American filmmaker Martin Scorsese has championed the Michael Powell's British classic Edge Of The World, suggesting that it blends the elements of documentary, drama and avant-garde. Scorsese says the British director had a distinct sense of vision, using and mixing images in ways later favoured by the American underground.

Powell shot the film in Shetland in 1936, on the remote island of Foula. The movie has just been given a release to the home video market in the States by Milestone, taken from a new 35mm print. The package includes a copy of the 1978 documentary Return To The Edge in which some of the original filmmakers returned to visit the location of the Powell÷s classic almost half a century later.

Projecting Passion

Documentaries about making movies are commonplace these days, particularly on DVD, but few project a passion like Return to the Edge, by the British director Michael Powell. Powell made his feature film "The Edge of the World" on the gale-bent Shetland Island of Foula, decades before helicopters could deliver actors and camera crews to clifftops in the middle of nowhere. From the evidence of the documentary, none of the filmmakers who washed in and out by boat ever forgot it.

Return to the Edge, was made in 1978. Emerging from an aircraft on Foula's airstrip (no planes at all in the old days), the actor John Laurie, who had a lead role in the feature shot 40 years earlier, greets each and every one of the surviving Shetlanders who took part with the profuse and obviously genuine warmth of someone recalling a life-enhancing experience.

American Financier

Powell, who died in 1990, is best known for films he made with the screenwriter, producer and director Emeric Pressburger, among them I Know Where I'm Going (1945), Stairway to Heaven (1946), Black Narcissus (1947), The Red Shoes (1948) and The Tales of Hoffmann (1951). After frustrating years filling his "quickie quota" as a contract director for Warner Brothers, Powell got the chance to make "The Edge of the World," financed by an American producer named Joe Rock.

Personal Vision

Martin Scorsese, a champion of Powell's, came across the film in the 80's. "I saw that he had this personal vision even before his work with Pressburger," he said this week.

For months Powell and his crew lived in isolation on Foula, filming the story of a culture slowly being forced into evacuation and extinction on the Scottish mainland. Foula was doubling for St Kilda, a distant Scottish island that had inspired Powell÷s story. St Kilda had been evacuated a few years earlier, when it was clear that the community was no longer viable. A whole way of life vanished with that evacuation and Powell was determined to capture the drama leading up to a resigned decision to leave.

Island of Death

In the movie, the island is named Hirta, or "Death." For centuries its now failing businesses were fish, wool and peat. Sheep dogs huddle against houses and walls of beautifully fitted stone, and a mute old woman stares knowingly at the wind-swept bluffs. "We'll live through this winter but not another," says James Gray (Finlay Currie), a patriarch and perpetual pipe-puffer.

His son, Andrew (Niall MacGinniss), favours trying to survive on Hirta, a position supported by Peter Manson (Laurie). Manson's son, Robbie (Eric Berry), advises the islanders to evacuate, and in an ancient tradition he and Andrew advocate their differing viewpoints by racing each other to the top of a sheer headland. Robbie falls into the sea.

Avant-Garde

"On one hand there is a documentary; on the other there is a very mystical, romantic feeling," Mr. Scorsese said. "It has the elements of all: documentary, drama, avant- garde." By avant-garde, he added, he meant "cinema language." At one point a young woman (Belle Chrystall) stands at the top of a cliff contemplating suicide while the image of ocean waves plays across her face. "Creating images like that hearken to American underground film," Mr. Scorsese said. "You wouldn't think of images coming together that way."