Ken Russell at the BBC

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Product Description ------------------- Ken Russell at the BBC (DVD) The iconic award-winning English director, Ken Russell, is best known for his flamboyant style, his attention to detail and for being a controversial and visionary artist. Russells approach was determined by a desire to knock the dust off the biofilm genre: “The whole idea had degenerated into a series of third-rate clichés. I wanted to dress people in old clothes and do it in a totally unreal way, and thus make it more real than ever, and in the process send up this new civil service/academic way of doing films.” This collection includes two early films starring Oliver Reed, The Debussy Film and Dantes Inferno about Dante Gabriel Rossetti, as well as Always on Sunday about Henri Rousseau, Isadora: The Biggest Dancer in the World, A Song of Summer about Frederick Delius, and Dance of the Seven Veils about Richard Strauss. These early films paved the way for his brilliant carrier that has spanned six decades. ]]> .com ---- Many American fans, like myself, who have seen most of Ken Russell’s films, probably don’t even know these biopics he did for the BBC prior to his feature film career exist. And these six hour-long documentaries collected on Ken Russell at the BBC may be his finest works. Russell is well known for narrative features with revolutionary undertow such as Women in Love, The Devils, and Tommy, a rock opera about the Who. The films included on this three-disc set, all in black and white, are clearly those in which Russell established his affinity for portraying iconoclastic eccentrics, and each has its own experimental merit, stylistically and conceptually. Though it is unfortunate that there is a proliferation of cheesy re-enactments in today’s film and television, one will be surprised to see how brilliantly this pioneer did it. Each documentary, here, enlists actors to portray the artistic luminaries of various historical periods. But the films so keenly observe their characters’ behaviors, factually and poetically, that one learns about Russell’s subjects on the sly, being entertained all the while. Occasionally narrators tease their subjects by pointing out absurd moments, reminding the viewer of documentary’s subjective nature, and of the humorous potential in many historical tales. The documentaries heighten their subjects’ flair for drama, and take interpretive liberties to recount the lives of those on screen. Impassioned explosions, nervous breakdowns, and tragic calamities are the norm. Always on Sunday (1965) studies how genius is manifest at great cost in Henri Rousseau, after the death of his wife and a friendship with Surrealist colleague, Alfred Jarry. Dante’s Inferno (1967) depicts the Pre-Raphaelite set, focusing on Dante Rosetti’s fiery persona and its negative effects on his muse, Elizabeth Siddal. In Isadora Duncan: Biggest Dancer in the World (1966), the arts and crafts-era mistress of movement maniacally travels the world in search of funding for her dancing schools. Though the characters depicted are wildly different, they share blinding passions and melodramatic means of achieving their ambitions. Many of these films are narrated in the third person, but occasionally their subjects share dialogue, elaborating the dramatic sense. Song of Summer (1968) is the breakthrough, starring young composer, Eric Fenby (Christopher Gable), who moves in with blind, paralyzed elder musician, Frederick Delius, to help finish his scores. Third-person narration fizzles out early on to allow the characters to speak about the need to create, even when handicapped. Delius and Fenby’s relationship strengthens as the two develop their music together, and gorgeous landscape scenes, or scenes depicting high human emotions, roll as soundtrack to the composer’s works as the film progresses. Heavily dramatized, the only documentary aspect to this film seems to be Russell’s dedication to tying film to music, by showing how Delius visualized his music. Ken Russell at the BBC says as much about the quality of BBC programming during the era as the director’s unhinged imagination, and it’s a wonder to view these films as precedents to what the BBC also pioneered a decade later in the 1970s, namely the much more fact-based documentaries, hosted by scientists and scholars like nature man, David Attenborough. —Trinie Dalton