939 A Matter of Life and Death

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colinr0380
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Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK

Re: 939 A Matter of Life and Death

#26 Post by colinr0380 » Wed Apr 18, 2018 3:29 am

The only argument I would make about domino's comments on A Matter of Life and Death is that I feel that we are meant to only be experiencing the film through the main character's point of view, and everything in the world is filtered through his perspective. It is part of what makes the film so powerful, as while the film can be viewed rigorously literally, with an actual Heaven and a fight to stay on Earth (and be a satisfying watch viewed in that Here Comes Mr Jordan/Heaven Can Wait/A Guy Named Joe-way), it becomes even more interesting when seen as a kind of post-traumatic response on Niven's part to his war experiences.

How does someone cope with having inexplicably survived something whilst everyone around them died? Does that tinge every experience afterwards with a general feeling of guilt for somehow being undeserved compared to those who died sooner? Why did I get the opportunity to live and fall in love by chance when so many others perished arbitrarily?

We get a development in Peter from a flippant character bantering over the radio as he cheerfully prepares for his death to someone who finds he has something still to live for and who he wants to see again. In that sense it makes the love story much more powerful as June (or at least an idea of June) actually has pulled Peter back from death.

It is a film that walks a beautiful tightrope between realism and magical fantasy, especially in its visions of Heaven in which care is taken to constantly allow for the idea that this is all just in Peter's head, the urgency of the situation getting more pronounced until the final trial scene as he undergoes his perilous brain operation, which there is a strong possibility that he might not survive. The time freeze moments and shifts into black and white can be interpreted matter-of-factly as just symptoms of Peter's brain damage. The accidental death of his friend (another trauma, and one that is a bit T.E. Lawrence-esque) is folded into Peter's fantasy and used in a way that allows his inspirational mentor figure to live on in Heaven and continue to inspire him.

Even the eventual heavenly conflict between Britain and America (and low key antagonism with the French!) is a kind of abstraction of the potential trans-Atlantic romance 'special relationship' between Peter and June, as a situation is created and archetypal characters formulated (all of these famous figures taking an active interest in your tiny individual situation) whose main purpose is to debate whether to keep the lovers apart or not. If they are satisfied (much as if the simultaneous brain operation is survived) the couple can be together.

The entire film is a love letter to the world that we have inside our heads (built up of accumulated knowledge, experiences, places and people that we have met along the way, as well as our feelings about it all) that can help us get through the most difficult experiences of our lives. In that sense all of our Heavens are uniquely tailored to each of us!

The film is so powerful because the viewer can take it both ways - magical or mundane - and both approaches are valid!
Last edited by colinr0380 on Thu Apr 19, 2018 3:29 am, edited 1 time in total.

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bugsy_pal
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Re: 939 A Matter of Life and Death

#27 Post by bugsy_pal » Wed Apr 18, 2018 9:59 pm

Nicely put Colin!

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colinr0380
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Re: 939 A Matter of Life and Death

#28 Post by colinr0380 » Thu Apr 19, 2018 3:18 am

Thanks! As well as being the perfect entry point for general audiences A Matter of Life and Death also feels interesting to unlocking the themes in later films as well. If we see the film all about a fantasy world that comes about in the wake of a traumatic experience, this film is the 'love conquers all' version of the darker takes on the internal concerns, fears and fantasies (caused by real world factors) of characters that we later see in The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus or even Peeping Tom!

And it is interesting that there is a move into full artifice in the later musical works (musicals and dancing of course being the ultimate fantastical liberation! If tragically only momentarily, until the song ends!)

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dwk
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Re: 939 A Matter of Life and Death

#29 Post by dwk » Thu Jun 07, 2018 4:27 pm


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hearthesilence
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Re: 939 A Matter of Life and Death

#30 Post by hearthesilence » Thu Jun 07, 2018 4:33 pm

Nice! Looks like the Criterion disc has a different (and to my eyes better) color timing. The grain looks a touch better too.

