Powell and Pressburger, one of the most important partnerships in British cinema, formed by Michael Powell (1905-1990) and Emeric Pressburger (1902-1988). Powell and Pressburger, introduced to each other by Alexander Korda in 1938, jointly wrote, produced, and directed the most experimental British feature films of World War II and the immediate post-war years, including The Spy in Black (1939), 49th Parallel (1941), The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947), The Red Shoes (1948), and Gone to Earth (1950).

Such films explore major contemporary themes, with an offhandedness not generally associated with British cinema. Although it is difficult to separate their contributions, Pressburger moulded the structure of the films, and was the more important in terms of both production and post-production, while Powell wrote the initial screenplay, was the floor director, and provided most of the visual inspiration. As a partnership they were considered capriciously brilliant; apart, however, with the exception of Powell's important Peeping Tom (1960), their careers floundered.

Until the Nazis drove him out of Germany, Pressburger had his career centred at UFA, the major German film company; Powell served his apprenticeship on low-budget British features. Powell, born near Canterbury, Kent, modelled his style on the silent masters of cinema and discovered fresh inspiration in the work of Walt Disney and Ludwig Berger in the sound period. He was essentially concerned with visual expression and sought a non-flamboyant image of sometimes great intensity to suggest mystery behind the surface. Pressburger, who was born Imre Pressburger in Hungary, spent the greater part of his life in exile, and the Powell-Pressburger films, as a result, require complex readings.

While they remain firmly within the Korda tradition, the pair's films are deeply personal creations and celebrate an ocular world that synthesizes Powell's intense imagery with Pressburger's philosophical concerns, merging references to both cinematic and cultural inheritances. Powell sought to combine design, music, sound, and movement in such a way as to capture the power of the silent film; Pressburger used “displacement” to disclose his own personal upheavals. Films such as Blimp, A Canterbury Tale (1944), and I Know Where I'm Going (1945) can be seen, therefore, to couple Powell's Modernist explorations of cinema with Pressburger's humanist preoccupations. A Matter of Life and Death, made at the end of the war, moves from Technicolor into monochrome, offering one of Powell's many homages to The Wizard of Oz (1939). At the same time, it honours the German tradition of Der Müde Tod (1921; Destiny) by Fritz Lang and, in the camera obscura sequence, relishes the power of the lens to disclose a world behind surface appearance. At another level it recognizes the tragedy of war and reverses the themes of the earlier films so that beauty, love, and colour exist in this world and not in a perfectly ordered next world, which Pressburger modelled on the Platonic utopia.

Works as far apart as Blimp and The Tales of Hoffman (1951) confirm Powell and Pressburger's separate creative autobiographies within a single film; technical expression for Powell, literary and emotional for Pressburger. In the latter, Powell achieves his long-held ambition of pre-scoring along the lines of Disney (that is, preparing the music before shooting begins), while Pressburger is able to reiterate the theme of tragedy and the loss of love that haunts all his major films.