A Matter of Life and Death

Hardly any other visual-political concept has shattered the spatiotemporal dimensions of cinematic movement in the vertical plane more than this film, which was marketed in the U.S. as "Stairway to Heaven". The staircase—on which God, through an angel, showed humanity the gate to heaven—becomes a bridge: namely, that of the transatlantic brotherhood in arms between the United Kingdom and the United States against the Nazis. Yet the massive escalator between heaven and earth also separates two worlds of color. The heavenly world appears as the pale and sterile otherworldliness of black-and-white footage, while the earthly world shines in the vibrant, this-worldly opulence of saturated Technicolor. – An upside-down world? (K.S.)