The film-buff doc combines self-mythology with a tribute to Powell and Pressburger.
Martin Scorsese’s on-screen and spoken narration in the documentary Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger shows a deeper personal investment than can be felt in his own recent dramatic films. At age 81, the senescent cineaste still projects that youthful enthusiasm from the years of his Mean Streets breakthrough in the ’70s American renaissance. It’s not the Jesuitical disciple of The Silence or the ponderous sociologist of The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon who animates Made in England. It’s Scorsese the eternal film-student prodigy.
The doc was directed by David Hinton, a veteran of BBC arts telecasts, who establishes the biographical structure for this historical review of British-born director Michael Powell and his Hungarian-born collaborator Emeric Pressburger. Their partnership as “The Archers” (symbolized by a tricolor archery-target logo) produced 19 films that were distinctively nativist and idiosyncratic.
Working during the period of World War II propaganda, Powell and Pressburger made films that were not British in an overtly political sense, but in their absolute eccentricity — a tendency Scorsese avoids scrutinizing. From their first Oscar-winner The 49th Parallel (in which shipwrecked Nazis attempt to invade the U.S. through Canada but are fought off by Commonwealth citizens) to the more famous Himalayan-set convent story Black Narcissus and the ballet film The Red Shoes, Powell and Pressburger made movies that were extrapolated from British politics, expressing cultural customs on the verge of hysteria. These emotionally vivid films impressed themselves on young Scorsese’s imagination and marked his own flamboyant film style that lately has come to be confused and to follow political fashion.
In this extended lecture, Scorsese emphasizes how Powell’s cinema instincts were displayed through visual extremes and panache. (Pressburger led the screenwriting, story, and structure.) Scorsese equates the “psychosexual energy” of their storytelling to Surrealism for its dreamlike qualities — a departure from Britain’s documentary tradition. But The Archers also struggled with notions of English propriety, even more so than masterly compatriots David Lean, Alfred Hitchcock, and Carol Reed.
Hinton and Scorsese fail to explore impulses of patriotic “energy” and instead emphasize “the power to grip me and stay in my mind.” Scorsese recalls this power, from his first viewing of Powell’s work on The Thief of Bagdad, that was “so formative” for him. He adds, “Taught me everything I know about the relation of camera to music.”
The enraptured confession of Made in England is like watching Scorsese discovering a storybook and “maybe the origins of my own obsession with film itself.” The clips are as magnificent as they were designed to be. Color or black-and-white, they whet a moviegoer’s appetite, but Scorsese’s honest appreciation, mixed with his loyalty to Powell (who became a friend and consultant on Scorsese’s ’80s films, eventually marrying Scorsese’s editor Thelma Schoonmaker) isn’t quite enough. Although Scorsese avoids plot giveaways –which spoiled his earlier film-history docs My Voyage to Italy (1999) and A Personal Journey Through American Movies (1995) — the fact is, Made in England needs the kind of historical rigor matched with artistic fascination in Luca Guadagnino’s Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams (about Salvatore Ferragamo) and Bertolucci on Bertolucci.
Scorsese gets too self-obsessed when he fears that filmmaking “could devour you if you let it.” Such immature, film-buff self-mythologizing is partly to blame for the trite politics in Killers of the Flower Moon and the insufficient sociology in The Irishman.
The Archers “make up a big part of [Scorsese’s] film subconscious,” but this retrospective should have taught him a new approach to the political effect of his own filmmaking — his Millennial unconscious. Rather than romanticizing The Archers, Scorsese and Hinton could recognize the team as part of their era’s British eccentric tradition: the Sitwells, the Mitfords, Aubrey Beardsley, Walter Sickert. The Archers style fits Edith Sitwell’s description of “that peculiar and satisfactory knowledge of infallibility that is the hallmark and birthright of the British nation.”
Powell and Pressburger exalted Englishness in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Canterbury Tale, and I Know Where I’m Going while exceeding the quotidian in The Red Shoes and Tales of Hoffmann. The latter two, Scorsese’s favorites, epitomize Sitwell’s characterization: “The man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and artistocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.”
Cinema’s popular appeal automatically saved The Archers from snobbery. Realizing that might have saved Scorsese from his newly politicized, mob-mentality cynicism and could perhaps return him to the culturally inspired richness of his pop-music-centered movies. When Scorsese cuts from The Red Shoes to the drunken “Rubber Biscuit” reverie in Mean Streets, the comparison is embarrassing since the student’s powerful feeling for America’s complexity already surpassed his mentor’s extravagant visions of Englishness. Killers of the Flower Moon was a ruinous, elitist failure because Scorsese lost The Archers’ empathy with patriotic culture — what Scorsese once intuited through the culture of pop music made in the U.S.A. If Made in England had more sociological rigor, it would be the most wonderful movie-movie of the year.