Ken Russell: A Bit of a Devil (BBC2, 14/01/2012)

[Maurice]

14/01/2012
BBC2, Saturday, 9pm

Alan Yentob reflects on career of film director, Ken Russsell, who died in November, 2011.

[dremble wedge]

There were some lovely bits but it was stronger on the TV part of Ken's career and rather weak once he made the move to film. A bit of a missed opportunity really as Alan Yentob had the clout to make an in depth appreciation but it was never going to happen with a flimsy 50 minute running time.

Hopefully Melvyn Bragg will come up with something.

[julian_craster]

The Ken Russell Delius film is on BBC4 next week.....and The Boy Friend on Sunday

[clarence]

Good to hear that KR's Delius film is being shown again : I can just remember seeing the original broadcast in the 1960's, and a re-run of it (which I taped) to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Arena series - (this was sometime in the 1980's). The original version showed the young Fenby playing the organ in a cinema accompanying Laurel and Hardy's "Way Out West" - an unlikely event seeing that the latter was released in sound in the 1930's - a typical example of KR's 'poetic licence'. I can recommend the BFI's CD of the film, which also contains KR's comments on the film and some of the difficulties he encountered in making it, which is possibly the best of his series of films on composers.

clarence

[Maurice]

Daily Mail 18/01/2012
letter from Paul Sutton,
Trumpington, Cambs.

"Let Ken's movies inspire a new audience" :

Earlier this month, the BBC re-screened a cheap cut-and-paste programme made in 2010 called the GREAT BRITISH OUTDOORS, in which a cheerful minor celebrity voices over archival footage.

"It's not even dancing," he says over a clip of Abbots Bromley Horn Dancers. The footage was taken from THE LIGHT FANTASTIC, a 35mm film made in 1960 by Ken Russell and squeezed into a TV screen shape that it was never meant to fit. None of the 35 short and feature-length films Ken Russell made for the BBC is available to the public who financed them. Those films belong to us, but the institution which suppressed them during his lifetime is disgracing itself by chopping them into stock footage.

Footage from Ken Russell's silent cinematic adaptation of DIARY OF A NOBODY (1964) - a film containing a Murray Melvin dance-stunt down a dangerous flight of stairs which would enhance a "best of" show reel for Charlie Chaplin - turned up in a BBC programme about "snobs in fiction". This really has to stop.

These Ken Russell films aren't entertainment fit only for "found footage". They're films, works of real cinema in which every frame, pictorial composition, cut and music cue has been thought through with a craftsman's hand and an artist's mind and eye.

They constitute a body of work which stands with the best of any director working anywhere in the world between 1959 and 1970. They're a very real treasure trove for anyone who knows how to "read" film.

In GUITAR CRAZE (1959), Russell moves the action from a woman's study to a busy study group with a single movement of the woman's head. She looks down at the guitar strings she's plucking, then up and she is looking at her tutor in a room in a different part of the city.

In the central section of LONDON MOODS (1960), made before Andy Warhol painted his first soup can, Russell uses a specially composed jazz score as his cutting cues for repeated pop art images. In POP GOES THE EASEL (1962), he takes us into the minds (the dream worlds) and environs of four pop artists to show without words the source and meanings of this "difficult" art. Lindsay Anderson and Stanley Kubrick took images and used techniques from this film in their masterpieces IF... (1968), DR STRANGELOVE (1964) and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971).

In ISADORA DUNCAN (1966), Vivian Pickles gives a performance of such skill and emotion that it can be counted among the finest female performances on film - a British one.

Every one of Ken Russell's 35 BBC films displays the master's art. We should be boasting about them and using them to inspire the next Lindsay Anderson, the next Stanley Kubrick and the next Ken Russell. The BBC should stop dancing on his grave.

[Nick Dando]

Watching the programme, I was struck by The Boyfriend and how sumptuous it looked. I watched it on TV a very long time ago and was amazed by the film, so I'm looking forward, apprehensively, for the screening on BBC4 this week. I'm hoping that it won't be a disappointment, as I don't really like musicals, with a very few exceptions (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Bugsy Malone are the exceptions).

I did also like the look of the Delius programme, and the shots on top of the Malvern Hills for the Elgar work. So there are some things to record coming up.

Nick