A Film Canon

The greatest exploration of Technicolour to date, Powell and Pressburger's finest film imbues the world with the immense sensual potential that it must possess for the celibate, thereby constituting an idiosyncratic argument for celibacy - on aesthetic, rather than ethical grounds - and reinforcing Sister Clodagh's (Deborah Kerr) peculiarly personal, irreligious motivations for having joined the Anglican order that leads her to a Himalayan outpost; that is, her own frustrated sensuality, deflected into her conflict with Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron), who experiences the same, uneasy attraction to Mr. Dean (David Farrar), the local British representative, but opts for a desublimation that, given the dichotomy between the two, can only result in a demonic incarnation of evil. Despite its overt ethical preoccupations, this conclusion ultimately serves the more striking aesthetic purpose of taking the lurid potential of Technicolour as close as possible to horror without precluding beauty; or, rather, beautifies horror to an unprecedented extent, as evinced in the supernatural agency attributed to Sister Ruth's brilliant lipstick. This, in turn, retrospectively imbues every beautiful object in the film with the same horrific potential - especially flowers, around which the nuns' seduction at the hands of the mountain tends to revolve, and upon which Sister Ruth's transformation ultimately seems to be modelled. It also culminates Jack Cardiff's spectacular cinematography, which, centred on disorienting contrasts between red/pink and blue/green, translates altitude-sickness into visual terms, producing a pervasive queasiness whose sonic counterpart is the omnipresent wind, as well as a quite different form of horrific atmosphere from that pioneered by Tourneur, whose humidity is replaced by rarefication: "There's something in the atmosphere that makes everything seem exaggerated". It's this sensory intensity that offsets the stagebound quality of much of the action, the (obvious) use of matte-prints and models to depict the mountain from afar, and the one-dimensional characterisation, all of which become so many ciphers for the exquisite, tortuous circumscription of the celibate: "I couldn't stop the wind from blowing, and the air from being clear as crystals...I couldn't hide the mountain."