Souvent not known in France, but influencing several generations of filmmakers, the profuse filmography of British Michael Powell articulates fantasy and elegance, humour and severity, flower and ellipsis. His post-war films in collaboration with the Hungarian scriptwriter Emeric Pressburger under the Archer banner, their own production company, represent the most productive period of his work. I know where I’m going! A question of life or death, Le Narcisse noir, Les Chaussons Rouge, The Small Black Room and La renarde all struck by their formal inventiveness, their freedom of tone, their artistic requirements, their density. Everyone asks for both the thinking and the audience’s body. How are narration and representation occasionally suspended or defeated? Why is their vision so tough? How can the singularity of powellian poetic be described? Because they worry about perception, these films question the supposed realism of the film image: they perpetuate and enrich the reflection on the concept of photoengineering defined by the first cinema theorists. They replace the reality, which remains their reference, with the invention of a world whose invisible share is favoured and the feeling of fantastic is permeated. Analysis of the films reveals an aesthetic appearance of the spill-over revealed by the dialectic of the cheesemaking, between masking and designation, expressionism in Technicolor and the virulence of statements of unexpected power. The development of the power of the desire, of which the female figures are the target, but also, and above all, the source, is creating ghost and fantasy. In its circulation between the screen and us, the desire is the substance of the powellian photoengineering. It is by no means complacent with regard to it, but opens up its use, which is a vertiginous one.