A Film Canon

The contemplative masterpiece of WWII cinema, A Canterbury Tale translates the strangeness of God into an extraordinary premise - that the war is a miracle, and its dislocations the mere pretext for a telescoping of history that condenses the spiritual life of Britain into a continuous revelatory presence, from the earliest days of the Iron Age to the peak of Anglicanism. This, in turn, presents a series of subsidiary miracles to a war nurse (Kim Hunter), American soldier (Bob Johnson), and English soldier (Dennis Price), all of whom find themselves on a modern day pilgrimage, to which end Powell and Pressburger subsume everything into topography, in its broadest sense. Not only is the narrative trajectory deflected into an elaboration of the various sight-lines of the cathedral - most pervasively from an elevated bend in the pilgrim's road, but most poetically from the vistas opened up by the bombing of Canterbury - but virtually every object hearkens back to a former time; or, rather, to a particular mythology of Englishness, encompassing hawks, ducking-stools, illuminated manuscripts, and the poetry of Dryden. Similarly, the 'characters' tend to be differentiated purely as various bodies of intimate, topographical knowledge, such that their very ability to converse at all both translates the temporal telescoping into a spatial register, and clarifies it as the product of a universal pastoral instinct, a longing for the country that is as old as war itself. The result is possibly the only film in which the duo benefited from black-and-white cinematography, conjuring up a shadowy universe between present and past that is ultimately identified with cinema itself.