A Matter of Life and Death

About the Book

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger collaborated in the creation of  many remarkable British films including "The Red Shoes," "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp," and "A Canterbury Tale." While film scholars have known that Powell and Pressburger valued accuracy to enhance the power of their stories, a complete analysis of the neurological basis of one of their most memorable films, "A Matter of Life and Death- American title-Stairway to Heaven" (1946), has not been fully explored.  This book will bring to light that scholarship interwoven into this powerful film.

About the Author

Diane Broadbent Friedman is a nurse practitioner with a focus on neurological disorders.  She is currently in a course of study leading to a PhD in Neuroscience. Diane Broadbent Friedman is a nurse practitioner with a focus on neurological disorders. She is currently in a course of study leading to a PhD in Neuroscience.

Perspectives
www.thelancet.com Vol 373 March 21, 2009 997 Last November I received a letter from Diane Broadbent Friedman, enclosing a copy of her book, A Matter of Life and Death: The Brain Revealed by the Mind of Michael Powell. Friedman wrote that when she was a nurse practitioner on a neurological unit, she had seen this old fi lm and had immediately wondered whether some of the seemingly fantastic scenes and events in it had a neurological basis. I had seen A Matter of Life and Death as a boy—it came out just after World War II, and I remembered being haunted by the power and strangeness of the fi lm with its large escalator running up to heaven and the weird six-note musical motif that ran through it. Now, 60 years later, alerted by Friedman’s letter, I watched A Matter of Life and Death again with my colleague Orrin Devinsky, a specialist in seizure disorders……

……As neurologists, we could see how many of the film’s seeming irrelevancies—details that had eluded me as a boy—could be understood as hallucinatory auras announcing a temporal lobe seizure. Before each mystical vision, for example, the pilot cocks his head as he “hears” music, and sniff s as he “smells” something— it is always the same music, always the same smell. Alarmed by Niven’s behaviour, his girl seeks the advice of a physician friend. The doctor takes a history, observes Niven’s attacks, and makes careful note of his hallucinations and altered behaviour. He is also able to show, after one attack, a dilated pupil, an upgoing toe, and a massive fi eld-cut in half of Niven’s visual fi eld. The physician diagnoses “adhesive arachnoiditis”, apparently a consequence of a previous head injury, and advises immediate surgery. During this surgery, Niven pleads his case in heaven for remaining in this life. As neurologists, Orrin Devinsky and I have seen many patients who have temporal lobe seizures—such seizures may include mystical visions and a post-ictal conviction of their “truth” (although never visions and delusions as detailed and logical as Niven’s). Yet when the fi lm came out in 1946, reviewers were strangely silent about these medical details—no one, indeed, seems to have noticed. That all of these tantalising neurological details had been missed, or seen as irrelevant, by fi lmgoers and reviewers alike astonished Friedman when she fi rst saw the fi lm in 1990. Fascinated, she embarked on what was to become a painstaking project to reconstruct the researching of the fi lm. Michael Powell, who directed the fi lm, had died, but his widow was still alive. On the basis of interviews with her and many others who had known Powell, Friedman discovered that he had read widely in medical journals and had interviewed neurologists and watched them examine patients. (A nice touch in the fi lm is when the neurologist pulls a key out of his pocket to test the plantar refl exes—typical on-the-spot behaviour for a physician who has to make an instant examination with whatever he has on him.) Feeling she had hit paydirt, Friedman published an article in Seizure, in 1992, hoping for a response from its readers, but there was no reaction. Undaunted, she expanded her research, and now, 16 years later, provides us with all the evidence in her meticulously researched book (one sees from the bibliography alone that she has read more neurology, and specifi cally more about temporal lobe epilepsy, than most neurology residents). Friedman shows that A Matter of Life and Death is not only the surreal and romantic fable it was taken to be by most viewers, but it is also a carefully worked out neurological case history. By a happy coincidence, the original 1946 fi lm has just been re-released with restored footage in The Collector’s Choice: The Films of Michael Powell. One hopes that everyone, but especially physicians and neurologists, will visit or revisit this unique double treat, a fi rstclass piece of fi lm, full of human drama with, if one has eyes to see it, a minutely worked-out neurological basis.
Oliver Sacks
OS2177@columbia.edu

Film and book
Michael Powell’s neurological cinema
“Friedman shows that A Matter of Life and Death is not only the surreal and romantic fable it was taken to be by most viewers, but a carefully worked out neurological case history as well.”
A Matter of Life and Death: the Brain Revealed by the Mind of Michael Powell Diane Broadbent Friedman. AuthorHouse, 2008. Pp 292. US$19·95. ISBN 1-438-90945-4. The Collector’s Choice: The Films of Michael Powell A Matter of Life and Death (Stairway to Heaven) Directed by Michael Powell, Emerich Pressburger. Age of Consent Directed by Michael Powell Sony Pictures, 2009. US$24·00. ASIN B001IZNIV4. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment