Distances Blued and Purpled by Romance: Revisiting the Midcentury Colonialist Gaze in Black Narcissus

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s midcentury psychological fantasy Black Narcissus (1947) is enjoying something of a resurgence, available to be rewatched and taught more widely than ever before. For much of the 70-plus years since its release, the movie was difficult to find except as written descriptions, movie stills or poster art (fig. 1). It was a tantalizing entry in filmmaker lore that the likes of Martin Scorsese and Tilda Swinton cite as formative influences, while ordinary viewers like myself could pore over trade publications and academic books or rewatch the original trailer online. This changed in 2020, when FX released a three-episode TV mini-series remake; simultaneously, the original also appeared widely on streaming channels. I was primed to admire Powell’s masterful use of Technicolor and the astonishing set design by Alfred Junge that recreated a mountain village near Darjeeling, India. I had read more than once that Powell used Brian Easdale’s score to meticulously rehearse key scenes with the precision of a dance recital, a practice that set him apart as a director from the rest of the plodders who tinkered with continuity in postproduction. This formal inventiveness, critics assured, was coupled with the movie’s real interest in women’s lives.

Finally watching Black Narcissus was a mixed experience after all this build-up. The film offers an abundance of counterfeit color, the blues of the Himalayan mountains and the purpled sunsets painted in meticulous, mesmerizing detail for the studio set. But its view of India, Indians, and British colonials is reductive at best and downright racist at worst. Its understanding of nuns and women as victims of their own sexuality is dated even for the late-1940s. When one nun screeches about the villagers, “There are too many of them, and they smell,” I was almost ready to consign the movie to the space reserved for formally brilliant, politically awful textual objects. But Black Narcissus remains fascinating despite—not because of—the human drama that the directorial team and most critics have focused on. Below I explore some of those filmic aspects that elide, evade, and ultimately refuse to be controlled by Powell and Pressburger. Unruly birds, distracting breezes, unscripted shouts by uncredited cast members, and those unreally beautiful mountains—in what follows, I consider how these elements present in the mise en scène disrupt the otherwise pervasive colonialist masculinism of Michael Powell’s commentary and much of the writing about Black Narcissus.

Unruly Elements that Refuse the Exotic

Adapted from Rumer Godden’s 1939 novel and greatly simplifying it, Powell and Pressburger’s film revolves around a group of five nuns who travel from colonial Calcutta (now Kolkata) beyond the popular hill station of Darjeeling. Their goal is to set up a mission in a remote building that used to be the pleasure palace of a minor Indian royal. The main frisson in the movie hinges on the tight-laced nuns’ encounter with such sordid depravation. Everyone expects the nuns to fail, and indeed they do return to Calcutta within a year, following the death of one of their number.

Whereas Godden’s novel is interesting for bringing out the nuances of colonial politics, such as why an Indian prince would want to ingratiate himself to British missionaries, or how the Irish Sister Clodagh is doubly estranged from the English and Indian people around her, the movie largely sidesteps such questions. It retains the same title as Godden’s book, but the film attaches no particular significance to “Black Narcissus,” a cloying perfume that the prince’s nephew wears liberally out of a misguided sense of high fashion. In the novel, the perfume suggests how social class intersects with imperialism in the colonies and metropole, but in the film, the perfume is just another feature of masculinity that irritates—meaning titillates—the nuns. The movie insists on the sexual triangle between Sister Clodagh, the leader of the mission, Mr. Dean, the prince’s overseer (played by David Farrar wearing the shortest of shorts), and Sister Ruth, who falls ill from altitude sickness, quickly loses her faith and, in turn, her life. The movie presents the nuns as uniformly repressed, denied their sexuality and motherhood, and for this reason easy prey for the deadly decadence of the Orient.

By focusing on the technological achievements of this film (and others made under the label of “The Archers,” as Powell and Pressburger styled themselves), many gushing filmmakers and critics have avoided facing up to the egregious ways it insists on an untaught White child’s version of India in 1947, the year of the country’s independence from Britain. Similarly, few commentators note Powell’s role as a propaganda filmmaker during World War II, which seems closely connected to his casually racist use of brownface or the colonial apologia in Black Narcissus. Important exceptions include Priya Jaikumar, who glosses the movie as a modernist imperial romance, and Greg M. Colón Semenza and Garrett A. Sullivan Jr.’s recent volume that reckons with the Archers’ war work for Churchill.[1] The film’s racism is implicit in the critically-lauded costuming of the local people, which incongruously throws together vaguely “Indian”-coded dress and jewelry. And it is explicit in the Criterion Channel’s commentary on the movie, recorded by Martin Scorsese and Michael Powell in 1988, shortly before Powell died in 1990 (included in the restoration completed and released in 2010).

Powell’s chauvinism contorts his view of Indians and of women. He is gleeful about the set design in these terms: “Exotic birds, exotic women, exotic birds!” He could have taken the crew to India for filming, he says, but “was much more interested, actually, to try and tell an exotic, wild, beautiful tale like this, and tell it all using all the studio techniques.”

