Black Narcissus (dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, United Kingdom, 1947) had a very intriguing plot about nuns who try to start a school and hospital in a small Himalayan village. But there their dreams and vanities are brought to the fore, creating a beautifully shot film with something almost devilish underneath. Black Narcissus is very much like Picnic at Hanging Rock in that regard, capturing a sort of austere repression that is then punctured by a wild landscape.
The film has an unique visual texture, due to its revolutionary (at the time) use of Technicolor and the great vibrancy of Alfred Junge’s sets (which seem to make their own statement about the lust and dreams of the collective past). At the end the set is turned into a claustophobic emotional space of violent desire with expressionistic lighting, all tense reds and sickening greens.
The camera style sets up a compositional dichotomy between the great shots of the Himalayan landscape and old palace to some of the most dramatically potent facial close-ups I’ve seen, the lighting beautifully sculpting the character’s face as she recognizes the implications of a previous action or dialogue with an interiorized horror. And then there are times when dramatically one would think a close-up would occur but the camera is kept at a full shot; when Sister Ruth runs in covered in blood it is not there is no close-up but the vibrant red of the blood seems to suddenly make itself part of the rest of the bold mise-en scene, pulling everything into a chillingly coherent and theatrical whole.
The film is not without its problems: some dialogue exchanges seem rough, almost like the adaptation of Rumer Godden’s novel needed to skip over multiple lines; some of the scene structuring seems dated; and we won’t get into the colonial politics (especially the one ethnographic montage near the beginning).
But overall Black Narcissus is a very engrossing film.
