If I’m a bit groggy and sleep-deprived today, despite having slept in for as long as my kitty cat April would allow (not all that long), it’s all Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s fault.
Not that I’m all that interested in tossing blame around, mind you. Nobody forced me to stay up well after 2:00 am. Given that today is Sunday, and that I’m in the midst of the summer break, there is nothing stopping me from living a vampiric existence, sleeping all day and staying up all night. No: I take that back. There is something stopping me, about 5 ½ pounds of concentrated ultra-elderly feline determination named April. Life as an up-all-night swinger just isn’t for me any more.
My late-night toot came about from sitting almost motionless before my hi-def TV watching the same movie in stupefied amazement three times in a row. The movie: Powell & Pressburger’s sublime 1947 Black Narcissus, just released in a pristine Blu-Ray remastering (supervised by cinematographer Jack Cardiff) from Criterion Collection. I’ve seen bits and pieces of Narcissus before, mostly on documentaries about the history of Technicolor, given the film’s status as a landmark achievement in color cinematography. But I had never seen the entire movie. In a way I’m glad about that, because my introduction to the film in its totality was thereby unsullied by a murky print, amateurish projection, or poor video resolution. Experiencing a pristine print of Narcissus in 1080p resolution on a fine-quality Samsung hi-def LCD is a special privilege, one that was probably not shared by most of the film’s original audiences—who would have seen a film print in various stages of wear. Narcissus is one of those movies, like Lawrence of Arabia, in which any individual frame could be removed and mounted in a gallery as a piece of art. It just might be the most beautiful film ever made.
The story: five nuns from an Anglican order are sent from Calcutta to a remote castle in Northern India near Darjeeling. The castle was built originally as a harem for the local raj; it sits on the side of a mountain, facing a vertiginous drop straight down to the valley floor below where most of the people live. Now that the castle is abandoned, the presiding local general has given it to the sisters to establish a nunnery, school, and hospital. The sisters arrive, all of them thoroughly ignorant of the people they are charged to serve and seeing no reason to learn anything about them. Small-minded and spiritually petty, of limited skills and even more limited vision, they have been thrust into a place of grandiloquent beauty, the Himalayas all about them, the wind ever blowing, vistas of towering snowy mountain peaks engulfing their world. Their pinched and repressed minds cannot stand the clarity, the light, the radiance all about them, the erotic openness of the people of the valley. They begin to lose their grip on reality, and before long tragedy falls. The nuns cannot survive in their clifftop convent. They leave.
Just stated simply like that, one wouldn’t think the thing would be worth seeing. Just another bit of sensationalist fluff about sexually-repressed nuns getting horny and the consequences of same. But Black Narcissus is so much more than that, so much more richly textured and nuanced.
Consider the picture above. Sister Ruth rings the convent bell, perched there on the edge of the cliff, in a shot which maximizes her exposed frailty and the outrageous splendor of her perch. It’s just one jaw-dropping image in a film teeming with astonishing opulence. Amazingly, the movie was made inside studio walls save a few outdoor scenes shot in a local garden, making extensive use of matte paintings and miniatures. Vertigo-inducing juxtapositions of people against the spectacular background of the Himalayas fill the screen, while legendary cinematographer Jack Cardiff uses color, light, shade, and line to capture emotional states with the sure hand of a Vermeer or a Rembrandt.
I am struck by the shabbiness, the stinginess, the pinched claustrophobia, of the christianity the sisters bring with them to their mountaintop enclave. Love has no place in their conception of Jesus, only a sense of duty and obligation. Sister superior Clodagh, played to perfection by Deborah Kerr, doesn’t know what to do about the holy man perched on a cliff above her nunnery; she can’t communicate with him, she can’t get rid of him, she hasn’t a clue about his spiritual practices, nor can she make the slightest dent in the people’s reverence for him. So she cowers in her stone box while he abides out in the air, on his cliff, like an ancient tree. He belongs there; she does not. That’s true of all of the nuns: the people tolerate them politely enough for a while, but they ignore the sisters’s parched and loveless religion. No matter how many times the sisters ring the convent bell, the resonant brass horns from the Tibetan monks, and the drums from the villages in the valley, are persistent and unchanging. The sisters are barren in more ways than one; they offer nothing, do nothing, help nobody. There is no reason for them to be there at all, save the blind conceit of an ignorant religion and the intolerant stupidity of its practitioners. So they deposit a clutch of sterile nuns into a hilltop box in a land teeming with overwhelming beauty, inhabited by people with richly developed spiritual lives and a nourishing culture. And once the sisters cross the line—a blundering nun administers castor oil to a dying baby, and her act is interpreted by the villagers as having killed the child—the people abandon the nuns, who are left to fend for themselves up in their wind-streaked stone aerie.
