“More Than Cool Reason Ever Comprehends”: Shakespeare, Imagination and Distributed Auteurism in A Matter of Life and Death

Abstract

In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), American servicemen take on the parts of the bungling thespians in A Midsummer Night’s Dream . The rude mechanicals’ rehearsal scene provides the filmmakerswith the occasion to contrast the British and American movie industries at the end of World War 2. Whereas both Powell and Pressburger and the British film industry flourished during the war, entering into what is often referred to as a golden age of British cinema, the cultural and financial dominance of Hollywood remained a powerful threat. Powell and Pressburger mobilize Shakespeare in order, first, to align their films with the English literary tradition and, second, to assertthe superiority of the artistic imagination over the commercial one, whichthey associate with Hollywood. Additionally, their version of Dream’s rehearsal scene represents Powell and Pressburger’s own conception of cinema as a fundamentally collaborative art. This conception answers to a theory of distributed auteurism , in which the vision of the director—or, in the case of Powell and Pressburger, the director and screenwriter—is not merely articulated but also clarified, modified, or complicated by the actions of others working on the film.