Uncle Ken

.. Cute Myspace Layouts My name is Henry Kenneth Alfred Russell, also known as Ken Russell (born July 3, 1927), and am a controversial English film director, particularly known for my films about famous composers and excessive psycho-sexual style.
MARCH: Ken Russell: A Life on Film
Ken Russell, the perpetual enfant terrible of English cinema, is one of those rare directors who works in both the documentary genre and in feature films. Like the French director Alain Resnais, he began his career with documentaries on art before switching to big budget studio productions. Russell’s feature films include Billion-Dollar Brain, Women in Love, The Music Lovers, The Boy Friend, Tommy, Lisztomania and Altered States. Like another maverick feature director, the German Werner Herzog, Russell has made many documentaries at the same time. He made the dramatised arts documentary Clouds of Glory, about the Romantic poets Wordsworth and Coleridge, soon after Tommy had broken box office records.Obsessed by film as a child, Russell’s professional career began at the BBC in the days of black and white television. His films about artists, photographers and musicians coincided with the golden age of the BBC. Russell’s vision developed within the well-maintained team of the Corporation’s cultural programme Monitor. The thirty four films he made changed the way both the BBC and the public thought about films on art, expanding the genre from fifteen minute shorts to spectacular productions one and a half hours long. His documentaries about the composers Edward Elgar, Frederick Delius and Claude Debussy are now classics.The majority of Russell’s documentaries since the 1970s have been made for The South Bank Show, Britain’s leading independent cultural television programme. They include studies of composers Gustav Holst, Anton Bruckner and Vaughan Williams, as well as his own entertaining and innovative cinematic autobiography, A British Picture.Russell is not only a compelling storyteller. He has also been technically innovative. In the 1950s and 1960s, for example, he pushed the BBC into changing the language of film thanks to his brilliant eye for composition, and in the 1970s he then ensured Tommy and Lisztomania pioneered the use of Dolby-encoded soundtracks. Born in 1927 he is still making films.This FIFA 2008 retrospective tribute to Ken Russell owes special thanks to the collaboration of Melvyn Bragg, the guiding force of The South Bank Show, and to Anthony Wall, Editor of BBC Arena, both committed supporters of Russell’s work.
Monday,March 10 at 21h30 Cinémathèque québécoise A BRITISH PICTURE — PORTRAIT OF AN ENFANT TERRIBLE
United Kingdom/1989/Betacam/colour/52 min/english This highly original self-portrait by Britain's "perpetual enfant terrible" was commissioned by The South Bank Show, one of the country's leading cultural institutions. The alternative autobiography Russell directed here permits him to look back on an amazingly varied and inventive life in the film industry. Despite a shelf loaded with international awards, Russell is viewed with caution at home. Interweaving clips from such feature films as Tommy, this portrait begins with his first home movies. Russell casts his delightful infant son Rupert as himself, while he plays the grand old naval captains and Air Force seniors of his youth. Written, narrated and starring Russell himself, the film takes no prisoners, allowing the director to get his own back, in a light-hearted way, on those studio bosses who made his life a misery. Love for his family and for the beauty of England's Lake District, where he shot many of his films, pervades this inspiring cinematic self-portrait.
Thursday,March 13 at 21h30 Cinémathèque québécoise CLOUDS OF GLORY I — WILLIAM AND DOROTHY WORDSWORTH United Kingdom/1978/Betacam/colour/52 min/english This is the first of a pair of rarely screened profiles exploring the life and work of two major English Romantic poets, William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Coleridge (1772-1834). Written by Russell and his lifelong friend Melvyn Bragg, the opening film is a lavish documentary drama, with period costumes and sets to match, set in England's Lake District, the scene not only of many other films made by Russell, but also the home and inspiration of Wordsworth himself. The profound and agonizing relationship between the poet and his sister Dorothy, which the film portrays as a tragic unrequited love story that skirted incest, is at the centre of this beautifully shot portrait of Wordsworth and the valleys that inspired his verse. Russell returns the poet, played by David Warner (who by then had become a major film star) to the precise locations in which he lived: Wordsworth's house and the landscapes he loved, all of which have now been declared National Monuments. Russell combines the sound of Wordsworth's poetry and prose, as spoken by Warner, with views of the forests, peaks and lakes to frame the background of a remarkable story.
