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Michael Powell on how the iconic climax in "Black Narcissus" (1947) was filmed:
"In 'Black Narcissus' (1947), I started out almost as a documentary director and ended up as a producer of opera, even though the excerpt from the opera was only about twelve minutes long. Never mind! It was opera in the sense that music, emotion, image and voices all blended together into a new and splendid whole. By music, of course, I mean not only sounds produced by musical instruments, but the human voice itself. Although neither Deborah nor Joseph nor Sister Ruth used their voices for anything but screams, music dictated their movements and revealed their thoughts and intentions.
The sequence started with little Joseph- he was certainly one of the great successes of the film- bringing a cup of tea to Sister Clodagh as the colours of dawn spread over the snows of the Himalayas, and ends with Sister Ruth falling to her death. It was planned step by step, bar by bar, by Brian and myself. I wanted to get the maximum of suspense out of the cat-and-mouse play between the two women and we succeeded. The crew were amazed when Brian and I appeared with stopwatches and exact timings when we started to shoot the sequence.
I insisted on rehearsing and shooting to a piano track and consulting Brian with a musical score in my hand over each set-up. But it worked! It worked! I have never enjoyed myself so much in my life. For the first time I felt I had control of the film with the authority of the music. It was astonishing to everyone, but particularly, of course, to the camera crew that we were able to compress or speed up the movement of the action just by saying: "No, that wasn't fast enough. We've only got seven seconds for I that bit of action."
I was so happy! I swore that this was the only way to make films; and so, of course it is, if they are silent films or musical films. But for me, film-making was never the same after this experience, and it was to lead me and my collaborators into tribulations as well as triumph."
("A Life in Movies", Michael Powell, 1986)
P.S: On this day, 79 years ago, "Black Narcissus" (1947) premiered in London, UK.
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