"Biographies seem to me rather like detective stories. You're given the clues of a man's life and you supply the motive for the crime, the crime being the work of art or the body of art produced by the man."
--Ken Russell
For the past 30 years, Ken Russell's work in British film and television has been the subject of praise and, often, intense condemnation. Though his films have ranged from experimental productions to Hollywood-style indulgences, Russell's most notable achievements have been within the genre of biography films. Virtually the entire first half of his film making career was dominated by this form, which he has recently returned to with his 1987 British television production of Clouds of Glory on William Wordsworth and the Romantic movement in English poetry. Granted, Russell's concerns are not necessarily rooted in either the facts of history or of the individual artist's life. Rather, he is obsessed by the larger and more fantastic meaning of an artist's life in relationship to the society and culture around him. In this regard, Russell's biography films are meant to be phantasmagoric evocations rather than strict documentaries and his own subjective viewpoint as the film's director is used freely as a referential guide to the facts and fictions surrounding the object of his attention.
Russell began his career as a photographer and independent filmmaker in the 1950s. Through the early critical success of his experimental films, especially Amelia and the Angel (England 1957), he was able to secure a film making position with the British Broadcasting Corporation. From 1959 to 1970, he directed 4 features and 30 shorts on subjects ranging from the British comedian Spike Milligan to the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev. His 4 feature films for the BBC would, however, bring him his first taste of critical acclaim and near ruinous controversy. His last BBC film, The Dance of the Seven Veils: A Comic Strip in Seven Episodes on the Life of Richard Strauss (England 1970), was permanently banned after its only telecast and Russell found it best to pursue a "theatrical" film making career.
Yet his early BBC films remain, in many respects, among his finest accomplishments as a filmmaker. The 3 films that are available for public viewing—Isadora Duncan: The Biggest Dancer in the World (England 1966), Dante's Inferno (England 1967), and Song of Summer (England 1968)--represent Russell at his most disciplined and artistically controlled level. Arguably, the tight shooting budgets and greater aesthetic restrictions of television provoked him to a high degree of imaginative circumvention. The smallness of the screen, as well as Russell's perception of the potential narrowness of the viewer's mind, led him to develop a biographical cinema based upon shock values (e.g., the opening scene of Dante's Inferno); an editing structure built upon abrupt transitions; and an ability to radically shift in his films from the sublime to the ridiculous, from placid beauty to surreal absurdity. Most of the techniques he would expand upon in his "theatrical" films had their origins in his early television productions.
Russell's first feature-length television film was Isadora Duncan: The Biggest Dancer in the World. It was produced at about the same time as Karel Reisz's theatrical film Isadora (England 1969) and Russell was handicapped by the fact that the producers of the other film had acquired the rights to virtually every biography that had been written on Duncan. The one biography that they had overlooked was an obscure book about Duncan's travels in Russia and South America. Further, one of Duncan's biographers, and personal acquaintances, Sewell Stokes, was still alive and Russell correctly reasoned that they couldn't have bought the film rights to Stokes' memories. This eclectic set of sources formed the basis for Russell's perspective in the film.
In Isadora Duncan: The Biggest Dancer in the World, Russell created one of his first sustained statements on the artist as part genius and part posturer. The film swings wildly between moments of near transcendental splendor and sudden outbreaks of vulgar showmanship as Russell mediates upon the gap between Duncan's artistic drives and the effect of time that gnaws at the dancer's physical and personal stamina.
The painful distance that can exist between an artist's ideals and his or her own life is a central concern of Dante's Inferno. In his approach to Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite movement, Russell was less concerned with the minute details of history than with the larger philosophical and psychological significance of the movement's failure. For Russell, Rossetti is a paradox of idealism and crude appetites. Rossetti's poetic concept of platonic love is contradicted by his overt sexual desires and his idealized art is increasingly consumed by the dictates of merchandising. As he dissipates himself, Rossetti increasingly realizes how he has failed both his art and those around him. The film's final image, an abrupt cut from a drugged and aging Rossetti to the ending credits played out to a calliope version of the song "I Just Want to be Happy," summarizes the elusive nature of his desires.
The contrast that can, and often does exist, between great art and the personality of its creator is the subject matter of Song of Summer. Co-written by Eric Fenby, Frederick Delius' personally selected biographer, the film avoids the one-dimensional tract of a mere hagiography. Rather, it concentrates upon the demanding nature of art and the sacrifices that are made for the artist by those around him. Song of Summer is based upon the brief work relationship between Delius and Fenby and the philosophical difference that existed between Fenby's Catholicism and Delius' atheism. Russell's own unorthodox, and occasionally heretical, notion of Catholicism allowed him a strangely emotional and sympathetic attitude toward Fenby's biographical viewpoint and, in that regard, toward Delius himself.
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