Thursday,March 13 at 21h30 Cinémathèque québécoise CLOUDS OF GLORY II — SAMUEL COLERIDGE United Kingdom/1978/Betacam/colour/52 min/english This rarely seen film is the second part of Russell's double portrait of the major English Romantic poets, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Written by Russell and his lifelong friend Melvyn Bragg, the film's original title is The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: The Strange Story of Samuel Coleridge, Poet and Drug Addict. It describes the roller-coaster career of one of the most brilliant literary talents of the 19th century whose life was made a misery by an addiction to opium. Sold as laudanum, the narcotic was easily available, and as the films shows it caused Coleridge, his family and friends like Wordsworth endless grief. Treating Coleridge's astonishing poem about the Ancient Mariner as veiled autobiography, Russell weaves a spellbinding narrative that converts the beauty of England's Lake District, where Coleridge had gone to join Wordsworth, into a private hell. Played by David Hemmings (who had recently starred in Antonioni's Blow Up), the poet languishes in his self-described "appalling condition" against the backdrop of an idyllic place and time.
Saturday,March 15 at 21h30 Cinémathèque québécoise THE DEBUSSY FILM United Kingdom/1965/Betacam/black & white/84 min/english The Debussy Film is one of Ken Russell's finest yet least-seen films. It has a complex and elegant structure, being a film-within-a-film, or more precisely a documentary about the filming of a 19th-century costume drama about French composer Claude Debussy (1862-1918). The action shifts from the present to the past and back again as we follow Claude Debussy (played by Oliver Reed just as he became a film star of international renown) first in period costume, then as Oliver Reed himself, in jeans, talking to the film crew and their director, sharing in the struggles and off-set romance during the shoot. The footage of life on set mirrors that of Debussy's own life. Shot magnificently in 35 mm black and white by BBC cameraman Ken Westbury, the film is an intense cinematic experience and a feast for the eye, offering romantic idylls in dappled woodland, a torch-lit procession along a seashore, and a hypnotic chateau scene worthy of Edgar Alan Poe or Orson Welles. The remarkable script was written by Melvyn Bragg and Ken Russell at the start of what were to be long and successful careers involving further collaborations, some of which are featured in this tribute.
Monday,March 10 at 19h00 Cinémathèque québécoise ELGAR — PORTRAIT OF A COMPOSER United Kingdom/1962/Betacam/black & white/54 min/english This dramatized documentary on the life of English composer Sir Edward Elgar (1857-1934) represented Ken Russell's breakthrough as the leading creative presence in the BBC of the early 1960s. This groundbreaking long portrait of a musician concluded several years of documentary filmmaking in which the BBC's taste for short films prevailed. Russell's innovative style changed the network's approach. Beginning with a traditional introduction by the remarkable BBC broadcaster, Sir Huw Wheldon, who later became director of all BBC Television, Russell's film leaves all conventions behind in his powerfully cinematic and tender evocation of the private life of a great Romantic visionary. The "heroic melancholy" of Elgar's music, driven by the composer's devotion to nature, is for Russell the end of Britain's imperial destiny, obliterated by the 1914-1918 World War. Russell's brilliant landscape photography, with its vast horizons, setting suns and glinting oceans, shot in crisp 35 mm black and white, is contrasted with jerky and distressed vintage footage that records the end of a golden age, which perished in the trenches.
Monday,March 10 at 21h30 Cinémathèque québécoise THE PLANETS BY GUSTAV HOLST United Kingdom/1983/Betacam/colour/52 min/english The Planets differs from the dramatised documentary profiles for which Russell is famous. It is composed entirely of found footage-news film and documentary film clips-which he uses to paint cinematic portraits of six planets in our solar system, based on the celebrated orchestral suite by Gustav Holst (1874-1934). For Mars, the Bringer of War, Russell produces a spellbinding cinematic anthology in red and black of flames, industrial mills, volcanoes and the majestic repetitive patterns found in the Nazi party rallies. Venus, Bringer of Peace, in contrast, is a cooler and intensely erotic sequence, combining shots of naked bathers, of the ocean and drifting helicopter views of the sinuous curves of Saharan sand dunes. Russell's eye for pattern, colour and movement make his portraits of Neptune, Saturn, Mercury and Uranus one of his most compelling and varied cinematic tributes to the power of music.
