Ken Russell at the BBC (3-DVD set) (1968/2008)

by | Jul 14, 2010 | DVD & Blu-ray Video Reviews | 0 comments

Ken Russell at the BBC (3-DVD set) (1968/2008)

BBC Documentaries of 1962-1968 dir. by Ken Russell
Titles: Elgar; The Debussy Film; Always on Sunday (Rousseau); Isadora:The Biggest Dancer in the World; Dante’s Inferno (Rossetti); Song of Summer (Delius)
Studio: BBC Video
Video: B&W 4:3
Audio: DD mono
Subtitles: English for the Deaf
No region coding
Extras: Ken Russell in Conversation; Late Night Line-Up: Russell at Work
Length: TT: 409 minutes
Rating: *****

These half-dozen documentaries provide a fascinating look at the early efforts of director Ken Russell.  Working on a small budget, he nevertheless quickly established himself as a pioneer in the making of documentaries.  He was the first to use re-enactments, and found clever ways to do bios of some of the composers and artists  presented. For example for The Debussy Film he set up a fake film production crew shooting a film on the life of Debussy.  He liked to work with friends and family, and this also kept costs low.  Yet well-known actors such as Oliver Reed and Max Adrian are featured.

The BBC encouraged Russell to select composers whose music he already felt a close connection with and that he would enjoy doing a documentary on them. Russell says he listened to the music of the composer in question at length, trying to envision what images he would put with some familiar excerpts of their music. I was disappointed the wild bio Russell did on Richard Strauss in this series is not here, but the three on composers are well done and interesting to view. (He later did an even wilder bio feature film on Mahler.) The one on Elgar was the first, and is more staid and less original than the other two. That seems appropriate for the composer anyway. However, it was the first documentary to feature actors instead of just some stills and old footage of the person. The Debussy Film brought out aspects of the composer’s life I was either unfamiliar with or had forgotten, including that two of his former lovers later committed suicide. Russell found an exciting way to picture the Fetes movement of Debussy Nocturnes with a Corpus Christi Day Spanish religious procession at night. And it was interesting to learn that the sea that directly inspired his great La Mer was in fact an English sea, not French.

One would think the story of the final years of English composer Delius, blind and almost completely paralyzed by advanced syphilis, would be a downer, but taken from the viewpoint of the his young musical assistant Eric Fenby, it becomes quite fascinating. Song of Summer is based on a memoir of his experience which Fenby wrote in 1936. Both the Debussy and Delius films seemed to call for some shooting in France, but that would have raised the budget of the films considerably, and Russell found creative ways to get around that, filming in England. The Isadora Duncan film makes use of an actress who stresses the famous dancer’s over-the-top wild behavior, which begins to get on one’s nerves – but it is supposedly an accurate portrayal of Duncan.  Painter Henri Rousseau was pretty wild too, and his story is framed with some of his familiar paintings. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter; not being familiar with him lessened my interest in that documentary.

The two bonus features on Russell are interesting, although the second one repeats some of the material in the first.  But it’s a treat to see the 80-year-old Russell in the recent extra, just sitting on a park bench telling us about his mini-masterpieces. The acting is uniformly good, and the cinematography excellent, especially considering the budget restrictions. The mono soundtrack is a bit tinny on the music, but it doesn’t greatly detract. The documentaries have aged well, with one quickly forgetting they are not in color with stereo soundtracks.

 – John Sunier

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