Ken Russell at the BBC, Part 4: Song of Summer (1968)

The final film in the six-film box set of Ken Russell's work at the BBC in the 1960s is on the English composer Frederick Delius (1862-1934). Of all the films in the set, this is the closest in its narrative organization to a conventional feature and the most subdued in tone. It is also the only film of the six based not on an original screenplay but on an existing source, the book Delius As I Knew Him by Eric Fenby, who collaborated with Russell on the screenplay, and it is to this that Russell attributes his stylistic restraint: "Song of Summer was less fragmentary and kaleidoscopic than some of my work. But the book was a straightforward story [with] a beginning, a middle, and an end, and there didn't seem to be any point in jazzing it up." Although the least tricked up film in the set, it is ultimately the most satisfying, a moving work that offers Russell's most profound insights yet into the creative mind of the artist.

The film covers the last five years of Delius's life and his association with a young Yorkshireman, Eric Fenby, a self-taught musician and composer who became Delius's assistant during this time. Hearing a work by Delius on the radio one evening, Fenby writes to Delius's wife Jelka offering his services. By this time, Delius is paralyzed and blind and has for several years been unable to compose. Jelka invites Fenby to join them in their house outside Paris, where they have lived essentially in isolation for more than thirty years. Fenby finds the atmosphere of the household "sinister" (his room is decorated with a copy of Edvard Munch's painting The Scream) and Delius cranky, opinionated, and demanding. At first the two don't get along. Unimpressed by Fenby's limited musical education and inability to follow the composer's attempts to dictate his musical ideas for transcription, Delius bullies the diffident young man mercilessly. Fenby manages to form a close relationship with Jelka, though, and she encourages him to stand up to Delius.

Fenby does assert himself, and eventually, through trial and error, the two are able to work out a method of musical dictation that makes it possible for Delius to begin composing again. The bulk of Delius's compositions were impressionistic tone poems based on natural scenes and elements—places, seasons, the time of day, for example—and although very different in temperament, the two men have one important thing in common that allows them to forge a working relationship: their ability to hear the music in nature and to use that as the source of their inspiration. When Fenby puts a broadcast of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony on the radio, Delius reacts dismissively: "Beethoven, Bruckner, Mahler and that lot. . . . A complete waste of time. . . . Listen to the music of nature. Forget the immortals. I did long ago."

The scenes of their first successful working sessions together, about half an hour into the film, are just stunning. Film biographies have often attempted to portray the almost subliminal communication of creative minds that can occur when songwriters work together, but Russell's depiction of this process in Song of Summer is far ahead of any other attempt of this kind that I'm aware of. The film critic Richard Schickel once called Song of Summer "the best dramatic television program I've ever seen" because of its insights into the creative process and the creative personality, and I have to say that, along with Jacques Rivette's La Belle Noiseuse, it's the best film of any kind on these subjects I've seen. As he slowly returns to life, Delius doesn't abandon his waspish personality altogether, but you can nevertheless sense an easing of his frustration and hostility. And you can see his attitude toward Fenby evolve into something resembling gratitude as the two collaborate to translate the melodies in Delius's mind into musical notation. For his part Fenby is very much the receptor in all this—he describes himself as Delius's "amanuensis"—but you can sense his active pleasure in enabling the great composer to regain his creative voice.

The film may concentrate on the last five years of Delius's life, but as he develops greater intimacy with Fenby, he opens up to him and begins reminiscing about the past, and this permits Russell to work in unobtrusive biographical details about Delius. Two episodes from Delius's past are particularly striking. One is of his experiences in Florida as a young man working as a factor on an orange plantation near Jacksonville. After Delius asks Jelka to play a recording of "Ol' Man River" on the gramophone, he tells his young assistant of the profound effect on him of the African American music of Florida, its spontaneous sense of harmony, rhythm, and counterpoint such a contrast to the academic music of Europe. It was in Florida, he tells Fenby, that "I first felt the urge to express myself in music."

The other experience, this time shown in flashback, is one that happened in Norway years earlier, when he could no longer walk but before he lost his sight. He wanted to go to the top of a nearby mountain to see the sunset and was taken there in a chair carried by Jelka, his friend the English composer Percy Grainger, and a Norwegian servant. This is a beautifully conceived sequence which shows the group ascending higher up the snow-covered mountain through clouds that grow ever denser. Then suddenly at the last moment they break through the clouds at the top of the mountain and see the sun setting in the distance. All this is accompanied by glorious music by Delius that exactly corresponds to the mood of the images, building in intensity until it suddenly seems to resolve itself tonally, soar free, and float away in an almost mystical sense of calm and release. Visually and dramatically, this small, technically simple sequence is the centerpiece of the film, a return to the melding of rapturous music with rapturous imagery that distinguished Russell's earlier biographical films on Edward Elgar and Claude Debussy.

In the earlier films in the set, Russell tended to use non-professional actors—often choosing them, like Fellini, for their faces—and to mold their characterizations himself through the writing, photography, and editing. But in Song of Summer, with its more conventional narrative approach, he concentrates more on getting his main actors to create sustained characterizations. And it pays off. Christopher Gable, who plays Eric Fenby, was a ballet dancer who had appeared in only one television program before this film. But he seems wholly comfortable with his character here, conveying all the boyish enthusiasm, hero worship, and insecurity of the young Fenby. Later, as he becomes a full-fledged collaborator with Delius, he makes plain Fenby's greater maturity and self-confidence. (He would go on to work with Russell five more times before his death in 1998.)

