The series of films collectively written, directed and produced between 1942's One of Our Aircraft Is Missing and 1957's Ill-Met By Moonlight by Englishman Michael Powell and Hungarian Emeric Pressburger under the collective name of "The Archers", are now, since their rediscovery and re-evaluation from the late seventies on, firmly recognized as key works in British cinema. Their value has been seen in the way they refute or even reject what have been considered as British cinema's strengths: realism and the documentary tradition. Instead, particularly in such remarkable films as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Canterbury Tale (1944), and A Matter of Life and Death (1946), The Archers offer a complex mix of romanticism, fantasy, wit and whimsy, admittedly allied to a rather conservative viewpoint. Even Black Narcissus (1948), whose Orientalist aspects (English actors browned-up as Indians!) can feel uncomfortable to a viewer nowadays, still provides a powerful aesthetic experience: the brooding hothouse sexuality of the story itself, the stunning exploitation of Technicolor, and the sheer ambition of recreating an English nunnery in the Indian Himalayas entirely in an English studio.

I Know Where I'm Going! (1945), the subject of Pam Cook's excellent BFI Film Classics monograph (and the third one the series has devoted to The Archers, following Scottish novelist A.L. Kennedy on Blimp in 1997, and Archers scholar Ian Christie on A Matter of Life and Death in 2000), always seems a more straightforward and even conventional film compared to the other Archer productions of the time. In fact, it served as something of a stopgap during a lengthy period of forced delay before A Matter of Life and Death could go into production. It's the story of Joan Webster (Wendy Hiller), a determined, ambitious, materialist, and rather self-centred young woman, and her journey to the remote Scottish island of Kiloran, where her fiancé, a rich industrialist much older than herself, awaits her and where their wedding is to take place. But Joan never reaches her island, delayed as she is by the weather, by her growing love for Torquil MacNeil (Roger Livesey), the actual owner of Kiloran, and by her exposure to and increasing immersion in the world of the Scottish Highlands, all mist and fog, simple virtues, charming eccentrics, folk music, and romantic legends of ruined castles and cursed families (in truth, as much an Englishman's fantasy as Black Narcissus's Himalayas were).

The story has a strong anti-materialist bent, explicitly contrasting the consumerist values of the more affluent, metropolitan South (in fact, Manchester) with the poorer but more authentic life of the Scottish islands (most of the film takes place on the Isle of Mull); as Cook points out, this bent verges on a resistance to modern capitalism, where "Highland economics are identified as working to different principles than those of England". And The Archers use the figure of Joan to play out their anti-materialist lesson, from the start adopting an ironic take on her self-assurance, keyed by the parodic use of a documentary-style voice-over to introduce Joan as part of the opening credits sequence.

Torquil stands in opposition to Joan in so many respects: male rather than female; Scottish rather than English; rural rather than urban; modest rather than arrogant (for Joan's obsessive, self-centred drive towards a single goal - getting to the island and marrying Sir Robert - does tend towards the arrogant); and spiritual/non-materialist. Moreover, Torquil is the figure through which the film's lesson is made clear to Joan in the climax of the film, the Corryvreckan whirlpool sequence.

Joan's frustration at being hindered by the weather from getting to Kiloran and the refusal of the local seasoned boatman to risk his boat lead her to bribe the young, inexperienced Kenny to take her there, an action which enrages Torquil to the point of physical violence (knocking her down in a stairwell); this follows a scene where Kenny's fiancée explicitly accuses Joan of arrogance. But Torquil accompanies them in the boat, and saves them by re-starting the failed engine just as the boat threatens to drift into the Corrywreckan whirlpool in the middle of a storm, at the height of which Joan loses her wedding dress - and her hubris.

But this whirlpool sequence is also important in terms of the aesthetics at work in the film, its convincing illusionism, for it is a remarkable mixture of dangerous, on-location footage, studio footage shot in a huge water tank, model work and rear projection material. In fact, this technological/aesthetic feature of the Corryveckan sequence is true of the film as a whole, the most famous example being that whereas actress Wendy Hiller was filmed on location, Roger Livesey was not as he had to appear in a London play at the same time. The Archers got round this by using a double for wide shots and back views, and then combining these, plus the location shots including Wendy Hiller, with studio footage involving Livesey, to completely convincing effect.

Pam Cook, besides detailing the technical virtuosity involved, gives an interesting (although, to me, unconvincing) interpretation of this. She sees the use of doubles and back projection as "reinforcing the sense of dreamscape, the hallucinatory quality that establishes this Scotland as Joan's fantasy projection"; and at another point she describes back projection as a "metaphor for memory", with the effect in this film of making 'Scotland' for the Scottish diaspora in North America an unrecoverable, lost homeland.

Cook does in fact have a tendency towards over-interpretation, as if the fascination she declares for the film needs to find some kind of intellectual justification. (This bears an interesting comparison with Richard Dyer's 1993 study of Brief Encounter [1945], also in the BFI Film Classics series, where he confesses his love for the film, acknowledges that many modern viewers will find it full of weaknesses and limitations, and then proceeds to his analysis of it.) For me the most extreme example of this is her consideration of the character of Colonel Barnstaple, played by Captain C. W. R. Knight, who owns and trains a golden eagle named after Torquil. While detailing the factual background to his character (Knight, an Englishman who lived and worked in the Highlands, was famous in Britain for his eagle 'Mr Ramshaw') she still declares that his role in the film is "difficult to explain in narrative terms" and that his "presence may only be accounted for by the displacements and associations characteristic of dream logic": a rather overdetermined interpretation for the presence of an English eccentric in an English film set in Scotland.

There are other points of interpretation readers may take issue with. Are The Archers really so intentionally ironic in their depiction of Scotland? And is the "bright and breezy conclusion" really "tainted by a faint aura of melancholy, deriving from a feeling that it is too good to be true"? But I shouldn't overemphasize this point. In the main, she offers a valuable analysis of the film; she does an excellent job in tying together the direct and indirect influences on the film, industrial (Alexander Korda, J. Arthur Rank), social/political (the Second World War, 'mobile women', the spirit of austerity, the Scottish question), and aesthetic (German Expressionism, Sunrise [1927]); and she outlines the contributions of The Archers' important collaborators: principally cinematographer Erwin Hillier, production designer Alfred Junge, and composer Allan Gray. We may not share Cook's concerns as to "why canonization has eluded" this film, but this is an excellent study to get us thinking about it.

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002