Notes on…

A Matter of Life and Death(1946)

Dir. Directed by Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell


Care [was] taken to reduce the shock of the shifts between black and white and colour by filming the transition shots in Technicolor but then printing out the colour: an idea suggested by the laboratories. This achieved what [Jack] Cardiff termed 'Technicolor black and white' which 'had this sort of strange look about it — not pure black and white, but with rather an iridecent sheen on it like a beetle's wing'.

— Sarah Street (The Cinema of Powell and Pressburger, 2023)

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When a young RAF pilot miraculously survives bailing out of his aeroplane without a parachute, he falls in love with an American radio operator. But the officials in the other world realise their mistake and dispatch an angel to collect him.