After the fourth exotic, I’m ready to scream at the recording. Powell’s decision to film indoors countered his usual habit of going on location to film even during World War II, and has usually been taken as a mark of his commitment to visual artistry. But such a decision also reeks of the desire to coerce screen space into the straitened formulations of a colonialist imagination unwilling to come to grips with the changing post-1945 global political order.

The Archers reduce complex narrative material into manageable binaries—British/Indian, sexy men/repressed women, and so on. But the film text, I want to suggest, over and above auteuristic intention, resists such simplifications. When scripted words infuriate, other elements of mise en scène invite viewers into an alternate space of aesthetic resistance. A detail from Powell’s commentary sticks with me: all those so-called exotic birds that were brought on set to look beautiful caused mayhem while filming. Even though they were indoors, the birds escaped so often that the production designer had to find a large quantity of fine mesh to cover the set while shooting. Powell tosses off this bit of trivia as a joke, but it discloses something mulish and recalcitrant embedded in the film.

In one of the first establishing scenes of the palace-turned-convent, we see the caretaker Angu Ayah cavorting in front of many cages; the longer sequence shows her holding out some seeds to a parrot sitting on a perch, which the bird looks at but doesn’t pick up. I’ve become attached to that small detail, so easy to miss unless one pauses frame-by-frame to undo the slippages of continuity editing. When considering whether to write, teach, or think any further about British Orientalist texts, such almost illegible nos preserved in the film counterbalance Powell’s commentary and the weight of critical approval. And so, in scenes where we are supposed to laugh at what Mr. Dean says, or register the arch of Sister Clodagh’s eyebrow expressing melancholy, anger, or whatever, my attention wanders over to birds who won’t sit still, who won’t pick up seeds on cue.

Similarly, there are many scenes in which the wind rushes across the frame and exceeds its proscribed function in the mise en scène. The wind whooshes in as white noise as soon as the score lowers in volume; it makes the flimsy curtains flap and the nuns’ wimples blow about. The wind was the result of large fans on set that were turned off and on by the crew in line with Powell’s exacting choreography, and yet the sound of the wind and its visual presence as moving cloth interrupt the ongoing melodrama. It is always present in the diegesis as if waiting for the director to cede control. Visually, too, I get lost in the way a curtain flutters on the edges of certain frames, its movement drawing my eyes away from the human drama at its center. Those naughty curtains pull my eye outwards, towards their own motion or back towards the painted sets, those entirely fabricated Himalayas that upstage the plastic people in the foreground. Tame birds and cloth moving in artificial breezes cannot be said to have agency of their own, but these visual interventions in the frame refuse to obey the Archers’ claustrophobic directorial vision.

Scripted Racism versus Unscripted Hindi

Few critics or filmmakers have commented on the reductive and conservative features of Black Narcissus, or how less prominent screen elements leaven its overt colonialism. And yet, one attempt to right the wrongs, so to speak, of the Archers version can be seen in the 2020 TV remake of Black Narcissus, directed by Charlotte Bruus Christensen. The new version eschews brownface, shoots on location in Nepal (although the original Godden novel is set in eastern India), and avoids bizarrely unreal costumes, in effect revising the political shortfalls of Powell and Pressburger. But the remake lacks the vim and gusto of the original. It’s true that the original Black Narcissus is in large measure an Orientalist pipedream, but simply exiling it from our attention—or trying to offer a morally “better” version—neither unmakes it for cinema history nor offers a meaningful riposte to Powell’s casually propagandist narrative simplifications. Rather than participate in such a proscriptive project, we might instead take a note from Eugenie Brinkema, who asks film critics to use formal analysis as a tool to delimit cinematic agency and the meaning-making potential of film texts.[2] Thus, my reading of the wind that whooshes every time Easdale’s score falls silent, or the disobedient bird in the corner of the frame, notices how the original Black Narcissus itself contains the political realities that its directors were eager to obscure. For me, the most crucial corrective comes in scenes of the uncredited extras on set and the snippets of their talk that we can hear, in contrast to the heavy-handed determinism about women, colonials, and even love that otherwise drives the movie.  

In his recorded commentary, Powell relates how he recruited many uncredited Indian actors as extras. “There were huge colonies of Indians down by the docks that would come in with the ships and perhaps stay, you see? 'Cause in those days, London was a great port. So we did all our casting down [at the] London docks.” He shows no interest in why London might be full of poor South Asians in 1946, when the movie was filmed—even though it is likely that the docks were full of people displaced after the 1943 Bengal Famine and discharged soldiers waiting to go home after 1945, besides that London’s cosmopolitan dock area already had a high proportion of South Asian migrants since the nineteenth century. Characteristically, Powell fixates on the two English actresses who play Indians: May Hallatt as the caretaker Angu, whom he admires, and Jean Simmons in brownface as the villager Kanchi. He spends several minutes musing about Simmons, including that years later he came across her at a restaurant. She “looked very much the same. All the women in my films have aged very well. I picked good, stout stock.” 

