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Life is not only a beginning, just as death is hardly an ending. There’s so much in between, and so much beyond. How do you put all the “in between” and all the “beyond” into one movie? Powell and Pressburger pulled it off in A Matter of Life and Death, a work of great audacity and joy. _This_ is the universe. And yes, it’s bigger than we’d ever imagined.

In its execution it stands alone, not only in the Archers' body of work but also in the entire spectrum of British cinema. It is hard to imagine another British film quite so consciously vulnerable to the charge of utter absurdity, yet which nonetheless succeeds triumphantly on its own terms—through its fierce intellect, its poetic confidence, and most of all, its unerring, consummate sincerity.

In STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN (a.k.a. A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH; 1946, 104 min, 35mm), The Archers' fantasy is infused with wartime unity, highlighting our countries' shared democratic ideals but tempering it with a burdensome bureaucracy and common history.

While other Technicolor cinematographers preferred to stop and stare, [Cardiff] captured beautiful imagery while still keeping the film going. The camera's free, balletic movement is vital to a story about hope surviving under difficult times. Though the writer-directors and the actors may be the first names you notice, the cameraman also helped A Matter of Life and Death become one of the most moving movies ever made.

Powell had more and bigger ideas than any other postwar British director: his use of color and bold graphic images is startling and exhilarating, as is his willingness to explore the subsidiary themes of Pressburger's screenplay, never sacrificing creative excitement to linear plot. And yet, for all its abstraction, the film remains emotionally specific and affecting.