By David Lazar
Art: “Azure” by Nawmi Manaam

Michael Powell directed several of the greatest English films of the twentieth century, in collaboration with Emeric Pressburger, his screenwriting and producing partner. Of these, my favorite has always been A Matter of Life and Death (1946, originally titled Stairway to Heaven in the U.S.). It is a film of urgency and whimsy, familiar tropes (angels, wings in heaven, celestial judge) and original images (an RAF flyer quoting poetry as his plane, in flames, heads down; the same pilot on the beach speaking to a naked Pan-like boy). But before we get to the film’s romantic and poetic soul, perhaps we should start with the prelude, unlike anything that had been presented in a narrative film previously.

We are told, “Any resemblance to any other world known or unknown is purely coincidental,” a play on the preemptive dodge of liabilities in narratives that draw on “actual events.” But Powell and Pressburger, ambitiously, are really telling us that we’re going to see something new. In soft, deep-blue technicolor, we see distant stars as an authoritative baritone documentary-like voiceover intones: “This is the universe. Big, isn’t it?”

The film was being made as World War II was winding down and it was, perhaps, a relief to begin somewhere beyond this world, out of the hot fields of conflict and destruction and in the cool and quiet and altogether vast cosmos. But as the camera moves through space, our narrator points out, “Hello, there’s a nova, a whole solar system exploded. Someone must have been messing about with the uranium atom. No, it’s not our solar system, I’m glad to say.” The sense of the world’s conflict and fragility isn’t so easily escaped, I’m afraid, even for a disembodied, God-like speaker.

We move past “a globular cluster of stars,” a “mass of gas, expanding,” and get nearer home, first seeing the moon, and then, “Here’s the Earth, our Earth. . . part of the universe, reassuring, isn’t it?” We’re thrown into anthrocenic time; then, our narrator, accompanied by harsh sounds of explosions and vaguely German radio pronouncements, announces: “It’s night over Europe, the night of the second of May, 1945. That point of fire is a burning city. It had a thousand-bomber raid an hour ago. And here, rolling in over the Atlantic is a real English fog. I hope all our aircraft got home safely. Even the big ships sound frightened. Listen to all the noises in the air . . . Listen, listen . . .” Andhere first the voices and then the images of the narrative film take over.

But a couple of notes: “our aircraft”: apparently this God (one of several in the film) is English. And the invocation of the domestic fog reminds me of Orwell’s “England, Your England,” where the bombers flying overhead and the gardening spirit of England create Orwell’s blend of threatened homeliness.

“Request your position. Request your position. Come in Lancaster. Come in Lancaster.”

“Position nil. Repeat nil. Age 27”, Peter Carter tells June (Kim Hunter), the American woman working for the RAF monitoring communications of incoming flights. She appears onscreen, a technicolor prettiness coming to life. He asks her name.

“Can you see our signals?” she asks, delaying their meet-cute only momentarily. Peter Carter’s response, the introduction of poetry into A Matter of Life and Death, is jarring to the operator and to us:

   Give me my scallop shell of quiet,
   My staff of faith to walk upon,
   My scrip of joy, immortal diet,
   My bottle of salvation,
   My gown of glory, hope’s true gage,
   And thus I’ll take my pilgrimage.

Carter (David Niven) tells June, “Sir Walter Raleigh wrote that. I’d rather have written that than flown through Hitler’s legs.” Poetry must be rather important to him. While he recites, the camera pulls back and June lowers her microphone, her face beginning to register that something is actually very wrong when a pilot begins quoting “The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimmage” to a radio operator. Clicking back into the practical mode of her role, she says, “I cannot understand you. Hello Lancaster. We are sending signals. Can you see our signals.? Come in Lancaster. Come in Lancaster.”

Here, Michael Powell switches to a shot of a burning engine and one of the most audacious scenes in cinema: a cockpit, blown open wide. A dead man’s dead, eyes open (it’s Carter’s navigator, or “my Sparks” as he refers to him. The fire burns just outside the plane. And finally Carter’s face. He recites,

   But at my back I always hear
   Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
   And yonder all before us lie
   Deserts of vast eternity.

Then: “Andy Marvell, what a marvel. What’s your name,” he asks again and she again replies on task, asking for his position. His explanation speaks to the quotation from “To His Coy Mistress.” His plane is going down, everyone bailed out or dead, and he doesn’t have a parachute. So we understand why Marvell’s carpe diem is especially sensible. He dictates a letter to his mother, explains that he thinks, perhaps, the next world “starts where this one leaves off, or where this one could leave off if we listened to Plato and Aristotle and Jesus,” and then he jumps from the flying inferno.

