A Matter of Life and Death · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Watch the operating theatre again and notice the eyelid. As the anaesthetic takes Squadron Leader Peter Carter under, a wet pink membrane slides down over the camera lens and the screen goes dark — the film blinking shut on itself. It is one of the most literal gestures in cinema. The movie tells you, without a word, that everything you are about to see happens behind this eye. And then Powell and Pressburger spend two hours refusing to let you decide whether the eye is dreaming or seeing true.

That refusal is the film. It is also why it belongs so squarely to what Deleuze called the powers of the false — the idea that a film need not pick between true and delirious, real and imagined, but can keep both alive and make the undecidability itself the engine. Cinema had long traded on a contract: the camera doesn't lie; what we see, happened. Here the contract is quietly torn up. Peter bails from a burning bomber without a parachute and lives; a heavenly clerk mislays his death; a French aristocrat in a powdered wig arrives to collect him and stops time on Earth to chat. Meanwhile Doctor Reeves, a neurologist, diagnoses adhesions on the brain producing 'vivid, organized visions,' and schedules the surgery that will run in lockstep with the cosmic trial. The title card is scrupulous: 'a story of two worlds, the one we know and another which exists only in the mind.' Only. In. The. Mind. The film hands you the debunking and then declines to cash it. Both readings stay standing to the last frame.

Deleuze had a name for an image built exactly like this: the crystal-image. In a crystal, the actual and the virtual — the present moment and its double as memory, dream, or reflection — become indiscernible; you can no longer say which face is which. A Matter of Life and Death is nearly a working model of the thing. Two worlds are graded as one continuous image so they can dissolve into each other. Doctor Reeves owns a camera obscura that throws the living village onto a table as a soft moving picture, and the film pauses to admire it — a machine for turning the real into an image, a rhyme for cinema tucked inside the story. The whole picture is that camera obscura: a projected world we cannot step outside of to check.

The most audacious craft choice makes the crystal visible in colour. Most Technicolor films of the 1940s treated the process as an unbroken sales pitch. The Archers did the opposite — full, painterly, Old-Master colour for Earth, a silvery pearl monochrome for the beyond, both achieved inside the Technicolor system so one could bleed into the other on a single strip. For Deleuze, affective colour is a colour that absorbs a scene and its feeling rather than merely decorating it; here colour becomes ontology. Which world you are in is a fact about the film stock. And the film knows it is joking: the celestial messenger, arriving downstairs, sighs that 'one is starved for Technicolor up there.' Heaven is monochrome bureaucracy. The afterlife looks starved because it is the negative of life.

Give that eyelid its proper name and you have a dicisign — an image where we feel the camera perceiving a character who is himself perceiving, the apparatus made present rather than transparent. When Conductor 71 freezes the Earth — a table-tennis ball hanging in the air, players locked mid-pose while two figures walk through the tableau — the film produces something rarer still, a direct image of time, a chronosign: time lifted out of the flow of action and shown for itself. Movement stops; time does not. And the great cosmic court is less a plot device than a discourse-image — action transposed into argument. A commissioned goodwill picture, asked merely to smooth frictions between British civilians and American GIs, inflates its brief into a trial of two nations before the universe, with the first American killed by a British bullet prosecuting the case. The film stages a problem — love against law, England against America, life against its own ledger — that it can pose far more vividly than it can resolve.

The lineage is honest about its debts. The clerical-error-litigated-in-heaven engine comes straight from Here Comes Mr. Jordan; the death-as-genial-bureaucratic-waystation from Outward Bound; love-as-negotiation-with-a-personified-death from Death Takes a Holiday. Junge carried the monumental machine-architecture of Metropolis onto Denham's floor and built it into the vast moving Stairway itself. And the split palette is The Wizard of Oz turned inside out — Oz kept colour for the dream and grey for Kansas; Powell gives colour to the world we know and drains the beyond. What the Archers add is the one thing their sources lacked: they refuse to certify which world is real. Mr. Jordan's heaven is simply true. This heaven might be a lesion firing behind a concussed man's eye.

That move — twist that rewards the second viewing, ground that keeps shifting under a sincere romance — is why the film sits so comfortably beside the modern mind-game film decades early. It is a wartime love story that also happens to be an experiment in how much a movie can withhold and still break your heart. Watch it again, from the eyelid on, and try to decide. The pleasure is that you can't.