Next month Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s wartime fantasy A Matter of Life and Death returns to British cinemas.
In this podcast Henry Barnes talks to Xan Brooks and Hollie Price about the genesis of what the BFI sight calls their "magic propaganda".
That is a pleasing category that can also take in another Powell and Pressburger film A Canterbury Tale.
Elsewhere on the BFI site Charles Drazin offers five reasons to watch A Matter of Life and Death:
Such is the fantasy dimension of the film that it is easy to overlook the extraordinary documentary eye with which it is constructed.
In telling the story of a brain-damaged airman who has hallucinations of another world, Powell and Pressburger pay a scrupulous respect to the neurological reality of how these visions might have taken place.
They appreciated the fact that the most gripping drama emerges out of an engagement with truth rather than a flight from it.
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