Michael Powell, a writer-director-producer of enormous visual wit and imagination, whose films are great favorites of PFA audiences, died in February at the age of 84. Apart from Peeping Tom, he made his best known films (among them, The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, The Tales of Hoffmann, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp) in partnership with Emeric Pressburger. And they, in turn, did some of their best work in the narrative netherworld between fantasy and realism, moving fluidly between the two. Their mastery of visual irony was never so complete as in A Matter of Life and Death, in which an elaborate stairway connects a Technicolor earth with a monochrome Heaven ("Less optimistic directors might have reversed the process" as William K. Everson notes). David Niven plays a downed bomber pilot in WWII who senses that his having eluded a fiery death was arbitrary at best. On the operating table he finds himself suspended between Heaven (where he is summoned to argue his case in the celestial courts) and earth (where he has fallen in love with a heavenly WAC in the person of Kim Hunter). This is existential fantasy at its finest. "The doctor who befriends him diagnoses a 'highly organized hallucination' and much the same could be said of the film, with its bewildering alternations of microcosm and macrocosm, poetry and pathos, monochrome and color. A stunning, subversive masterpiece" (British Film Institute).