Black Narcissus

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's Black Narcissus opened in 1947 and won two Academy Awards in 1948, Best Cinematography for Jack Cardiff and Best Art Direction for Alfred Junge, and the craft behind both has aged into something close to permanent. Not a frame was shot in India. The whole film was made on Pinewood sound stages, with the Himalayan vistas built from matte paintings and forced-perspective miniatures by W. Percy Day, and the result is among the most uncannily beautiful artificial landscapes in the history of cinema.

Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr, in a defining early performance) leads a small order of Anglican nuns sent to set up a girls' school and a clinic in an abandoned palace called Mopu, high above a Himalayan valley. The palace was once the local raja's harem, and the wind, the altitude and the presence of the British factor Mr Dean (David Farrar) start to work on every nun's vows. Sabu plays the young general and Jean Simmons the silent dancer Kanchi; Kathleen Byron and Flora Robson are among the other sisters, and between them they let the strain inside the convent build by degrees.

It is a religious drama and a story of colonial encounter, but what people remember is the colour, used to paint emotion. Cardiff's photography, with the deep saturation of the kitchen sequences and the gradual cooling of the high-altitude exteriors, belongs to the history of colour cinematography, and the Pinewood production design, an entire Himalayan convent built indoors, became a touchstone for studio-bound world-building. Black Narcissus sits at the centre of the Archers' cycle, alongside A Matter of Life and Death and The Red Shoes.