On demand: "Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger"

Some docs make life substantially easier for themselves. For Made in England, an overview of the work of the varyingly born, British-based yet internationally minded directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the filmmaker David Hinton has armed himself with clips from some of the golden age's most revered titles, notably The Red Shoes, A Matter of Life and Death and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp; he's also sought out extensive commentary on these titles from one Martin Scorsese, a man who needs scant cue to talk, and to talk, expertly, about the movies in particular. Filmed in his natural habitat (a screening room), visibly reading off cards or some other prompter (the documentary's one inelegant touch), Scorsese duly gives forth on the development of these careers and of a rich strain of poetic, romantic, broadly crowdpleasing cinema: Powell's early solo work, Pressburger's apprenticeship on the continent, the wartime endeavours that brought the pair together, the peacetime flops that tested their bond and eventually led to a fond parting of the ways. The clips, for their part, keep coming. Moira Shearer's feet. Kathleen Byron on the clifftop, a hyper-ventilating Ken Russell heroine before her time. A transition from monochrome to full, glorious Jack Cardiff Technicolor that is as giddying as anything in The Wizard of Oz. Lots and lots of Anton Walbrook. How, frankly, could any of us resist?

There is also, I should say, plenty in Made in England that you won't have seen - or won't have seen recently. For starters, there are the P&P titles that aren't so readily and regularly recirculated: The Edge of the World, 49th Parallel, A Canterbury Tale, Gone to Earth, Oh... Rosalinda!!. There's some very touching footage - likely care of Melvyn Bragg's The South Bank Show - of Powell during his Californian exile at Francis Ford Coppola's American Zoetrope studio at the turn of the 1980s, pottering around, checking his mail, drafting his memoirs but failing to get anything else made, his cutglass accent and physical resemblance to Clive Candy only intensified by the years. Hinton also turns up a reunion between the directors in their dotage, where they resemble a married couple who found in one another something bigger than themselves, and can now look back on a long and happy history together. Scorsese's textural analysis, meanwhile, returns us to the glory days of the directors' commentaries that used to come as standard on our DVDs. Made in England only sporadically broaches the context in which these films were made and received, but - steered by the Scorsesean eye - it's eternally alert to what these specific clips mean and represent, their inspired shifts of camera perspective, their sly, warm gags and asides. The entire film is a connoisseurial nudge, first in the direction of the Powell and Pressburger corpus, then towards individual titles and moments: look at this, it says, isn't this great, see how this rapturous two-minute extract speaks to the whole.

And - increasingly, as its thesis assumes shape and heft - see how these extracts speak to a very great love: that love between the filmmakers, between the characters, and between the filmmakers and their characters; finally and crucially that love for the infinite possibilities of the cinema. As those who've spent the dog days of 2024 revisiting these films in BBC2's Saturday matinee slot could testify, this body of work now seems to bear out a radical-to-miraculous optimism. Even in the dark days of war, amid the crises of the British film industry and the hardships suffered by the wider populace, these two men from very different backgrounds found it in their hearts to embark upon a project like this. As Scorsese admits, he first saw these films on a tiny black-and-white TV set in the 1950s and 60s, and still fell head over heels for them. After a decade or so of docs reliant on fuzzily pixellated YouTube footage - often replicated in the wrong aspect ratio - it's stirring to encounter one where the archive looks pristine, shimmering, as if it had been filmed last week and its Technicolor were still wet paint. Made in England has been made with a comparable love, Hinton's generosity of sourcing and handling extending all the way back to the Rex Ingram silents Powell worked on in the 1920s. I first saw Powell and Pressburger's films on TV in the 1990s, coincidentally the last time those silents were being routinely broadcast, when the love affair between the cinema and television was still impassioned and cultural commentary such as this became a means of connecting our restless, curious minds to something bigger. Might this not be the moment to extend the project of Hinton's excellent film and seek a more considered curation of films on TV, so that the next generation of Scorseses can discover them and likewise take them to heart?

Made in England is currently streaming via the BBC iPlayer, and is available to rent via Prime Video, Curzon Home Cinema, YouTube and the BFI Player.