Critics reviews

Watching [Powell and Pressburger's] one-of-a-kind drama Black Narcissus, which was released in cinemas on 26 May 1947, raises some intriguing questions about the outlook of Britain in its period of production. Here, the world outside of Europe is treated, through a perceived exoticism, with a surreal otherness. This sits alongside a radical questioning of female sexual desire and repression, which unleashes a level of eroticism that's surprising for 1940s British cinema.

What struck me, and has stayed with me, was how nitrate took the emphasis off the story and onto geography—of places, of spaces, and most importantly, of faces. The texture and color (or lack thereof) of Deborah Kerr's young face in relation to that of her much older Mother Superior as they talk about her upcoming assignment was unlike anything I had ever seen, the nitrate stock almost allowing you to feel the differences in their skin textures and tones.

The theme is from Forster and I Know Where I'm Going!, worked out "at the back of the beyond" by The Archers at their most carnal-bonkers-sublime... The blur of rapture and dread is magnificently embodied by Kathleen Byron's gaze of furious desire, her tormented nun donning scandalous reds for a foretaste of Hammer horror. Mallarmé's bell-ringer and Murnau's mysterious high angles for the climax, with consequences for Hitchcock. The fever breaks, but "I shall have my ghosts to remind me."

That great duo of stylized cinema, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, shot their classic dark-comic melodrama mostly on British studio sets, and the film's very falseness—those matte-painting vanishing perspectives and cinematographer Jack Cardiff's harshly exaggerated lighting cues—creates a psychologically charged space in which an ungodly tragedy can unfold.

What defines the sometimes bleak, often nostalgic, but always elegant trajectory of the Archers' cinematic arrow is a cleverly human understanding—one that forgives without forgetting, and that half-depicts, half-analyzes behavior as a schizoid depository for all the fears, hopes, and heartaches we've disappointedly gathered through day-to-day interactions.

It carefully paints the motions of these women, young, old, virginal, promiscuous and their struggle with their individual desire in a world that is riling against them. One can find strong and interesting female characters at the heart of nearly every P&P film, and this is no exception. This is perhaps their most overtly sexual venture, exploring the conflicting social norms of different cultures, as well as the perception of the value of the feminine characters through their sexual roles.

Twice-seen, Black Narcissus strikes me as a camp, technically complicated, gorgeous, morally offensive, admirably garish and ultimately shallow Crappy Film by two photoplaywrights I like quite a bit / No, they're cinéastes in other works, but to compare Black Narcissus to another adaptation of Rumer Godden, one goes back to the language of notices.

Where the people in The River arrive at peaceful acceptance, the sisters in Black Narcissus are left with their illusions of perfect spiritual order shattered. The River is about the flow of life, while Black Narcissus is about the convulsive effect of life on closed minds, a drama of fugitive glances and grimaces and fixations... advancing in vivid and at times hair-raisingly precise emotional increments, each one as richly abundant and visually satisfying as the last.

When a film hits you with such an overdose of poetry that it bends the needle on your Aesthetometer, and the part of your brain known as Fassbinder's Eggcup starts to overflow with meaningful beauty, causing a pint of freezing cold serotonin to squirt down the back of your neck, the whole thing "kind of monkeys around with the body's periodontal atrium," bringing on what we at Shadowplay call THE CHILLS. You get goosebumps, shivers, all that. You feel in danger of falling into the sky.

At precisely the moment Kathleen swings open the outer door and we have that astonishing CU on her face, the chills overtake me... Of course the build up to this moment is crucial — the whole thing was actually shot with Brian Easdale's pre-recorded score played on the set to provide it with drive and rhythm. But the clincher comes when Kathleen charges through that door in her Kabuki makeup. It's an extraordinarily stylised, overwrought moment, so unBritish in every way, and I love it for that.

One of the best and most beautiful Technicolor films ever made... Black Narcissus defines delirium. (It has one of the best lipstick scenes in cinema.) ...Designed to the hilt... and pulsating with a sense of the exotic and the erotic, Narcissus was cut into incomprehensibility in accordance with the demands of the Catholic League of Decency.

Despite the great wit and character of Pressburger's dialogue, Black Narcissus is a film that develops almost entirely through formal rather than dramatic means. The carefully developed tensions between monochrome and color, between closed, coherent spaces and aching, cosmic voids, reach a crescendo in the bravura climactic sequence. It is enough to see the bright, red lipstick that Sister Ruth has put on to know that the apocalypse is near.