Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, A Canterbury Tale (UK, 1944; 124 minutes)

In anticipation of the jump cut in which a bone becomes a spaceship in Stanley Kubrick’s (1928–1999) 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), at the beginning of A Canterbury Tale the falcon loosed by a medieval knight becomes a Spitfire soaring in the sky. This is the first connection of the journey of Chaucer’s pilgrims to Canterbury to the ‘present’ of 1944. Michael Powell (1905–1990) was born near Canterbury and although expressing from early on a ‘deep fascination with and affection for Britishness’, he also showed early signs of being open to European and global influences. Emeric Pressburger (born Imre József Pressburger) (1902–1988) was born into a Jewish Hungarian background. He later lived in Prague, Stuttgart, and Budapest, moving to Berlin in the late 1920s. He sold stories to the UFA studios before leaving for France in 1933, with the rise of Nazism. Finally, he settled in England in 1935, becoming a British citizen in 1946. Powell and Pressburger (usually known as The Archers, the name of their production company) met in the late 1930s and went on to make almost twenty films together during the next two decades. Generally, Pressburger would come up with the story and Powell would direct. Both would act as producers, but Pressburger, who had received musical training, would be more involved in the editing, particularly in the way music was used.

When an Englishman and an American are discussing the nature of different types of wood in A Canterbury Tale, it is not just Oregon and Kent that are linked, but also different times and different seasons, the present and the past. The suspense regarding the discovery of ‘the Glueman’ is, notwithstanding the remaining of a certain ambiguity throughout most of the film, dissipated early on. The whole story becomes structured around the idea of pilgrimage. The four main characters journey to Canterbury to ‘receive miracles’ or, in Colpeper’s case, to ‘do penance’. Much has been written about Colpeper’s ‘misogyny’ and ‘wish to stop time’, both fitting observations. However, his fear of otherness is also worth noting, a fear reflected in much criticism that was made at the time regarding British films with ‘foreign’ influences. In 1936, Graham Greene (1904–1991) wrote in The Spectator in strongly xenophobic tones about ‘dark alien [Hungarian] executives’, bashing a ‘system of nepotism’ in which immigrants found jobs for each other ‘to the exclusion of English technicians’. Throughout the piece, Greene drew, in the words of Andrew Moor, a present film scholar, on a ‘tight and authoritarian definition of “Nation” which sees hybridity as monstrous’. Moor notes how the films of Powell and Pressburger stood for a cosmopolitanism which was in affinity with European modernism (regular collaborators with The Archers included designers Alfred Junge and Hein Heckroth, actors Conrad Veidt, Anton Walbrook and Albert Bassermann, and cinematographer Erwin Hillier [1911–2005] – born in Germany to English-German Jewish parents, Hillier was responsible for the stunning cinematography in A Canterbury Tale and would continue to work in British films until the late 1960s; he had also worked on Fritz Lang’s [1890–1976] classic M [1931] and there are clear Expressionist elements in A Canterbury Tale). Following Homi K. Bhaba, Moor argues that ‘a distinctively national cinema [can] allow for difference, engage with international factors, and be enriched by hybrid and alternative voices, while remaining in some very real and cultural sense “nationally specific”, without necessarily peddling an authoritarian or conservative set of values’. This can be applied not only to the filmography of The Archers in general, but also to the resolution of A Canterbury Tale – including Colpeper’s ‘penance’.

Part of the Medieval Film Club, for more information go to the website.

This screening is open to all and free to attend. No booking required.

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