Orlac
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Re: 939 A Matter of Life and Death

#31 Post by Orlac » Thu Jun 07, 2018 6:34 pm

He really does insist on a nude pic per review

mteller
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Re: 939 A Matter of Life and Death

#32 Post by mteller » Mon Jul 23, 2018 12:33 am


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domino harvey
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Re: 939 A Matter of Life and Death

#33 Post by domino harvey » Mon Jul 23, 2018 12:41 am

David, there's no uploading here but you can use this site for reliable image hosting

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diamonds
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Re: 939 A Matter of Life and Death

#34 Post by diamonds » Mon Jul 23, 2018 10:20 am

So 2 and 3 are how the disc looks, 1 and 4 are what it should look like? Or vice versa?

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tenia
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Re: 939 A Matter of Life and Death

#35 Post by tenia » Mon Jul 23, 2018 10:30 am

David M would know certainly this better than I do, but IIRC, the use of the wrong color matrix regarding REC. 709 directly impact the rendering of red. It could be that one presentation is correct and the other not, but am totally unsure here which is the right one.

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Re: 939 A Matter of Life and Death

#36 Post by cdnchris » Mon Jul 23, 2018 11:56 am

Are those taken from the restoration demonstration?

Yeah, when watching the film, I was struck by the intensity of the reds and they became even more pronounced when watching the comparisons in the demonstration. But the before shots were really green I thought, particularly when they compare the sequence where Niven wakes up on the beach (which also removed some severe pulsing). The skin tones I guess look better but there was a lot of green everywhere else, with the blues even looking green. Between the two I prefer the restoration but it's probably somewhere between.

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movielocke
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Re: 939 A Matter of Life and Death

#37 Post by movielocke » Wed Jul 25, 2018 12:58 pm

Watched this last night. Holy shit this looks amazing. I’ve seen it three times on film in the last twelve years, and I’ve always been disappointed by the dvd presentation which didn’t transmit the look of the film very well at all.

But on the Blu-ray right away in the first scene we can see how right this is by looking at the three face tones, the sallow dead Sparks, the fire lit niven, and the gauzey Hunter. It’s a subtle thing but the dvd just never seemed right to me the way these colors interplayed with each other, the Blu-ray feels exactly right.

Just phenomenal perfect work on the image all around. I’m staggered and couldnt be happier.

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TheKieslowskiHaze
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Re: 939 A Matter of Life and Death

#38 Post by TheKieslowskiHaze » Fri Apr 03, 2020 10:21 pm

Here is a blog post I recently wrote for this movie:

Powell and Pressburger’s WWII-era films seem today like dispatches from a besieged England, offering modern viewers a taste of that uncertain time. But rather than dwell on panic or despair, the movies exude aspirational resolve and an English fighting spirit. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp perhaps best exemplifies this. Released in 1943, well before Allied victory was a certainty, it offered a forceful thesis about how to win the war and how to grieve for what would be—already had been—lost in the process. But, in our own uncertain times, the Archers movie I recommend is their post-war sigh of relief, A Matter of Life and Death. That aspirational resolve is apparent from the opening scene, an oddly static but rousing plane crash during which the (supposedly) doomed pilot falls in love with the radio operator and espouses the virtues of “Plato, Aristotle, and Jesus.” Thus begins a plot too complicated to summarize here, but one that barrels through catharsis and whimsy toward its celebratory final minute. It’s that final exchange between the not-so-doomed-after-all pilot and his American lover that both addresses the movie’s central mystery with perfect ambiguity and offers, sub-textually, the affirmation that war-exhausted viewers needed. He wakes up from brain surgery, certain he’s bested divine providence in a heavenly trial, she possibly thinking his hallucinations fixed with medical science (the film noncommittal on an answer). He looks into her eyes and tells her, “We won.” She replies, “I know.”

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