Part glam rocker, part wild-haired conductor, Ken Russell was the populist maestro of the screen, the great defiant romantic of British cinema. Russell's films showed his great love for music and composers: Elgar, Tchaikovsky, Delius, Strauss, Liszt – and Sandy Wilson and Roger Daltrey. Other film-makers might have found their creative impetus in novels or plays; Russell's inspiration was surely primarily in music. His ideas, his images, his rows, his career itself were all one colossal, chaotic rhapsody.
His adventures were a rebuke to British parochialism, literalism and complacency, and he had something of Kubrick's flair for startling or mind-bending spectacle. Russell gave us the nude wrestling scene between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed in the Oscar-winning Women In Love (1969) in which each actor, with Russell's cheerful consent, was said to have taken tentative solo measures between takes to ensure his manhood looked, on camera, as impressive as legally possible.
He electrified the cinema world with his still controversial The Devils (1971) – a version of Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudun and a radical, satirical critique of power – in which Vanessa Redgrave's nun has a sexual encounter with the Crucified Christ.
In his rock-opera Tommy (1975), in which Ann-Margret frolicked in baked beans, the world of modernity was shown to have its genesis in the personal agonies and abuses of the second world war. It was as if Russell looked around at the stupefying dullness of Britain in the Heath/Wilson era and thought: what can I do to shake this lot up? "I conduct to live; I live to compose," says Robert Powell in Russell's 1974 movie, Mahler – and perhaps Russell, in his heart, admired the clarity and calm of an artist who could keep distinct money-making endeavour in the public sphere, and creative labour in private.
Russell's career heyday of the 1970s was a spectacular, raucous era right up there on the conductor's podium, thrashing his arms around as the over-the-top music swelled around him.
As the audiences tittered or melted away, Russell would heroically keep on plying his baton, occasionally turning to jab it gleefully into the odd critic's bum. And he never lacked for critics who jeered that he was silly, shallow, with no innate expression or judgment but a hit-and-miss flair for making box office cash registers ring: a deaf-dumb-and-blind-kid who just played a mean pinball.
Russell began his career with the BBC on the arts programme Monitor, and made broadcasting history by making one subject last for a whole hour-long programme: Elgar.
The tone was set in this shrewd, heartfelt, useful introduction to a composer in whose music was a pulsating world of wonder and passion. Russell sought to approximate, on screen, far more of the grandeur and feeling of the music than might normally be the case in a documentary, using dramatic reconstructions and by straying, intentionally, into the arena of the feature film, and fiction itself.
His films about composers were variations on a biographical theme, narrative cadenzas, taking liberties which were more and more extreme, and with Lisztomania (1975), becoming a fantasy which was, according to taste, daft, or surreal, or inspired, or all three. Russell's fans and collaborators had the conviction that you never achieve anything with polite good taste.
He made a star out of Reed, a Russell regular who was also a Russell doppelganger. What Johnny Depp is to Tim Burton, Ollie Reed was to Ken Russell. Something of Reed's brawling, confrontational spirit had within it the ghost of Russell. Long after Russell had vanished from the working world of the cinema, Reed carried on his flame of bolshiness which wasn't all down to drink. When TV audiences gasped at Reed pawing and insulting Kate Millett on a Channel 4 chat show, some might have remembered Russell whacking critic Alexander Walker over the head with a rolled-up copy of the London Evening Standard after Walker's attack on The Devils.
The 80s and 90s did not see any great diminution in Russell's skills but a turning of the zeitgeist away from his shock cinema. His florid fantasies were found to be shrill, although his sci-fi movie Altered States (1980) enjoyed some success and his Gothic (1986) and The Lair Of The White Worm (1988) were disquieting fantasies whose reputation continues to grow.
At the end of his life, Russell worked on self-financed, micro-budget, experimental films. And he virtually re-invented the concept of underground cinema – if only in his house and garden.
It is perhaps for The Devils that Russell's name will come to rest, especially as it emerges from censorship and a new DVD edition is about to come out. It is an uncompromising transgressive fantasy, an operatic orgy of the forbidden, and a truly anarchic film; perhaps as challenging as Pasolini, or more challenging.
Russell was a great upsetter of the apple cart, and like Edward Bond or Dennis Potter, it was his destiny to receive a mixed and grudging reaction on his home turf. Yet his career was always a courageous statement of faith in the power of imagination.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario