Continuity and modernity in A Canterbury Tale

The new London Review of Books has a review by Alex Harvey of The Cinema of Powell and Pressburger. Published in 2023 - that's academic reviewing for you - this is a collected volume edited by Nathalie Morris and Claire Smith.

I looked first to see what Harvey had to say about A Canterbury Tale:

The jump-cut at the start of A Canterbury Tale moves from a soaring falcon seen by Chaucer’s medieval pilgrims to a war plane patrolling rural Kent. Time is sped up and frozen; the East End land girl Alison drives a horse-drawn cart. 

Powell grew up amid the ‘hop poles, oasts and orchards’ of the Kent countryside, as Alexandra Harris writes in her contribution to the collection. In A Canterbury Tale, he used the landscape to show an unchanging pastoral England. But since the film was scripted by Pressburger, an exile who knew the unrelenting force of modernity, it becomes ‘an act of continuation that is also a meditation on continuity’, as Peter Conrad put it. 

On this theme, it is striking that in the film's prologue (spoken by Esmond Knight in the video above), a steam locomotive serves as a symbol of modernity:

Alas, when on our pilgrimage we wend,
We modern pilgrims see no journeys end.
Gone are the ring of hooves, the creak of wheel:
Down in the valley runs our road of steel.
No genial host at sinking of the sun
Welcomes us in: our journey's just begun.

But to the modern viewer that locomotive is likely to be the object of nostalgia - nostalgia, increasingly, for a landscape that viewer never got to see.

That distant shot of the train, incidentally was not filmed in Kent but in Surry - to the west of Dorking, on the line that runs between Guildford and Redhill.