It’s the Summer of Powell and Pressburger in New York

Toward the end of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s “Black Narcissus” (1947), set at a convent high in the Himalayas, the crazed Sister Ruth sneaks up behind her perceived nemesis, Sister Clodagh, who is ringing the convent’s cliffside bell, and gives her a good shove.

The scene, a classic in the Powell-Pressburger canon, is remarkable for many reasons. For one, the mountains are an illusion, conjured with paintings on glass and matte work at Pinewood Studios near London. “Wind, the altitude, the beauty of the setting — it must all be under our control,” Powell recalled explaining to his collaborators.

For another, the whole sequence was filmed to a precomposed score. Shooting action to music fascinated Powell. He and his filmmaking partner, Pressburger, would refine the technique in “The Red Shoes” (1948) and in the filmed opera “The Tales of Hoffmann” (1951). In the new documentary “Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger,” Martin Scorsese says that repeated childhood viewings of “Hoffmann” taught him “pretty much everything I know about the relation of camera to music.”

Scorsese is hardly alone in feeling that Powell and Pressburger, the greatest British filmmakers this side of Alfred Hitchcock, left a profound mark on his way of thinking about movies. Francis Ford Coppola’s forthcoming “Megalopolis” pays tribute, too, by lifting an exchange from “The Red Shoes.” For those who already are or who long to be similarly entranced, Powell and Pressburger are blanketing New York this summer.

For five weeks beginning Friday, the Museum of Modern Art is screening “Cinema Unbound,” the most comprehensive Powell-Pressburger retrospective ever mounted in the city. Scorsese will introduce “Black Narcissus” on Friday, while his longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, who was married to Powell until his death in 1990, will introduce a preview of “Made in England” on Saturday. That film, which features Scorsese as an onscreen guide, opens July 12. And Film Forum is giving a run to “The Small Back Room,” the noir that followed “The Red Shoes,” starting June 28.