Black Narcissus (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1947) (Patreon)

The jury is not exactly out on Black Narcissus. It is considered one of the very best artifacts from the Powell / Pressburger partnership, which surely makes it one of the greatest British films of all time. At the same time, encountering it not in 1947, or 1997, but in 2021, I cannot help meeting it with a fair dash of ambivalence. This isn't so much about "presentism," much less "cancel culture." The problem isn't the way that Black Narcissus reflects its status as a postwar production, with the, shall we say, different social and political sensitivities most of us hold today. Instead, it seems to me that the film wholeheartedly commits to some ugly ideologies, chewing on them, working them over, and offering them for overt consideration. And yet, Powell and Pressburger stop well short of offering a satisfying viewpoint on those overt ideologies.

There's a certain sense in which Black Narcissus is a distaff Heart of Darkness. A select group of Anglican nuns are separated from their convent to establish a new nunnery, with a school and clinic, high on a mountain in the Indian Himalayas. They are to work out of Mopu, a crumbling building belonging to the family of the local ruler, General Toda Rai (Esmond Knight). The massive compound belonged to the General's grandfather, who used it as his harem. Much to the nuns' embarrassment, the walls are festooned with erotic paintings in the classical Indian style. Adding to the difficulties, Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr) has been given this assignment as her first Superiorship, so the complicated project is a true trial by fire.

It should be acknowledged that Black Narcissus is quite simply one of the most visually ravishing films ever made. Much of the credit for this goes to master cinematographer Jack Cardiff, who captures the combination of lush green luminosity and peeling decrepitude that comprise the atmosphere of Mopu. Frequent images of the mist-shrouded mountains, particularly the high-angle shots of the belltower perched on a mile-high precipice, have almost certainly served as inspiration for King Hu and other wuxia directors. And in terms of overall design, Powell and Pressburger subtly but insistently contrast the bright colors and surroundings of the village with the stark luminosity of the sisters' white habits.

In fact, Black Narcissus is practically baptized in natural light that is practically electric. This underlines the fact that although the Archers are not depicting a fantasy world as such, this is nevertheless a zone of feverish hallucination, an uncanny combination of holy emanation and the optical phenomena said to accompany schizophrenia. This glowing, tactile semi-reality perhaps helps to explain why estate caretaker Mr. Dean (David Farrar) seems to be oilier and more scantily clad with his every appearance, or why some internal crisis is provoking the otherwise reliable Sister Philippa (Flora Robson) to experience states of panic, forgoing her official gardening duties to plant non-native flowers that contribute to the overall chromatic overload.

But this otherworldly miasma, the break with "civilization" that induces all manner of psychological maladies -- this is where the trouble begins. There is continual discussion of how this "strange place" drives otherwise sensible people to madness, licentiousness, depravity. Powell and Pressburger have Dean, especially, articulate this point of view repeatedly, while also noting that the native villagers are "primitive" and "childlike," incapable of any systematic thought. While Dean looks down on their superstition, he does in fairness display just as much haughty contempt for the sisters' Catholicism. 

Black Narcissus seems to dwell in this colonial mindset, even as it self-consciously presents it as a discourse. Even Sister Clodagh, the most levelheaded member of the convent, experiences unbidden memories of the failed love affair that drove her to become a nun in the first place. This of course is nothing compared with the violent erotomania experienced by the "sick" Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron), whose rejection of both the Anglican Order and the "dirty natives" is the opposite of Dean's clinical disengagement. She is depicted as passionate id unleashed, the work of the devil being helped along by this bizarre, godless place.

Powell and Pressburger's film is driven by two distinct but interlocking mythologies. The first, of course, is the concept of the inscrutable East, that no man's land where logic doesn't obtain and a rational person will inevitably go mad. ("There's just something about this place," we hear again and again.) But the second is a kind of pre-Freudian concept of female subjectivity, and women's sexuality in particular, as a dark, lawless force that can form a black hole, set to consume every meaningful thing that God and Man have ever made. By using nuns to exemplify this crisis, the Archers have produced a rather blatant contest between patriarchal Law and innate female madness.

What is ultimately so troubling about Black Narcissus is that there is no real critique of these mythologies, even as they are so clearly displayed. The poker player uses the cards they find in the deck, and makes certain decisions about how to deploy them. But he or she cannot be said to "problematize" the king, the queen, the jack, etc. Those are just the tools that allow the game to proceed as normal. This is how Powell and Pressburger operate, staging their melodrama within the rare air of Black Narcissus. We can see how the system works, but are in no way expected, much less encouraged, to critically intervene in it.

Or, more briefly: in nine years, Hitchcock will make Vertigo, restaging the belltower death not as the inevitable self-destruction of the wanton woman, but as the direct result of men's own delusions.