A Matter of Life and Death

A Matter of Life and Death (1946) is a film by the British writer-director-producer team of Powell & Pressburger. The US title for the release was Stairway to Heaven, which was derived from the film's most prominent special effect: a broad marble escalator linking heaven and earth.

Influence

The architecture of the film's Heaven is noticeably modernist; vast and open plan, with huge circular observation holes beneath which the clouds of Earth can be seen. This vision of Heaven was later the inspiration for the design of a bus station in Walsall, England, by architects Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, and the film's amphitheatre court scene was rendered by British Telecom in an TV advertisement in about 2002 as a metaphor for communication technology, especially the Internet.

Related Topics:
Modernist - Walsall - British Telecom - 2002 - Internet

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The film garners praise, often couched in sentences including words such as "subversive" and "surreal".

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In 2004 the magazine Total Film named A Matter of Life and Death the 2nd greatest British film ever made.

Related Topics:
2004 - Magazine - Total Film

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