A Matter of Life and Death (U)
Michael Powell's own favourite, "a film with incredible
self-possession, at once a playful miniature of innocent
love and grandiose epic" The Guardian
Directors: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Starring: David Niven, Kim Hunter, Raymond Massey, Marius Goring, Roger Livesey
UK, 1946, 1 hour 44 minutes
Fri 20 March 8.00pm - Ledbury Film Club / Ledbury Market Theatre
A WW2 British fighter pilot shot down in flames over the English Channel spends his last moments quoting love poetry to a young American wireless operator whom he's never met. He ends up arguing for his life (and for love) in an austere heaven peopled by Pilgrim Fathers and frivolous French aristocrats alike. Imaginative, witty and subversive in its sudden switches from glorious Technicolor to otherworldly black and white, from wartime Britain to an eerie parallel existence, like many Powell and Pressburger films it somehow manages to put its finger on what it means to be quintessentially British.
External Links: Powell and Pressburger Pages / JG Ballard on A Matter of Life and Death