It turns humans into art, at once vulnerable, comic, and unsettling. An artform for the dead to smile at.
I think their brief from the government, to bring England and America “into a mountain of affection th'one with th'other" did make the trial scenes rather too preachy. But when the lights went up, I found the young couple behind me blown away. "Seventy years old!" she said. I told them to go out and watch them all.
no subject
I did. Excellent short speech by Thelma Schoonmaker (filmed earlier today in New York): she said she would have gone up that stairway for Michael Powell, as he would have for her. She said that the war freed Powell and Pressburger to do as they wished: all they were asked, she said, was to make something good for morale; and in this case, something good for Anglo-American relations, which reaction to the war had soured. ("Over-paid, over-sexed, and Over Here.") The black-and-white of heaven, she said, was actually monochrome: clever Jack Cardiff filmed it in technicolor, then printed it without dye. If you see a good print, she said, it's pearly.
Well, this wasn't a print, but 4K.
The restoration did look gorgeous, though——especially the beach. All beautifully acted, wittily written, and Archerly askew. No one else would have thought of those lovely mischievous bits: the goat boy; Conductor 71; the great theatre of heaven dwindling into a galaxy, tinting as it shrank; and the vicar rehearsing A Midsummer Night's Dream with GIs; and the camera obscura, with our doctor as benevolent spy. The Archers always were drawn to the act of gazing. And of course, the--what do you call a freeze-frame that ghosts can walk around in?--the stopped tsble-tennis match, the stopped neurosurgery is form of spying. It turns humans into art, at once vulnerable, comic, and unsettling. An artform for the dead to smile at.
I think their brief from the government, to bring England and America “into a mountain of affection th'one with th'other" did make the trial scenes rather too preachy. But when the lights went up, I found the young couple behind me blown away. "Seventy years old!" she said. I told them to go out and watch them all.
Nine