A Matter of life and Death

A Matter of life and Death

Introduction

Just as Freud's famous discussion of trauma takes place just after the First World War, so British cinema's first great confrontation with trauma takes place just after the Second. Two films at the war's end but like day and night: one is in breathtaking Technicolor and deals in metaphysical healing, while the other is in black and white and deals in perpetual nightmare. One is the Archers partnership of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger at their best; the other is an Ealing Studios composite, with three writers and four directors.

Discussion

Of course, A Matter of Life and Death (1946) does have a monochrome afterlife, but visually the romantic rapture of a multi-coloured English countryside, the here-and-now triumphantly prevails. Dead of Night (Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Chrichton, Basil Dearden, Robert Hamer, 1945), by contrast, has its sinister country-house located in Turville, Buckinghamshire, the site of local treason in the wartime Went the Day Well? (Cavalcanti, 1942). Cavalcanti directed on both features and no rural idyll is forthcoming in either.

And what of commercial success? The uplifting A Matter of Life and Death with a special royal première was a magnet for post-war audiences, the dark, unrelenting Dead of Night a film they avoided in droves. When your country has been battered by a monstrous war, you want to savour victory and then move on. That is what A Matter of Life and Death explicitly allows you, and what Dead of Night implicitly denies you. Yet, I would argue against the critical grain that, of these two great films, the Ealing composite is just as enduring. For sure, A Matter of Life and Death has some of the boldest sequences in British cinema and, with back-to-back scenes in the bomber's doomed cockpit and an unsteady walk by pilot Peter Carter (David Niven) out of the sea to the broad sand-dunes of the Devon shore, one of the most imaginative openings of its epoch. But the film is also poised precariously between direct material trauma and dense metaphysical fable. In a way, it was Powell's drive to ground Emeric Pressburger's lofty fable in the material world of war and traumatic breakdown (by consulting medical case-files) that saves it. The lesion in the brain caused by the force of the airman's fall is what gives rise to the spatial hallucinations of a dying consciousness, in Powell's framing, so that we have on view the direct psychic consequences of severe physical trauma refined into a cinematic imaginary. In other words, poet Peter Carter is placed poetically on the margin between life and death as if his flair for language had been translated under duress into a flair for extraordinary images.

At the same time, the logic of the afterlife trial that at one level may indicate survivor's guilt on Carter's part also has a momentum of its own as metaphysical fable. It works as part of the film's remit: to celebrate the Anglo-American special relationship as victory against ...