American Cinematographer - November 2006 - 22

Shoes,

of the other PowellPressburger films made between 1943
or any

and 1949, is to encounter artists in total

command of their medium
ers

-

filmmak¬

with bold ideas and the technical

skill to express them.
The second of these features, A

Canterbury Tale, is also a triumphant
an adaptation of
Chaucer as much as a piece inspired by
his sensibility, the film is a typically rich
Powell-Pressburger meditation on love,
duty, and patriotism. Set in the period
when American soldiers were arriving
in England to prepare for D-Day, the
story follows three searchers: an Amer¬
ican sergeant who longs for the woman
achievement. Not

he left back home; a recruit from the

Women's Land

Army mourning the

death of her lover; and a resourceful

British sergeant

who joins forces with

the other two to solve

small

a

crime in the

village where they all find them¬

selves.

The mystery

really just an

GC-EASy

plot in the film is
excuse Powell and Press-

that

arose

entered

ballast

when American soldiers
in which

English women
by their own fighting
men. Yet its exploration of the reasons
we fight in the first place, and the price
that both men and women pay, remains
relevant and affecting today. This rele¬
vance is largely due to the filmmakers'
overwhelming affection for their charac¬
areas

had been left alone

ters, all of whom are rendered with

great complexity and care; even the
movie's ostensible villain is
moments

of

great

granted
dignity and

poignancy.
Powell and

Pressburger's gener¬
osity of spirit finds its perfect visual
corollary in Erwin Hillier, BSC's luminous
cinematography. Each character is
lovingly lit and framed, and every loca¬

the

particulars of village life in great
detail) and poetic stylization (the many
romantic, melodramatic moments in

which the characters expose

their
deepest feelings). The most interesting
aspect of Hillier's photography is his
active avoidance of the expected; as
film historian Ian Christie points out on
the DVD commentary track, the movie
finds the extraordinary in the ordinary,
and vice versa. Right from the begin¬
ning, when Hillier lights a conventional
expository scene as though it were a
sequence from an ominous film noir, A
Canterbury Tale exhibits a tendency
toward the most unlikely and unpre¬
dictable forms of visual expression.
However, Hillier's stylization is
not just a gimmick; it always comple¬
ments and adds additional layers to the
drama. The movie's unspoken theme is
that of enlightenment and revelation,
and Hillier makes this concept concrete

tion shimmers with sunlit radiance. The

by using wartime blackouts to create

film is

scenes

odd blend of

documentary
realism (in the form of scenes depicting
an

news

in which characters

between literal extremes of

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intensely engaged with the concerns of
its period, notably the complications

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American Cinematographer - November 2006

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