Michael Powell (1905-1990) and Emeric Pressburger (1902-1988) formed one of the most creative partnerships in cinema’s history. They worked under the banner of The Archers, founded to develop their filmmaking art without interference. Their best films were shot between 1940-1951, including, besides those in our selection, classics such as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) and A Canterbury Tale (1944). If Powell was in the director’s chair and Emeric generally provided stories and dialogue, their famous but little understood credit line: “Produced, written and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger”, testified to the intimate ties that bound every aspect of their work. Their collaboration was rooted in a fertile cross-culturing of talent between men of different backgrounds and temperaments: a discreet Hungarian Jew who fled Hitler’s Berlin and the extroverted Powell, gentleman from Kent, quintessentially English. They were maverick artists, far removed from the British realism of the times. They made films of visual magic – fantasy-filled, flamboyant, excessive – but which never overshadowed human emotion in very real stories about love, death, sacrifice and artistic creation.

But like the rainbow in the sky, The Archers could not last. For Powell, they lost their “glorious arrogance in 1953”, but their partnership was not officially dissolved until 1957, in disagreement over their independence in the new face of British production. The films, with their creators, fell into obscurity and were almost for- gotten until a series of revivals began in the 1970s. Their reputation spread to America in the 1980s, when an overwhelmingly enthusiastic Martin Scorsese brought Peeping Tom to the New York Film Festival, where it met with great critical success. Powell eventually became his advisor in America and they remained friends for life. Powell and Pressburger, filmmakers who inspired giants – Scorsese, Romero, de Palma, Coppola, Spielberg and others – rekindled and deepened their friendship until Emeric’s death in 1988.

APOCALYPSE YESTERDAY