Kindness rules

Gavin Millar

• A Life in Movies by Michael Powell
  Heinemann, 705 pp, £15.95, October 1986, ISBN 0 434 59945 X
• All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema edited by Charles Barr
  BFI, 446 pp, £12.95, October 1986, ISBN 0 85170 179 5

Though it does not say so, Michael Powell’s 700-page autobiography is merely the first volume of a work which Powell rather surprisingly tells us is ‘what my mother would have wished and what I was born for’. Surprising not for the reference to his mother, since he always speaks of her with the greatest affection and respect, but for the seeming dedication to letters in a man who never ceases to proclaim his lifelong devotion to images. He reads an article in Picturegoer in 1920 about a day in the life of a film crew shooting in London: ‘What fascinated me was the attitude: the planned yet flexible operation, led by the director, to seize the moment, to take advantage of something pictorial or surprising, to snatch your scene out of the streets, to turn the light of common day into something beautiful and entertaining. This was for me! I never had the slightest doubt that I was meant to direct films from that day to this.’