Martin Scorsese presents an impassioned and highly personal tribute to Powell and Pressburger’s work, richly illustrated with clips and rare archive material. It’s been said that had Martin Scorsese not become one of the world’s great filmmakers, he would still have been one of its greatest teachers of film history. This impassioned exploration of the films of two of his formative and most treasured inspirations follows the US filmmaker’s film essays on American and Italian cinema, delivering deeply personal reflections on what Powell and Pressburger’s work has meant to his life, alongside wonderfully illuminating analyses of the films themselves.
Producing, writing, and directing, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger created some of great classics of the British golden age including The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, A Matter of Life and Death and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. In the words of Martin Scorsese their films were “grand, poetic, wise, adventurous, headstrong, enraptured by beauty, deeply romantic, and completely uncompromising”.
Drawing richly from the BFI National Archive, as well as private material from Scorsese and the film’s editor (and Powell’s widow) Thelma Schoonmaker, David Hinton’s film is both an ideal introduction to Powell and Pressburger’s work, and the perfect complement to our 6pm evening screening of their film, I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING (1945)