Thinking with Black Narcissus is for me an exercise in holding very mixed critical reactions alongside each other; amazement, irritation, wonder, and mortification are equally present as I’ve watched and rewatched it. I felt less alone in my response when reading the British Indian writer Mahesh Rao’s moving essay about the actor Sabu in Black Narcissus.[3] Rao describes his mix of pride, at an ordinary Indian starring in British and Hollywood movies, and acute shame about the weak role given to Sabu. Rao recalls “shrinking in [his] seat whenever Sabu appeared on screen,” hating to see an unsexed brown “man-boy” in ridiculous clothes presenting himself “as little more than an empty vessel to be filled with superior Western learning” (“Black Narcissus,” 68–69). Like Rao, I cringe at Sabu’s parts, which remind me of many other scenes of supplication wherein a colonized subject can only secure validation by bowing to the White gaze. Rao does not turn from Sabu to the other brown men and women in Black Narcissus, but we can and must look more closely at the Indians within its textual space to reject the abjection imposed upon Sabu.

Two things are striking about the extras in this film. The first is that the actors present a mix of subcontinental features that might be Nepali, Sri Lankan, Pakistani, Bengali, and so on. I don’t care to guess the origins of each uncredited actor, but they defy Powell’s flat characterization as “Indian” through the regional specificities they carry in their bodies. Secondly, Black Narcissus uses awful nonsense sounds to indicate “Hindustani” being spoken by the villagers. Not only would it be rare for Hindi to be spoken in colonial-era Darjeeling where the dominant administrative languages would be Bengali and English, but the movie compounds that error by having the character of Mr. Dean use gobbledygook when speaking to Kanchi. In such scenes, the subtitles register the lack as “speaking native language,” because anyone would be hard put to assign meaning to the sounds coming from Farrar’s mouth.

But Hindi is present in the diegetic world of this film. If you turn up the volume enough, ambient words not in the script can be clearly heard shouted by the actors to each other in the crowd scenes. “Chalo chalo agey barho,” an unseen person calls in Hindi across the voice track. “Keep it moving”—the phrase is familiar to me from crowded public spaces where people direct each other to step forward in the queue or make room for someone behind. Farrar unnecessarily makes up a “native language,” as there were plenty of people on set who could have taught him the words a colonial officer would say to a girl from that region. The lack of interest in linguistic authenticity mirrors Powell’s explicit framing of the villagers as backwards, unlettered, superstitious and ignorant. Thrillingly, however, we can hear real Hindi bandied about by the extras that is almost lost, but not quite, among other ambient sounds. Keep it moving, they tell each other on set—to get going and get paid, maybe. The recorded phrase strikes me as a particularly apt critical dictum for myself, too. Agey barho also means go forward in the imperative tense. I wonder which of the brown bodies seen only in long or extreme long shots offers this recorded encouragement across time and space, to keep pushing forward with Black Narcissus, to neither accept its idiocy nor ignore its virtuosity. 

Let’s keep it moving. One of the most visually striking of the uncredited actors was given the role of the “Sannyasi” (or sanyasi, Hindi for ascetic), a figure whom the movie fetishistically offers as a counterweight to the civilizing mission of the nuns. The Sannyasi in Godden’s treatment motivates insights about faith and serves as a point of comparison as well as contrast with the nuns. For the Archers, his thin, uncovered brown body is a visual index of all kinds of odd, esoteric beliefs that don’t merit exploration. The Sannyasi never speaks, only stares. And so compelling is his stare—more precisely, so compelling are the fake mountain peaks painted on glass by Percy Day at which the actor stares—that a viewer of Black Narcissus is mesmerized into replicating the ascetic. We sit as he sits, looking slightly upwards at the screen, unable to tear our eyes away.

The backdrop paintings to which he draws our attention are so gorgeous—and so artificial—that they prompt, for me, thoughts about the historical context within which to apprehend this film. One of these is Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon (1902), a movie that resists straightforwardly approving of European imperialism. Powell tells us that Percy Day worked as an apprentice with Méliès, an association that lends some cachet to Black Narcissus. The reference also reminds us that the older film contains an embedded criticism of human exploration-as-conquest, asking audiences to celebrate the successful trip into outer space while leaving room to speculate about the moon creatures who were suddenly and inexplicably invaded by violent strangers. Contrastingly, for Powell, “England is amazing,” because “in the days of Empire, you had these people making enormous amounts of money and behaving like kings and rajas.” Amazing is an astonishing word to use to describe British Imperialism in 1947, or indeed in 1988, when Powell could not fail to have heard about the “amazing” number of deaths caused by the Partition of India, among many other instances of callous administration leading to mass death in the colonies. Thus, although directorial attention insistently recreates Orientalist tableaux in the foreground of many frames and in many sequences throughout Black Narcissus, the inauthentic mountains made by Day’s team impel viewers beyond the thin human story, toward an obscured political reality indexed within the domain of the formal.

One of the final Himalayan scenes in this movie captures Sister Clodagh silhouetted against the mountains, attended by the little servant Joseph Anthony (fig. 6). Its blocking surely looks familiar to students of 17th–19th century Orientalist art, but it is not the humans that attract viewers like me most strongly to this image—or to this strange and maddening film. What attracts me most vividly are those birds, that wind, the unscripted shouts by unimportant actors, and those blued and purpled mountains.