Excuse my summary, but even if you’ve seen the film (which would be a slightly dubious assumption on my part, despite Powell and Pressburger’s renaissance, thanks to Martin Scorsese’s indefatigable promotion of their work), a reminder will be useful. The film moves into a split structure between the technicolor real world and the black-and-white heaven where Peter is put on trial to determine if he can stay living despite his deadly destiny. You see the “conductor” who comes to retrieve him to the other world misses him “because of your ridiculous English climate”—the fog, another Orwellian echo. The fog and the poetry of Marvell and Raleigh—as opposed to the fire representing the war—are symbols of Englishness, an appreciation of which is central to the film’s thematic coherence. The war had just ended and some self-appreciation was morale boosting.

But the importance of poetry to A Matter of Life and Death doesn’t stop there. Our protagonist, you see, is a young poet. Peter’s doctor, Frank Reeves, played by the always marvelous Roger Livesey, says to June, “Didn’t you know this is Peter Carter?” He then says to Peter, “I don’t have much modern stuff in my library, but you’re there. I like your point of view and I like your English.”

Philip Larkin wrote, “What will survive of us is love,” which would be a true if partial summary of the film’s thematic motifs, but what survives of the world of the characters of the film is also poetry, specifically English poetry, which the barbarous Germans, represented by the brief guttural radio clips in the beginning, could not extinguish. We don’t know anything about Peter’s poetry other than Frank Reeves’ characterization of it as “modern stuff” with, apparently, a good ear. Is Peter more Keith Douglas or Sidney Keys? Well, we can’t know, but unlike those young poets, he survives the war, perhaps to write a book of poetry called A Matter of Life and Death. Whether his poetry, clearly promising, leaned more toward Auden (who did not serve) or Larkin (who was rejected due to bad eyesight) is a matter of delightfully pointless speculation.

The rest of the film alternates between black-and-white heaven, where the poet’s trial is to take place (“I’m ready to call John Donne, Dryden, Pope, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, Tennyson, Bridges,” Peter Carter says, contemplating his defense attorney) and the technicolor world—the color scheme an inversion of The Wizard of Oz. In A Matter of Life and Death, it is the quotidian world of love and loss that is more magically hued. The afterlife may be interesting, but it’s a monochromal affair. Peter and June are clearly fated for earthly marriage, and Dr. Frank Reeves, a neurologist, and genial town father (he watches the village through his camera obscura), who dies en route to the hospital to prepare Peter’s surgery, will defend Peter’s vita interruptus.

For the survival of English life, people like Peter Carter, a pilot and a poet, and Frank Reeves, a doctor and a humanist, a polymath really (“She walks in beauty like the night” he says of June, quoting Byron) and June, a radio operator and autodidact (“She only comes by to borrow a book,” Frank says of her, teasingly) must also survive. They all appreciate poetry, and poetry is crucial to survival, because, in this world, at least, poetry is a matter of life and death.

The judge of Peter’s trial, who is also his neurosurgeon in the technicolor world of life, ends the film with a poetic epilogue.

   Members of the Jury, as Sir Walter Scott is always saying,

   ‘In Peace, love tunes the Shepherd’s reed
   In War, he mounts the warrior’s steed
   In halls in gay attire is seen
   In hamlets dancing on the green
   Love rules the court, the camp, the grove
   And men below and saints above
   For love is heaven and heaven is love.’

Love, we know, but also film and poetry, time and space, are vehicles of transport, and thus intertwine us with worlds the existence of which we might have barely suspected.

---

David Lazar’s most recent book is Stories of the Street: Reimagining Found Texts. His other essay collections include Celeste Holm Syndrome: On Character Actors; I’ll Be Your Mirror: Essays and Aphorisms; Occasional Desire; The Body of Brooklyn; and two prose poem collections. With Patrick Madden, he co-edited the anthology, After Monaigne. Forthcoming from Nebraska is Double Indemnities (collaborative essays). Ten of his essays were named “Notable Essays of the Year” by Best American Essays. Lazar was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2016. He is the co-editor of Ohio State University’s 21st Century Essays imprint, and he created the undergraduate and graduate nonfiction programs at Ohio University and Columbia College Chicago.