The Image: Something happens; something is happening - aestheticoftheimageuk.wordpre... Alison, cocking her head slightly as a sort of quiet English miracle unwinds quietly, slowly all around her - the past communing with the present - the Canterbury pilgrims of the past breathing once again with this modern pilgrim from the present. We see her face bathed in that almost transcendental light as the vision plays out in front of her. (aestheticoftheimageuk.wordpre...)
The sounds too of those jocund pilgrims on their way to Canterbury - released from centuries ago in that little seam in the countryside where they resided so long...
(It took a foreigner like Emeric Pressburger to help England reconnect with its own history in the darkest years of the war)
Sheila Sim as Alison - an ordinary English girl from London - who discovers something deeply personal in the spirit and undulations of the English countryside is extraordinary in this scene.
(It is true to say that ever since I watched this film yesterday, this scene has percolated in my mind with a life of its own, unbidden. It may be one of the very best scenes in cinema history - certainly English cinema. I am a bit obsessed by it.)
The notion of the English countryside as mythological, poetic, charmed. The past is not dead and buried - but still there in the curve of the path, the spread of the leaves above, the earth beneath your feet. You/we are the pat - if only we know it. T.S. Eliot of course:
"In that open field
If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie-
A dignified and commodiois sacrament.
Two and two, necessarye coniunction,
Holding eche other by the hand or the arm
Whiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire
Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
Mirth of those long since under earth
Nourishing the corn. Keeping time,
Keeping the rhythm in their dancing
As in their living in the living seasons
The time of the seasons and the constellations
The time of milking and the time of harvest
The time of the coupling of man and woman
And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.
Eating and drinking. Dung and death..."
And then Keats: "Gone is the vision, do I wake or sleep"
Image Book here: • A Canterbury Tale (194...
(Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger looked like this: www.expressandstar.com/resize...
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