And now I would like to introduce Mr. Tom Walsh.
Thank you.
Thanks very much.
Give my props here in place.
What a great turnout from 62-year-old movie here on a Sunday afternoon in L.A.
Thank you for joining us.
Good afternoon, and welcome to this, our 11th season of Art Director's Film Society screenings,
with this film tribute to the career and talents of production designer Alfred Junga,
mad artist W. Percy Pop Day, and director photography Jack Cardiff.
My name is Tom Walsh, as you've heard, and I have the privilege of serving as the president of the Art Director's Guild
in co-chair of its film society, along with its founder, designer John Muto.
The membership of the Art Director's Guild is comprised of design visualization specialists,
all of whom are practitioners in the art of narrative design for the moving image and theme design industries.
Our film society's primary goal is to honor and celebrate those narrative designers and artists,
and the films that have most significantly advanced the art of the moving image.
At this time, please join me in thanking some of our friends and associates who make these screenings possible.
First, thanks to our editor, Dennis Walsh, for his keen eye and careful preparation of our slide and clip reels.
He just got back from Comic-Con, so he may be sleeping upstairs, but Dennis, that was for you.
Thanks to our publicist, Marie Weisman, Suzanne Parker, and the staff of the firm of Weisman and Associates.
Thanks goes to the Art Director's Guild special events producer, Marjo Bernay,
as well as the staff and executive board of the Art Director's Guild for their continuing support for these programs.
As always, thanks to Chris, Gwyn and Margo, of the American Cinematheque, as well as their fine staffs here at the Egyptian.
A special thanks to the British Film Institute for their generous loan of some of the Alfred Younga images that you viewed in our slideshow.
And finally, our sincerest thanks to our panel guests, Director of Photography, John Hora ASC,
who will speak with us about the art of IB Technicolor and the work of cinematographer Jack Cardiff,
and visual effects designer and artist, Harrison Ellen Shaw, who will talk about his grandfather, W. Percy Popday,
who was the principal matte artist on Black Narcissus.
We also will be screening a very special new clip reel tribute to the art of three-strip Technicolor,
as well as sharing a few comments from extra special guests.
So please join us for this post-screening clip show in conversation, which will happen five minutes after the screening is finished.
And now I'm going to ask for a drum roll, because I'm about to go out on the edge of the wire,
on the wire without a net here, and speak in hyperbole, which I never do.
Black Narcissus is, if not the most beautiful cinematic effort ever recorded on film,
certainly the benchmark threshold or bar for what great film craft requires.
I grew up watching this film in black and white, and my first encounter on it was on the big screen,
for which it was intended, in its full IP Technicolor brilliance.
It was here at the Cinematheque at the three-strip IB Technicolor Festival many years back.
I'm a little fearful about what we're going to see today.
I'm going to be optimistic that you will be awed by the color saturation and the beauty of this clip.
If we're disappointed mutually, then we'll do a special screening of an IB print in the future.
So let's hold our breath and hope that this is what we want it to be.
If there is a high renaissance in the art of color film production, then that period would be between 1932 and 1955,
when Technicolor became known and celebrated for its hyper-realistic saturated levels of color,
which was used commonly for filming musicals such as The Wizard of Oz and Singing in the Rain,
and costume pictures such as The Adventures of Robin Hood in the Black Swan,
and animated films such as Snow White in the Seven Dwarfs in Fantasia.
Black Narcissus in Michael Powell's own view was the most erotic film he ever made.
Quoting Michael,
It is all done by suggestion, but eroticism is in every frame and image from the beginning to the end.
It is a film full of wonderful performances and passion just below the surface,
which finally at the end of the film erupts.
It can be said that desire frustrated elsewhere is just discharged in Technicolor.
And I hope that's true.
This film is justly famous for its Himalayan set designs,
which are a visualization of the protagonist's disturbed inner worlds,
an India more of the mind than of an external reality.
Every frame was photographed at what was then the newly opened Pinewood Studios back lot and stages
in the nearby Leonard's League Gardens in West Sussex, England.
None of it was done on location, not even second unit.
The film's production designer Alfred Junga began his career in Berlin at the Ufa Studios,
working there as an art director from 1920 to 1926.
Film producer Michael Balkan brought him to England and put him in charge of the new Gamat British Art Department,
where his organizational skills, as well as his talent, came into their own,
running a large staff of art directors and craftsmen who worked on any number of films at one time.
Considered Britain's first real supervising art director,
Junga began to work with Powell and Pressburger in 1939 on Contraband,
the first of eight pictures he would make with them.
Think of it, eight pictures with the same group. We just don't get those opportunities anymore.
The last of these was Black Narcissus, which earned Junga the Academy Award for Best Color Art Direction.
He received a second nomination in 1953 for the Arthurian Epic Knights of the Round Table.
His body of English language works includes King Solomon's Mines in 1937,
Goodbye, Mr. Chips in 1939, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp in 43,
Canterbury's Tale in 1944, Matter of Life and Death in 46,
Calling Bulldog Drummond in 51, Ivanhoe in 52, Magambo in 53,
Bo Bremel in 54. Picture a year, not a bad dig.
As an artist and designer, Alfred Junga possessed one of the most important talents that technicolor could require,
which was a superior command in control of color.
All of Junga's color films benefited greatly from his masterful and careful application of color in the service of the narrative story.
In this area, he really had very few equals in that day.
Black Narcissus also makes extensive and awe-inspiring use of matte paintings and large-scale painted backdrops
to suggest a mountainous environment of the Himalayas.
Matte paintings were created by the legendary special effects wizard Walter Percy Popday.
Powell said, our mountains were painted on glass.
We decided to do the whole thing in the studio, and that's why we managed to maintain color control to the very end.
Photographed by the British cinematographer and technicolor veteran Jack Cardiff,
we have a few specially picked cameramen by technicolor to become practitioners of their privately controlled system in Great Britain.
He was best known for his influential cinematography for directors such as Powell, Houston, Hitchcock.
The turning point in his career was as a second unit cameraman on Powell and Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.
They were impressed enough to hire Cardiff as cinematographer on their post-war technicolor film, The Matter of Life and Death.
This film, along with Black Narcissus and his work on the Red Shoes,
are considered by many to be the three masterpieces in the body of Powell and Pressburger's works.
Cardiff was also to win the Oscar for Best Color Cinematography for Black Narcissus in 1948.
The credits for this film are, as we know, written and produced and directed by Michael Powell and Emmerich Pressburger,
based on the novel by Romer Gordon, production and design Alfred Younga, assistant art director Arthur Lawson,
who went on to win another Academy Award for the Red Shoes along with that film's production designer.
Cinematography by Jack Cardiff, process and match-ups by W. Percy Day, film editing by Original Mills,
costume designed by Hein Heckeroth, who designed the Red Shoes.
Original music by Brian Easdale, running time is 101 minutes.
So again, please join us after this screening, and we will have a really wonderful after-show experience for you.
Enjoy the film.
