Black Narcissus is a 1947 British psychological drama film written, directed, and produced jointly by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, based on the 1939 novel Black Narcissus by Rumer Godden.
Set during the final years of British colonial rule in India, the film depicts the growing tensions within a small convent of Anglican nuns who have been invited to establish a school and hospital in the old harem of an Indian Raja at the top of an isolated mountain in the Himalayas. The nuns have trouble adapting to the harsh climate and antagonistic population. They come to rely on the help and advice of the Raja’s British agent, a cynical Englishman whose attractiveness and panache become a source of temptation for the sisters.
Filming of Black Narcissus began on 16 May 1946, and was completed on 22 August.[18] The film was shot primarily at Pinewood Studios but some scenes were shot in Leonardslee Gardens, West Sussex, the home of an Indian army retiree, which had appropriate trees and plants for the Indian setting.[19] While Powell at the time had been known for his love of location shooting, with Black Narcissus he became fascinated with the idea of filming in the studio as much as possible.[20]
The film is known for making extensive use of matte paintings and large-scale landscape paintings (credited to W. Percy Day) to suggest the mountainous environment of the Himalayas, as well as some scale models for motion shots of the convent.[21]
Black Narcissus was released only a few months before India achieved independence from Britain in August 1947. Film critic Dave Kehr has suggested that the final images of the film, as the sisters abandon the Himalayas and proceed down the mountain, could have been interpreted by British viewers in 1947 as “a last farewell to their fading empire”; he suggests that for the film-makers, it is not an image of defeat “but of a respectful, rational retreat from something that England never owned nor understood”.[50] The story in the film quite closely follows that of the book, which was published in 1939.