The “heavenly tribunal” meets the operating room; A Matter of Life and Death, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946
For quite a few of the people who revere it, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter of Life And Death (1946) is a beautiful, moving, and funny fantasy film about a young British airman in love with an American, who, under the earthly pretext of a brain illness, is having his life put on trial by a heavenly tribunal. For Diane Broadbent Friedman, a nurse practitioner with a focus on neurological disorders, the film is pretty much the inverse of that. “The film is a complex neurological study of a psychologically normal man who believes that a heavenly tribunal has sentenced him to death.”
Of course the “rational” explanation for the seemingly fantastic events in AMOLAD has always been available to the lay viewer. But Ms. Friedman’s book, A Matter of Life and Death: The Brain Revealed by the Mind of Michael Powell puts this forward with a level of detail heretofore unseen in Powell scholarship. Early in the book Friedman recalls finding herself entranced by a television screening of AMOLAD she had happened upon. “I was shocked because I thought I recognized extensive, detailed neurological information within the film.” Researching Powell, and the Powell-Pressburger partnership known as The Archers, Friedman discovered Powell’s obsessive attention to detail, which he brought to every project. In the beginning part of her book Friedman brings the reader up to date on how far neurological science had gone by the time Powell and Pressburger conceived and began working on AMOLAD, and extrapolates just which cases and readings Powell brought to bear on the case of Peter Carter, the hero of the film.
Writing in plain, clear prose, Friedman lays out the science in a patient, cogent fashion, and takes us step by step through the film, revealing how beautifully, and subtly, the film uses that science. The neurological knowledge Powell accumulated is shown to inform every aspect of the film. But as lovers of the picture know, AMOLAD is never a film that gets bogged down in its own bona fides, or bogs the viewer down in them. That’s one reason why Friedman’s analysis, rather than spoiling the magic of a truly magical film, in fact enhances it. (Peripherally, the book also demonstrates why the title Stairway to Heaven, imposed by a U.S. distributor, was so vehemently disdained by The Archers.)
Self-published via the firm Author House, Friedman’s book isn’t just an absolute must for any Archers fan. I believe it should prove illuminating for science wonks who insist that popular entertainments always get the technical stuff wrong—here’s an exception that may prove the rule. I got my copy via Amazon, here.
I was tickled to discover that a namesake of mine, Dr Hugh Cairns, seems to have been a source of information for Powell when preparing AMOLAD. Since Powell was sort of obsessed with Scotland, he may have been attracted to the doctor partly because of his name and ancestry.
A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH, screened under the title of STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN, was the last movie I ever saw at the Biograph Theater in Washington D.C. before it was replaced by a CVS drugstore in 1996. It was there, in all of its 35 MM glory, right in the heart of Georgetown, that I fell in love with the movie.
The theater
http://cinematreasures.org/theater/800/
became this
http://www.flickr.com/photos/maincourse/2222236504/
Tragic.
Anyway, I can’t wait to get my hands on this book… wow.
Oh, hey, I’ve been to the Biograph! They used to show real movies in the daytime, and porn at night. I remember seeing Miyazaki’s “Castle in the Sky” (is that the title??) and “Akira”. It was featured in an early scene of William Peter Blatty’s “Exorcist III”. Kinderman and Dyer go there to see “It’s a Wonderful Life”.
I have seen this movie its really good to see all of your comments and sharing this ..!