Andrew Moor – författare

The film-making partnership of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger was one of the most remarkable and visionary in cinema. They made an extraordinary range of films, from The Spy in Black and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp to A Canterbury Tale and The Red Shoes. With champions like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, and revived critical interest worldwide, they now find new generations of admirers. This illuminating new book looks closely at these classic films to explore their complex relationship to national identity, and their interest in exile, borderlands, utopias, escapism, art and fantasy. Moor reveals for example how the visual imagery of the films of the Second World War question current cinematic styles and how post war films like The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffman are in their highly expressive use of design, music and dance utterly international in character.

The films of Michael Powell (1905-90) and Emeric Pressburger (1902-88), among them I Know Where I'm Going! (1945), A Matter of Life and Death (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948), are landmarks in British cinema, standing apart from the realist and comic mainstream with their highly stylised aesthetic and their themes of romantic longing and spiritual crisis. Powell and Pressburger are revered by film lovers and film-makers (Martin Scorsese has called them 'the most successful experimental film-makers in the world'). In this first-ever collection of essays on Powell, an international group of critics and scholars map out his film-making skills, providing new readings of individual films, analysing recurrent techniques and themes, and relating them to contemporary debates about gender, sexuality, nationality and cinematic spectacle. Powell, with and without Pressburger, emerges as a film-maker of lasting originality and significance.