Michael Powell Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The UK production of The Thief of Bagdad (1940) is a bit like the US production of The Wizard of Oz from one year earlier. On the surface, it looks like a seamless blend of fantasy storytelling, special effects and stunning color, but underneath it was a patchwork collaboration of many hands, coming together in a combination of spit, duct tape and luck. These days, The Thief of Bagdad is usually catalogued alongside the movies of director Michael Powell (I Know Where I'm Going, The Red Shoes, etc.), but he was only one of three credited directors and at least two more uncredited directors. The saving grace is that The Thief of Bagdad had a driving force behind it: producer Alexander Korda. Korda was a Hungarian immigrant who, along with his brothers Zoltan and Vincent, took the British film industry by storm with his combination of business savvy and boyish glitz. No matter who filmed what footage, Korda would be the one to call final cut. And despite some sluggish spots, the result is still dazzling, enough to enchant entirely new generations of dreamy children.

A couple of weeks ago, A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis of the Times wrote a couple of pieces on the relationship between movies and the Internet. Manohla's was the featherweight of the two, humorously recounting her struggles to find a movie download site to her liking. Scott's was more substantial, positing a time in the near future when movie fanatics will have access to a "virtual cinematheque" where "before too long the entire surviving history of movies will be open for browsing and sampling at the click of a mouse for a few PayPal dollars." I think it's an entirely logical premise. If in 1978, when I was born, you would have said to someone that the movies released that year could one day be played by inserting a little round disc into a home computer, the person you were talking to would have looked at you like you were crazy. Then they would have asked "What's this 'home computer' thing you refer to, by the way?" So if we can travel that far in 28 years, you're telling me that in the next 28 years, Paramount and Fox can't figure out a way to get their library of films from the 30s and 40s onto the Web, which will likely be by then a more important avenue of distribution than the video store? That's flatly absurd.

I've been reading some counterpoints to the argument on the Web, and I've yet to find a credible argument against the "virtual cinemateque." One of them, by film historian Kristin Thompson, is downright illogical. Thompson misuses Scott's phrase 'surviving history of movies' to set up a strawman argument, claiming that when Scott speaks of movies, he's including teaching films, porn, ads and, I guess, home movies as well. What planet is she on? He's clearly talking about movie-movies -- the kind of movies that he or I or any other reasonable film fan might be interested in downloading. As for the more substantial argument -- that the studios have no financial incentive in digitizing even an obscure movie-movie from the 1930s -- to that I say, what was the financial incentive in putting the 1947 film Black Narcissus on DVD, which I bought last week? Was Universal Pictures being besieged on a weekly basis by fans of director Michael Powell, demanding an end to the injustice of not having Black Narcissus on DVD? I think not. It seems like we've been over this ground many times. If I wanted, I'm sure I could go to the New York Public Library and microfiche an article from the early 80s explaining why all the movies we grew up with won't ever be transferred to home video.