‘You are objectionable when sober, and abominable when drunk…’
One of the things I love about cinema is that you can devote your life to it and still have huge gaps in your knowledge. I’m aware of the filmmaking duo Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, mainly because I know that Martin Scorsese was a big fan, but Black Narcissus was my first foray into the British filmmakers’ oeuvre…
Black Narcissus sees four nuns, presided over by the ambitious Sister Clodagh, dispatched to a princely state nestled in the Himalayas with designs on providing education and healthcare for the locals. Sister Philippa (Flora Robson) for gardening; Sister Briony (Judith Furse) for the infirmary; Sister Blanche (Jenny Laird) to teach lace-making; and the emotionally unstable Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) for general classes. As predicted by local impresario Mr Dean (David Farrar), the sisters don’t last beyond the beginning of monsoon season.
Adapted from Rumer Godden’s 1939 novel of the same name, Black Narcissus is a triumph of filmmaking. When Hitchcock evoked pure cinema, the idea of cinema as a purely visual art form, this is what he meant. It’s also easy to see what Scorsese sees in the vivid colours and expressive camera of Black Narcissus. The barely contained eroticism was scandalous at the time and it still holds a raw power today. It’s there in the close-ups, the use of primary colours, the gorgeous score… it’s a heady mixture. The acting is superb in that stilted, repressed, 1940’s way. Kathleen Byron captures the yearning of Sister Ruth for something more, something else, and it is this yearning that runs through the rest of the film as well. Everyone in Black Narcissus wants something they can’t have and will never have. There is a sadness to it. But mainly it is longing that these characters feel.
Black Narcissus won’t be my last visit to the works of Powell and Pressburger. Just like that, a whole new area of cinema has been opened up to me.
