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Showing posts from May, 2021

Finding Black Narcissus in Moscow

Further recycling from LiveJournal. The surprise expressed here at finding the DVD soon evaporated as I discovered that Russia had a fantastic back-catalog of foreign films, relatively inexpensive, and well-made.  I have my collection still. Years previously I had lived in a house of a friend of Rumer Godden's and often answered the phone to her and we would have brief chats whilst waiting for Dinah to make her way to the phone.  "Browsing in a Moscow store, I found to my surprise a DVD of Powell and Pressburger's 'Black Narcissus'. It is an extraordinarily sensual film given that it was filmed not in its Himalayan location but in Pinewood Studios and at a house in West Sussex, belonging to a retired Indian army officer, with the help of backdrop painting of convincing light and space. A group of nuns accepts the offer of an Indian prince to establish a convent in the old palace of his father's concubines! The place's history (and location) works both on th