Chillingbourne

A cross posting from my Cultural Geography blog - check it out if you haven't seen this blog. It includes hundreds of posts linking to cultural geography in its widest sense.

Chillingbourne is the fictional town featuring in the classic film 'A Canterbury Tale' (1946) made by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. It is the town where the characters emerge onto the train platform by mistake and encounter 'the glue man'. 

The design work was completed by Alfred Junge.

Brief biography from a website.

Although German by birth, Alfred Junge (1886-1964), contributed most significantly to filmmaking in the British context, arguably becoming the most influential and important art director of his day. Junge discovered his artistic sensibility in his teens by trying his hand at all aspects of theatrical design in local productions in his native Germany, eventually going on to do set design work for the German State Theater and the Berlin National Opera. Establishing his reputation as a visionary craftsman, Junge accompanied the seminal German film director E.A. Dupont to England in the late 1920s to join the prestigious ranks of British International Pictures, essentially conducting the rest of his career in the UK.

In the early 1930s, Junge was selected to lead the Art Department at Gaumont-British Picture Corporation, and went on to complete the set design work for over thirty films for this studio in six years. During this time, Junge collaborated most extensively with the British film director, Victor Saville. Junge is perhaps most renowned for his breathtaking design work for Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, ultimately working on eight films for them throughout the 1940s.

Junge's crowning achievement was as recipient of the 1947 Oscar in Art Direction for his work on Black Narcissus (1947). Junge's artistic rendering of the Himalayas was so authentic that many viewers were surprised to learn that the film had not been shot on location. Junge's work on the Technicolor film, A Matter of Life and Death (1946), for Powell and Pressburger also earned him considerable accolades, as the groundbreaking "Staircase to Heaven scene" remains a powerful cultural trope. Junge concluded his career as head of production for MGM Studios at their British headquarters in Elstree.

His film collection archive is here - held by the Harry Ransom Centre at the University of Texas in Austin.

Here's a production still showing the railway station platform and bridge. It is very like many rural stations used to be, until they were closed to try to save money (imagine if they had been kept and how different life would be...)

And here's a cinema poster:

Copyright granted for educational and research purposes.

This BFI blog describes a tour trying to find the locations in the film.

There is some impressive work during the scenes in Canterbury Cathedral. The team couldn’t use the building’s interiors, partly due to permissions, partly because, during the Nazi bombing campaigns, wartime procedure had forced the cathedral to move the stain-glass windows and organ to places of safety.

Instead, replicas and trick perspectives were created on a large lot at Denham Studios, and it’s relatively easy to line up these illusory shots with the real cathedral today. The inside section that we (apparently) see in the first shot of interior is now one of the cathedral’s gift shops.

Reference: "Intelligent Female Nonsense‟: Pastoral, National Identity, and Shakespearean Misrule in A Canterbury Tale (1944) and I Know Where I’m Going! (1945) Marie-Alix Thouaille (University of East Anglia) 

Also this - the essay from Anthony Frewin on the film.

If I were cast away on a desert island and could take with me but one British film, 'A Canterbury Tale' would be it. If you were to ask me why, I’d be a little flummoxed. Yes, I like this and I like that about the film, but those reasons fall short because, of course, any work of art that means something to us invokes responses on a non-verbal, emotional level. The more one tries to nail down the exact reasons the more elusive the quarry becomes, like those stars in the night sky seen through one’s peripheral vision: turn and face them head on and they’re gone.

I'm going to see this film later tonight.