Hi gang, Ben here with some sad news. The great British director Ken Russell died yesterday. If you read that sentence and asked yourself, “Who?,” don’t worry, you’re not alone. Despite being one of the most iconoclastic yet iconic directors to throw his mad fantasies up on the silver screen in the last half a century, Russell is all but forgotten even amongst otherwise literate cineastes.
It hasn’t even been two years since I saw my first Ken Russell movie. When I first read about Russell’s Lisztomania!, it was one of those flicks I moved hell and earth to track down even though it has never been released on DVD. Why? Because it’s a biopic of famed Romantic piano composer Franz Liszt…that finds Liszt chasing women around with his 15 foot long erection. This is also the movie that casts Richard Wagner as a Nazi-uniformed Frankenstein’s monster who kills Jews with a machine gun. It was love at first sight.
Roger Daltry as Franz Liszt, seducing everything with a pulse.
However, by populating his irreverent – some might say blasphemous – biographical movie with vampires, spaceships, and rock’n’roll icons (Ringo plays a wisecracking Pope) Russell shoots so far past the mark of bad taste that Lisztomania! actually manages to achieve some kind of sublime truth about its subject. Through all the madness, Russell stays remarkably true to the spirit and passions of Liszt himself, even as the facts are mutilated.
Ken Russell’s best movies (and his worst, for that matter) attempt a foolhardy balance between near-divine intellectual enlightenment and straight-from-the-gutter crass exploitation. Russell was “The Fool” from King Lear. His movies are dirty jokes for the smartest guy in the room.
Tchaikovsky struggles to balance art and lust in The Music Lovers.
Time has not been kind to Ken Russell. What many call his masterpiece, The Devils, was never released uncensored, and is unavailable on DVD to this day. Profound works such as the understated (for Russell, anyway) Tchaikovsky biopic The Music Lovers go unwatched. After his final day in the sun with Altered States over 30 years ago, Russell struggled with funding and relevance. I can only hope that news of the director’s death might lead to a wider reconsideration of his work. It would be a shame for Russell’s star to grow only after his passing, but nothing would make me happier than thoughtfully restored DVD/BluRay releases of some of Ken Russell’s “lost works” (whatdaya say, Criterion?) and a general reevaluation of his place in the pantheon of great directors of our time.
Ken Russell, you will be missed.
-Ben