Powell and Pressburger’s War

The Art of Propaganda, 1939-1946

Greg M. Colón Semenza, Garrett A. Sullivan Jr.

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9798765105733
• eBook ISBN:
  9798765105740
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

A focused study on Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's cinematic contributions to the war effort, arguing for the centrality of propaganda to their work as film artists.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger are widely hailed as two of the greatest filmmakers in British cinema history. The release of their first movie, The Spy in Black, barely preceded the beginning of World War Two, and a number of their early masterworks, including The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Canterbury Tale, and A Matter of Life and Death, were produced in the service of the war effort. Through exploring the relationship between art and propaganda, this book shows that Powell and Pressburger saw no contradiction between their aesthetic ambitions and their cinematic war work: propaganda imperatives were highly conducive to their objectives as both commercial cinema practitioners and artists.

Drawing on production materials from the archives of the British Film Institute, this book charts three phases in Powell and Pressburger's wartime career: from first-time collaborators who strive to reconcile popular cinematic forms with developing notions of what constitutes effective propaganda; to accomplished, and sometimes controversial, propagandists whose movies center upon Britain's relations with its enemies and allies; to filmmakers whose responsiveness to the propaganda requirements of the late war is matched by a focus, shared by the Ministry of Information, on what the post-war future would bring.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One
• 1 “You Are English. I Am German. We Are Enemies”: Anticipating Propaganda in The Spy in Black
• 2 “Taking the War Against Hitler”: Blockade and Blackout in Contraband
• Part Two
• 3 49th Parallel and the Dangerous Interpretability of Wartime Propaganda
• 4 From “We Can Take It” to “V for Victory”: Agency, Gender, and Propaganda in One of Our Aircraft Is Missing
• 5 “England Isn’t as Bad as All That”: Propaganda and Censorship in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
• Part Three
• 6 “The Values That We Are Fighting For”: Reconciling Tradition and Modernity in A Canterbury Tale
• 7 Building Up a New Britain: Scotland and Postwar Reconstruction in I Know Where I’m Going!
• 8 “Conservative by Nature, Labour by Experience”: The Propaganda of Futurity in A Matter of Life and Death
• Coda
• Index
• Copyright