When Royal Air Force squadron leader Peter Carter (David Niven) finds himself facing an imminent crash with no working parachute, he does what anyone would do: quotes poetry to the lady on the other end of his radio and asks her to polish a farewell letter to his mother. But providence and the stubborn idiosyncrasy of the English climate intervene: the conductor (Marius Goring) who’s been appointed to escort Carter to the afterlife can’t locate his body in the fog, and the pilot receives an accidental reprieve. Living again on borrowed time, Carter finds his airwave amanuensis — June (Kim Hunter), a radio operator from the US Army Air Force — and it’s love at first sight. But shouldn’t he really be dead after all? From this deeply romantic premise, Powell and Pressburger craft a work of maximalist cinema, with the quotidian hillsides of wartime England rendered in Jack Cardiff’s retina-scorching Technicolor while the afterlife gets the art-moderne “dye monochrome” treatment.  Powell would later describe A Matter of Life and Death as “a tilt at the documentary boys,” as if sweeping away an entire tradition of unvarnished cinematic realism with the insouciance of an eighteenth-century dandy.  The film is a genre unto itself, a mad swirl of delirious fantasy, celestial courtroom drama, imperial introspection, and visionary cinema. (Text courtesy of Chicago Film Society)
 

35mm from the ConstellationCenter Collection at the Academy Film Archive, permission Sony Pictures Repertory

Preceded by: “All My Life” (Bruce Baillie, 1966) – 3 min – 16mm from Canyon Cinema