Powell and Pressburgers War: The Art of Propaganda, 1939-1946

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A focused study on Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburgers cinematic contributions to the war effort, arguing for the centrality of propaganda to their work as film artists. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger are widely hailed as two of the greatest filmmakers in British cinema history. The release of their first movie, The Spy in Black, barely preceded the beginning of World War Two, and a number of their early masterworks, including The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Canterbury Tale, and A Matter of Life and Death, were produced in the service of the war effort. Through exploring the relationship between art and propaganda, this book shows that Powell and Pressburger saw no contradiction between their aesthetic ambitions and their cinematic war work: propaganda imperatives were highly conducive to their objectives as both commercial cinema practitioners and artists. Drawing on production materials from the archives of the British Film Institute, this book charts three phases in Powell and Pressburgers wartime career: from first-time collaborators who strive to reconcile popular cinematic forms with developing notions of what constitutes effective propaganda; to accomplished, and sometimes controversial, propagandists whose movies center upon Britains relations with its enemies and allies; to filmmakers whose responsiveness to the propaganda requirements of the late war is matched by a focus, shared by the Ministry of Information, on what the post-war future would bring.

Reviews

Greg M. Coln Semenza and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr.s detailed exploration of Powell and Pressburgers wartime films stands out in its clarity of thought, expression and in the thoroughness of the historical research on display. We get rich analyses of the major wartime feature films, and the authors persuasively tease out the complex tensions they reveal between art and propaganda. There are valuable insights, too, into the way Powell and Pressburger point towards the challenges and possibilities of postwar reconstruction. In this well-crafted book, Semenza and Sullivan ably show that they know where they are going. * Andrew Moor, Reader in Film Studies, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, and author of Powell and Pressburger: A Cinema of Magic Spaces (2005) *
Powell and Pressburger's War is an important new study of some of British cinema's finest films. Semenza and Sullivan demonstrate how Powell and Pressburger combined technical artistry and cultural imagination to meet the changing ideological imperatives of wartime cinemacreating works that are a perfect fusion of art and propaganda. The authors' sympathetic and nuanced analysis does full justice to these richly textured films. I recommend it heartily to all British cinema scholars and Powell and Pressburger aficionados. * James Chapman, Professor of Film Studies, University of Leicester, UK, and editor of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television *

Author Bio

Greg M. Coln Semenza is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, USA. His books include How to Build a Life in the Humanities (2015), The English Renaissance in Popular Culture (2010), Graduate Study for the 21st Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities (2005; 2nd ed. 2010), Milton in Popular Culture (2006), and Sport, Politics, and Literature in the English Renaissance (2004). He has published numerous essays on film and adaptation. Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. is Liberal Arts Professor of English at Penn State University, USA. He is the author of four monographs, including Shakespeare and British World War Two Film (2022), Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment (2012), Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama (2005), and The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage (1998).