Sundays and Mondays this September at the 4-Star.

Four timeless classics by two of the most magical visionaries in cinema history.

Once you watch a film by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, you never forget the look. Their movies are filled with bright and vivid colors, bursting emotionality, and an unmatched technical craft that’s being utilized to evoke worlds torn between dreams and reality. To see one of their films is to take in an experience where the artists are using every technique available to them to heighten the intoxication of the viewer into their portraits of life. When you see the mind-blowing matte-paintings that immerse you in Black Narcissus and The Tales of Hoffman, or feel the strikingly modern intensity of films like Peeping Tom and The Small Back Room, it’s hard not to wonder if you might be watching the artistic highpoint of an entire generation of studio filmmaking.

This September at the 4-Star, we’re proud to offer filmgoers a chance to experience four of Powell & Pressburger’s greatest gems in the theatrical setting they deserve. We’ll be starting on September 1st and 2nd with their stirring, covent-set psychological drama Black Narcissus, which earned their longtime collaborator Jack Cardiff an Oscar for his breathtaking cinematography. On September 8 and 9, we’ll be screening their dreamy opera-ballet The Tales of Hoffman; a dazzling spectacle of music and dance that represents an artistic highpoint in the duo’s boundless ability to create awe-inspiring visuals. Then on September 16 and 17, we continue with the brilliant psychological horror film Peeping Tom, a solo work by Michael Powell. It’s a film that baffled and disgusted critics at the time, but is widely celebrated as a precursor to countless modern movies with its timeless exploration of a disturbing addiction to the voyeurism of filmmaking and film-gazing. Finally, we’ll end the series on September 23rd and 24th with the duo’s underrated WWII bomb defusing thriller The Small Back Room; a work of terrifically intense minimalism and claustrophobia that astonishes partially due to how different it feels compared to the rest of their filmography.

The Monday night screening of Black Narcissus will be introduced by the writer G. Allen Johnson (SF Chronicle). Additionally, Peeping Tom and The Small Back Room will be screened in new 4K restorations put out by Rialo Pictures.

DCPs for the series provided by Park Circus and Rialto Pictures

Here is a link to an article written by G. Allen Johnson on Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger, a recent documentary where Martin Scorsese recounts their career and his relationship to their movies.

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