Movie review | Martin Scorsese’s personal love letter to British classics

Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger, directed and written by David Hinton. 133 min. K12.

★★★★

Filmmakers Michael Powell (1905–1990) and Emeric Pressburger (1902–1988) made some of Britain’s most beautiful, experimental and fantastic films of the 1940s and 50s, including such as A matter of life and death, Black daffodil, Red shoes and The Adventures of Hoffman.

by David Hinton in a documentary film Made in England The films of Powell and Pressburger’s production company The Archers are narrated by one of their biggest fans, a world-famous American film director Martin Scorsese.

Perhaps documentary is the wrong title in this context, because Made in England is first and foremost a verbal essay of Scorsese’s private declaration of love for the films of Powell and Pressburger, which have greatly influenced his own directorial work.

After having to As a child, due to asthma, spending a lot of time indoors, Scorsese ended up watching movies on TV. As American studios were reluctant to sell their films to television, many British films came out of it, including Powell’s early The Thief of Baghdad (1940), a glowing color film that Scorsese, however, saw in black and white on television.

Still Thief of Baghdad the atmosphere and imagery made a great impression on the boy, and the more films Scorsese saw of Powell and his later collaborator Emeric Pressburger, the more enchanted he became.

The division of labor between the British Powell and the Hungarian-born Pressburger, who fled the Nazis, was on the surface clear: Pressburger wrote the screenplay, Powell directed. Still, the duo constantly bounced ideas around and thus shared the creation process of their films. They stuck to their own line for a long time, which is why cooperation with American producers drifted into disputes.

Made in England -film does not feature the usual talking heads of documentaries. The point of view is Scorsese’s only.

In the documentary, Scorsese sits on a cinema bench and exaggerates, but not without cover. He does a good job of analyzing Powell’s and Pressburger’s themes, use of color, attitudes, and the inevitable clash with the conventions of commercial cinema.

Powell and Pressburger are seen talking in old film clips. However, the relationship between the working couple, who once broke up due to differences of opinion, seems to have lasted into adulthood.

Michael Powell also became Scorsese’s friend and supporter when Powell married Scorsese’s longtime editor by Thelma Schoonmaker with.

Powell’s career as a filmmaker was interrupted after the early 1970s when he no longer received funding for his projects. The last masterpiece was about a psychopathic murderer The face of fear (1960), which has gained recognition only decades later.

If the viewer is not bothered by only one person’s point of view, Made in England is an excellent platform for getting to know the careers of two filmmakers and their meaning.