High Altitude
The beauty and majesty of the Himalayas are most directly used as imagery through the matte paintings that recreate reality to an astonishing extent. Watching the film, it is impossible to believe that every single shot showing mountains was filmed inside a British studio. The altitude at which these nuns try to run their school is vital to the story in a sensory way. The filmmakers very subtly implicate the reaction to the transition of these nuns from a country mere hundreds of feet above sea level to a location several thousand feet above sea level. The various ways that such thin atmosphere can impact the body which in turn has consequences upon the mental, emotional and cognitive states is incorporated into the breakdown of psychological repression of innate desires.
Wind
Strong gusts of wind blowing through the former palace which is now occupied by the nuns as a school is situated as imagery. The wind that sweeps through the halls of the palace in sudden gusts and persistently blows outside the palace is exploited as imagery to herald the arrival of something. As the movie progresses, the wind blows harder and by the feverish climax of the last twenty minutes, it is a howling personification of that arrival: Sister Ruth unplugged.
Red
Red-headed actresses populate Michael Powell films in the way that blondes are everywhere in Hitchcock. Powell obviously had some kind of deep and powerful attraction to the color (he made The Red Shoes, after all), but nowhere does he use the color to such power effect as imagery as in Black Narcissus. This is certainly due, in part, to the juxtaposition of such an intense color with the pervasiveness of white mandated by the nun’s clothing. Sister Ruth’s descent into unrepressed carnality and then deeper into madness is symbolized by red: blood as a foreshadowing image early on, the color of her dress, the almost unbearably erotic application of lipstick and then the strange, unexpected burst of red seen from her perspective just before she faints.
Kathleen Byron's Face
The movie’s erotic presentation of repressed sexuality unleashed and given full authority lives or dies upon Sister Ruth. If the actress can’t project both the repression and the release of that repression, the movie suffers. Likewise, if the production team responsible for makeup, lighting and cinematography fail to take advantage of the actress and physically manifest Sister Ruth’s intense deterioration into madness, the movie suffers. Fortunately, both come together to create the film’s most lasting and memorable imagery. As Sister Ruth becomes just Ruth and her conscious mind loses authority over her unconscious desires, this psychological process is physically exhibited primarily through close-ups of Byron’s face which move from a face surrounded by white in which the devil is showing peeking through her eyes to the movie’s most iconic image: an extreme close-up of Byron’s eyes with her lower lids red (again!) and strands of wild wet hair slithering down over her eyes likes serpents.