At the very opening, a nearly all-white convent in Calcutta serves to introduce the sisters and their oh-so restricted and constricted ways. The very face of the mother superior evokes that sense of shrivelled, dried and soured life, one dominated by renunciation and repression. She’s a tough old bird, wily and sharp, and tells Sister Clodagh bluntly that she considers her appointment as sister superior of the new convent to be a mistake. As we all find out soon enough, the old bird was bang-on correct, but in fact any nun from her order would be out of place anywhere save the starched, whitewashed, airless, and colorless confines of their convents.
As the sisters begin their lives in their Himalayan convent, the film’s colors slowly but inexorably deepen, widen, and enhance. Their minds, unprepared for the vast open beauty all about them, begin to play tricks on them. The gardener Sister Philippa (played with understated mastery by Flora Robson) becomes lost in thoughts of her past, before she buried her heart in her vows; she stands motionless in the midst of a cliffside garden, staring off towards the immeasurably distant horizons and towering mountains. "You can just see too far", she complains. And of course that’s just the problem: these women have lived in a box so long they can’t stand the possibilities presented by the open air. Freedom, openness, grandeur, and the sublimity of the natural world have become toxic to them.
The most haunting and central images of the movie are Sister Ruth’s descent into insanity. A lovely and passionate young woman, her repressed sexuality is inflamed by the local British agent Mr. Dean (played by David Farrar, the Sean Connery of the day), and we watch as she comes bit by bit unglued. Kathleen Byron plays the role fabulously well, but Jack Cardiff gives an even more virtuoso performance. As the film’s climax approaches, the screen pulsates with the orange-rose tints of both dawn and dusk, burning and thrusting through the greenish shadows, all focusing on Sister Ruth’s mounting dementia, Sister Clodagh’s desperate attempts to help, and her own inability to quell the torrent of regret and desire in her own mind. The physical world itself rises up in an orgy of erotic color to engulf and enfold these world-denying, life-denying women and their desperately constricted minds. Words and dialog aren’t necessary; it’s all created with light, color, movement, and music. The film images themselves become the teeming passions of these womens’s minds.
Resonance follows on resonance, theme upon theme. The detail afforded every nuance of the plot and image is astounding. The relatively steady Sister Briony (a big, robust Judith Furse) shows her own distress in a particularly fascinating way; amidst a teeming convent filled with people who need her (extremely limited) medical services, Sister Briony obsessively washes a painted statue of Mary, apparently caring more about the symbols of her repression than the life pulsating all around her. A subplot involves a young aristocrat (Sabu, all grown up and gorgeous) and a ripe young girl (Jean Simmons), who enjoy their mutual attraction and happily satisfy their desires. The affair over, the prince returns to apologize, but he isn’t the slightest bit sorry for what he has done; he’s just trying to tell Sister Clodagh what he thinks she wants to hear. Despite his being a fop and a glamour boy, he displays considerably more compassion than any of the nuns; when hunky Mr. Dean shows up drunk to the convent’s Christmas service, the prince remarks quietly to an outraged sister Clodagh how beautiful Mr. Dean’s singing voice is—a skillful way to defuse anger, by bringing up a point of mutual agreement. And it is the prince who seems to have figured out what’s really important about Jesus’s teachings, even if Sister Clodagh considers his attitudes to be disrespectful. He enters the film in a blaze of rosy mental health and leaves the story in the same condition, unlike the emotionally-wrecked nuns who have no choice but to slink away in defeat.
All of this is framed in exquisitely arranged images of striking beauty, one after another in an intoxicating joyride of visual munificence. The Vermeer hues of the opening give way to the Van Goghs of the springtime, when the flowers erupt into profusion, soaked in the sunshine pouring through the thin air at 9,000 feet elevation. Those in turn give way to the moody Rembrandts of the climax, with its golden-rose surges of color flashing through the greenish-brown shadows, seeming to penetrate right through the nuns’s bodies. Often the sisters’ faces are illuminated by the light reflected off their starched white wimpoles, while streaks of sunlight play around them in endless profusion. Shadow, light, color, air, sound—this is one movie that will remain perfectly intelligible with no dialog at all.
Glitzy sci-fi and adventure movies aren’t the only justification for high definition video. It is also working wonders in preserving the glories of cinematic history, giving everybody a chance to see these splendid achievements in full clarity, rather than in washed-out or murky images on videotape or standard-def TV broadcasts. If you’re in the market for a Blu-Ray player, may I suggest that you pick up a copy of the Criterion Collection Black Narcissus among your first stash of discs? There is nothing in theaters today that can touch this 63-year-old masterpiece for color, composition, and sheer visual panache.
