The British Film Institute’s definitive and all-embracing celebration of the films and creative genius of arguably Britain’s greatest film-makers, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (‘Rejecting hatred and fear’: why Powell and Pressburger’s weird, confounding films are perfect for our times, 16 October) is a welcome culmination of a project begun in the early 1980s by the BFI National Film Archive (of which I was then deputy curator) to restore the Technicolor masterpieces of P&P’s production company, the Archers.
My boss, David Francis, had persuaded a percipient National Heritage Memorial Fund to sponsor the programme, involving complex chemical laboratory skills, beginning with The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. The archive restored all the Archers’ major works (The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, A Matter of Life and Death) in this way, along with P&P’s dormant reputation.
Rediscovering Powell’s vivid, saturated Technicolor palette was an essential element of the restoration work. After a gala screening of Gone to Earth (a much-maligned film up to that point) at the London film festival, Powell wrote to me thanking the NFA for “finding the colours we could not get in the laboratories at the time”.
It is partly from these stirrings that Martin Scorsese and his editor Thelma Schoonmaker fell in love with British cinema (Thelma, literally, with future husband Michael Powell), leading Scorsese to continue the technical enhancement and endorsement of P&P’s films through the Film Foundation.
Clyde Jeavons
Former curator, National Film and Television Archive
• Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