Wednesday,March 12 at 21h30 Cinémathèque québécoise POP GOES THE EASEL United Kingdom/1962/Betacam/black & white/44 min/english Pop Goes The Easel is both one of Ken Russell's most conventional documentary films and one of his most frequently seen. Within its clear reportage, clips are regularly used to illustrate the cultural scene in 1960s London. Russell follows a group of four London art students to their studio, shows them at work and at play. If you are careful at the end you can even catch a youthful David Hockney dancing the night away in the background. The hand-held filming follows the students through a funfair and across town. The pop and rock soundtrack is laid over period news footage that inspired the artists and that celebrates the Beverly Hills dream world and the first moonshots the artists all loved. Russell's street-wise portrait records the freshness and innocence at the start of the Pop Art Movement, before it mutated into our own garish Age of Celebrity. Blake, Phillips and Boshier have now become internationally recognized artists. Pauline Boty, however, died tragically young, leaving this documentary record of her beauty, vivacity and talent.
Friday,March 14 at 21h30 Cinémathèque québécoise SONG OF SUMMER United Kingdom/1968/Betacam/black & white/74 min/english Based on the autobiography of the English musician Eric Fenby (1906-1997), this lyrical and austere film reconstructs the extraordinary five-year relationship between Fenby and British composer Frederick Delius (1862-1934). Set in an isolated French country home, Russell's dramatized documentary reveals Delius' fierce determination to resist the growing agony and paralysis that followed his slide into the last stages of syphilis as he composed his final works. Fenby's selfless support overcame Delius' paralysis and together they devised a technique to transcribe what was in the composer's mind and play it back for him to edit. Russell's beautiful lit footage evokes the claustrophobia of Delius' provincial home, reminiscent of the paintings of Edvard Munch, and the psychological pressure endured by its isolated inhabitants. In contrast, the exhilarating landscape photography of mountains, coastlines and rivers reflects Delius' passionate devotion to the beauty of nature, recalling the romantic visions of German artist Caspar David Friedrich.
Friday,March 14 at 21h30 Cinémathèque québécoise VAUGHAN WILLIAMS United Kingdom/1984/Betacam/colour/52 min/english In 1984 Russell was invited to make a film about the life of the internationally recognised English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) who, despite his love of England, its history and landscape, refused the honours offered him by Queen and state. A gentle and private person, VW, as he was known, survived action in the First World War and had no further respect for governments. Russell chose to present this portrait as a film within a film, interviewing not only those who knew the composer, including his widow Ursula, but also filming his crew at work, involving them in the process. The result is a clever and informal portrait that celebrates not only such majestic pieces as The Lark Ascending and the Ninth Symphony, but also the scores Vaughan Williams wrote for such feature films as Scott of the Antarctic, which allowed him to invent musical equivalents for frozen and forlorn landscapes.
Wednesday,March 12 at 21h30 Cinémathèque québécoise YOUR HONOUR, I OBJECT! United Kingdom/1987/Betacam/colour/50 min/english In July 1987 Ken Russell travelled to New York to defend himself in court against a charge of breach of contract. He faced one of America's wealthiest men, Bob Guccione, publisher of Penthouse Magazine, who had hired Russell to write and direct a version of the 18th-century novel Moll Flanders. BBC's Arena followed Russell as he prepared for the trial. "I met Guccione in Rome, read the novel and didn't think much of it," said Russell. To improve the narrative, he agreed that he would tell Moll Flanders' story in the manner of the paintings of the English 18th-century satirist William Hogarth. But executive producer Guccione clashed with Russell's final script. "Ken, for all his talent, is a very difficult person to work with," he said. To add to the tension, Russell found an American Attorney, Richard Golub, who was an aspiring rock musician. Instead of negotiating a fee, Golub asked Russell to make a music video to promote himself in performance. Nigel Finch's film traces this extraordinary trial, documenting its courtroom drama, the rock music video shoot, the screen tests by aspiring and nude Molls, and closes with a sassy Broadway-style musical routine shot in court to celebrate the verdict. The film illustrates Russell's uncompromising approach as a filmmaker and his resistance to editorial meddling by Hollywood-style executives.