They are considered among the greatest British filmmakers of all time. TIFF Cinematheque pays tribute to the Archers

“(He) knows what I am going to say even before I say it, maybe even before I have thought it,” said the Hungarian-born screenwriter Emeric Pressburger of the English director Michael Powell. “You are lucky if you meet someone like that once in your life.”
Luck may have had something to do with it, but the filmmaking duo known as the Archers — who worked together for 15 years, peaking with a run of flawless and indispensable comedies and dramas in the 1940s — were above all a study in skill; their chosen professional nickname and trademark bull’s-eye logo channelled simultaneous and exhilarating sensations of swift, weightless flight and razor-sharp precision.
Not only are they widely considered among the greatest British filmmakers of all time, but they managed to make commercial hits without sacrificing eccentricity or personal vision. Whether working on an epic Technicolor canvas or crafting intimate melodramas in black-and-white, the pair worked in a way that split the difference between economy and expressionism, between pleasing crowds and pleasing themselves. Their stylistic range was extraordinary and their emotional aim was true.
TIFF Cinematheque’s new retrospective on the Archers offers a worthy — if incomplete — introduction to their films, which don’t feel so much dated as emblematic of the mid-20th century, especially in the ruling theme of tradition versus modernity.
It’s tempting to call their lavish, lovingly crafted movies old-fashioned, but by torquing the British realist tradition with a certain degree of self-reflexive showmanship, Powell and Pressburger were arguably ahead of the curve. They were also often deeply and deceptively subversive, exhibit A being 1942’s extraordinary “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp,” which tells the story of a career military man (Roger Livesey) who survives a series of conflicts ranging from the Boer War to the Blitz.
The film was adapted from a satirical comic strip, but its humour runs deeper than tweaking stiff-upper-lip archetypes; by juxtaposing a story of personal honour against a backdrop of wide-scale combat, the film challenged notions of glory and patriotism in ways that ruffled feathers. Supposedly no less than Winston Churchill tried to have the script suppressed before production got underway.
The most daring choice in “The Life of Death of Colonel Blimp” was the casting of Deborah Kerr in a triple role, playing the lead character’s different lovers over a 40-year period. She would go on to star in the Archers’ most sheerly beautiful production, “Black Narcissus” (1947), about an isolated convent carved precariously into the side of the Himalayas, a location that is visualized as the end of the world.
“The atmosphere in this film is everything,” Powell told his collaborators, and few movies have ever been suffused with such a sense of breathlessness from frame to frame; shot in a rich, florid colour scheme by Jack Cardiff (who won an Oscar for his efforts), the film’s images — which combine motifs from Eastern and Western religious traditions — seem conjured out of thin air and then suspended there weightlessly.
(Every step seems to be bringing the pious characters closer to heaven; a crucial scene featuring the tolling of a bell mines dizzying, fatal sensations of vertigo a decade before Hitchcock).
At once an airtight exercise in formal control and an ardent critique of spiritual and sexual repression, “Black Narcissus” is a movie that demands to be seen on the big screen, where it becomes its own immersive, self-contained universe.
If “Black Narcissus” flaunted artistry for its own sake, Powell described “The Red Shoes” (1948) as a movie about the thesis that “art was worth dying for”: a love letter to the mysteries of artistic creation that reads like a suicide note.
Its heroine is an aspiring ballerina (Moira Shearer) who is caught between her love for a handsome young music student (Marius Goring) and her devotion to her craft; the villain is the heartless impresario (Anton Walbrook) who uses his influence to manipulate the young ingenue, stalking through the story’s backstage intrigues like the Phantom of the Opera. At once a stylized romantic tragedy and a ruthlessly unsentimental depiction of the creative process, “The Red Shoes” feature an extraordinary 20-minute ballet sequence that collapses reality and fantasy into a whirling, colour-coded phantasmagoria that fulfils and overwhelms the senses.
Equally powerful — and even more haunting — is Powell’s 1960 solo effort “Peeping Tom,” a visually and psychologically discombobulating study of a photographer who becomes obsessed with capturing women’s fear on film (as a prelude to killing them).
As scopophilic serial killer Mark Lewis, Karlheinz Böhm eschews cliched horror-movie gestures and mannerisms; like Anthony Perkins in “Psycho” (which was released the same year), he makes us complicit in not only his character’s brutality but also his weakness.
The film’s mix of pop psychology and pulp fiction proved too potent for some; the National Legion of Decency singled out “Peeping Tom” for condemnation. But Powell’s sophisticated meditation on the relationship between sadism and voyeurism has endured beyond its scandalous reputation to become a modern classic, one that retains its power to shock and appall.
“Of Myth and Magic: The Films of Powell and Pressburger” will be at the TIFF Lightbox May 10 to 29. See tiff.net/cinematheque for details.