Set in a gorgeously photographed Technicolor England and a monochrome heaven, A Matter of Life and Death took the imaginative daring of jointly credited writer-producer-directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger to new heights.

David Niven plays a British airman who survives a plane crash and falls in love with an American radio operator (Kim Hunter), only to be summoned to the afterlife by a heavenly ‘Conductor’ (Marius Goring). But is heaven just a hallucination brought on by brain injury?

Powell and Pressburger layer breathtaking visual tricks on top of this whimsical premise, such as a celebrated point-of-view shot in which our hero’s eyelid closes over the camera lens. The film also works as a sly satire on Anglo-American relations at the end of WWII.

“There are more stunning ideas in this one film, concerning a mistake made in heaven about a WWII pilot who should be dead but isn’t, than the whole of British cinema can usually muster in a decade.” Nick James

“A most peculiar and potent cocktail of romance, theology, global bridge-building and national tub-thumping, this thoughtful drama about one pilot’s deferred mortality remains, if nothing else, a definitive monument to the power of Technicolor. The vivid imagery and the cineliterate style(s) deployed by a creative team at the top of their game express the film’s intricate worldview. It searingly conveys a world grappling with uncharted new places, trying to pick up the pieces after unimaginable calamity.” James Healy

Film	Year	Director
Harlan County, USA	1976	Barbara Kopple
Anvil: the Story of Anvil	2008	Sacha Gervasi
A Matter of Life and Death	1946	Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Portrait of a Lady on Fire	2019	Céline Sciamma
All about Eve	1950	Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Wandafuru Raifu	1998	Hirokazu Koreeda
Paris Is Burning	1990	Jennie Livingston
Wake in Fright	1971	Ted Kotcheff
Lola Montès	1955	Max Ophuls
The Arbor	2010	Clio Barnard

Jeanie Finlay

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