Customer Reviews

Powell and Pressburger: A Cinema of Magic Spaces (Cinema and Society)

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I'll say it right off the bat: I'm disappointed. I was hoping for more (or anything!) about the actual making of the films discussed rather than lengthy psychological discourse about the often obvious symbolism contained in these cinematic treasures.
For example: there's nothing about shooting in the Hebrides but more than you could ever wish for on the psychology of Sister Ruth's red lipstick. That may not be a bad thing for some, but for $45 couldn't Moor have at least included a few more photos? (There are just a handful: The Archers, a promo shot of Robert Helpmann from Tales of Hoffman and stills from Contraband, Canterbury Tale, Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death and Black Narcissus.) The fact that the book's index lists an astonishing SINGLE mention of Moira Shearer should be another clue to fans hoping for more meat and potatoes rather than simply food for thought.
Moor has unquestionably written some interesting dissections, but the dissections are only of the finished films, with barely a whisper about the actual creation of them.
Powell and Pressburger are undoubtedly masters who created some of the finest films ever made. But for the steep price I was hoping for more.

Andrew Moor works beautifully in the small spaces of Powell and Pressburger's films, and he shows how the two men progressed from a series of spy/thriller/patriotic movies all planned to advance to cause of a besieged Britain during the Second World War, into a melodramatic and deranged world of total devotion to artmaking--the crazy TALES OF HOFFMAN and THE RED SHOES.

He is perhaps most interesting when he is most programmatic, in the chapter about the pastoral during which he discusses A CANTERBURY TALE and I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING. I must admit I sighed going in, thinking I was going to hear all about Raymond Williams and pastoral theory and this and that, but although Moor brings everything up I feared, his applications are really quite sound, brilliant even. Coming away from his analyses, we feel that yes, the Archers HAD to make this slight retreat (towards the country air of Canterbury and the Western Isles) in order to be able to reach for the bizarre, psychosexual heights of something like BLACK NARCISSUS. He even manages to make sense of the little short film, THE VOLUNTEER, which is to the oeuvre of the Archers what AVENTURE MALGANCHE and BON VOYAGE are to the otherwise comprehensible work of Hitchcock. Does the auteur theory triumph in Moor's study? Incomparably! And yet this time around we believe it.

Another reviewer here mentions that Moira Shearer is only referred to once in the book. But obviously Andrew Moor has a weakness for the incandescent Kathleen Byron and the candybox charms of Deborah Kerr. He's not totally made out of stone.