Black Narcissus
(Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1947)

Powell and Pressburger make films of fanatical discipline, extreme dedication. Ballet dancers (The Red Shoes, 1948), serial killers (Peeping Tom, 1960), colonial nuns (Black Narcissus) — in each case we observe consciousness driven to the limits of commitment. The intensity of an obsessive human face is one of their most essential compositional elements, often paired with successive impressionistic explosions of coloured light. In Black Narcissus, the precocious Superior, Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr), pursues control relentlessly right up until the moment when, faced with the irrepressible sensuality and murderous disequilibrium of Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron), she must relinquish it entirely. In the isolation of an Anglican mission in the Himalayas, everything slips at the borders of authority, until the eruption of the Gothic — a variation of the conventual Gothic, no less, that mainstay of eighteenth-century British romance — spells the end of all illusions. That is, only when aesthetic fantasy reaches its height does illusory restraint collapse; the more camp and hyperbolic the performances and compositions, the closer we are to the denied reality of sensuous humanity and its overflows. The sleep of reason indeed produces monsters.