Maureen Pryor, an experienced film and television actress who plays Delius's wife Jelka, grounds her character in Jelka's selfless devotion to her husband and her motherly but companionable support of Fenby. Her finest moment comes when Delius delivers a tirade to Fenby against marriage. "It's only from your art you will find lasting happiness in your life," he tells Fenby, then advises him that if he must marry, marry a woman who is more devoted to his art than to him. The blind Delius cannot see the effect his thoughtless words have on Jelka, but we can, and the pain provoked by his insensitivity registers clearly on her face.

As good as those two actors are, though, it is really Max Adrian as Delius who carries the film. At this point in his life, Delius is paralyzed, confined to a wheel chair, and blind. His character unable to gesture or use his body, unable to see, his eyes often concealed behind dark glasses, and his facial expressions immobilized by his illness, Adrian must create a portrait of Delius largely through his voice. Despite these limitations, he gives Delius a tremendously vivid personality. Another of Russell's troubled geniuses, he has the additional burden of being an artist still in possession of his full creative ability, but physically unable to express it. His resentment of his dependence on Fenby gradually becomes tolerance then admiration as Fenby subsumes his own creativity to Delius's and becomes a channel for the great composer's inspiration. Delius may never entirely lose his irascibility and egotism, but Adrian lets us see some of the sharp edges to his personality begin to soften and suggests just a touch of increasing regard for someone other than himself.

Song of Summer is a remarkable finale to the six works in this box set. Beginning with Elgar, the closest to a traditional biographical documentary, Russell proceeds in these films through stages that become more and more idiosyncratic. "There are certain points in every film I do, where I deliberately want to shock people into awareness," he once said in an interview, and in these works you can see him honing this vision of cinema as shock treatment. Finally he arrives at Song of Summer, in which he synthesizes all he has done in the previous films and integrates it into a more subdued yet still emotionally intense experience. To follow Russell through these six films is to be taken through the successive phases of a truly original filmmaker's experimentation with how to tell the life stories of artists in innovative ways. It's a journey well worth taking.

Ken Russell at the BBC, Part 3: Dante's Inferno (1967)

If you didn't know you were watching the beginning of Ken Russell's 1967 biography of the English Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rosetti (1828-1882), you might think you were watching a black-and-white Hammer horror film from the 1960s. The film opens in sensational Hammer fashion, with the nighttime exhumation of a grave. While eerie, melodramatic music on the soundtrack builds in intensity, torches wave over a coffin being raised from an open grave, the scene shot from overhead. The lid slides away from the coffin and we see an arm sweep away cobwebs from the shriveled remains of a woman in a burial shroud. The arm reaches into the coffin and lifts out a small moldy book, the camera moves in for a closer shot of the face, its skin sunken and stretched tight over the skull, and suddenly the title of the film appears: Dante's Inferno.

Immediately the scene cuts to a shot of Oliver Reed, who plays Rosetti, leaping directly at the camera over a bonfire around which a group of people are cavorting as they toss in paintings in the style of Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds and chant slogans like "Away with the wishy-washies!" A narrator explains in voice-over: "Arson, rapine, riot, civil insurrection is terrifying Europe. This is 1848. . . . In England rebels conspire to overthrow the Royal Academy of Art." Thus the film begins in Ken Russell's typically flamboyant style, with the juxtaposition of horror, social rebellion, and high jinks.

For the next hour and a half Russell gives us a crash course in the Pre-Raphaelite movement and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, with its fascination with knights and damsels and all things medieval. The cast of characters surrounding Rosetti sounds like a who's who of the movement: his sister the poet Christina Rosetti, the painters Millais, Holman Hunt, and Burne-Jones, the decorative artist and founder of the English Arts and Crafts Movement William Morris, the poet Algernon Swinburne, the critic John Ruskin. But always at the film's center are Dante Gabriel Rosetti and his lovers: his model Elizabeth Siddal, Jane Burden, another model who later married William Morris before beginning an affair with Rosetti, and Fanny Cornforth, yet another model with whom Rosetti lived off and on for several years at the end of his life. The film concentrates especially on Rosetti's relationship with Elizabeth Siddal (Judith Paris), a milliner's assistant who became his model, his muse, his mistress, and eventually his wife. Siddal posed for many of the best-known paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites, including Millais's iconic Ophelia. Their relationship was a stormy one, complicated by her mysterious chronic illness, her addiction to laudanum, and her adoption as a protégée by the domineering John Ruskin.

The tone of the film—at least for the first hour—is the mixture of satire and seriousness of Russell's earlier films on Henri Rousseau and Isadora Duncan. The PRB might be preaching a revolutionary message, but unlike their champion the priggish John Ruskin (when offered snuff, he declines, saying condescendingly, "Art is my stimulant"), they aim to have a good time doing it. When early in the film Russell accompanies their prankish behavior with Irving Berlin's "There's No Business Like Show Business" playing on a carnival organ on the soundtrack, we know that these are young men living their lives as theater. Later when Rosetti, Morris, Burne-Jones, and Swinburne spend the summer in Oxford painting murals of the Arthurian legends on the walls of the Oxford Union debating hall, they frolic like buffoons, becoming Russell's Pre-Raphaelite version of the Marx Brothers. Yet when they go out punting on the Isis with Jane Burden, who is posing for the murals as Guinevere, the visuals become almost idyllically beautiful.

After Siddal's death in 1862 from an overdose of laudanum, the tone of the film takes a sharp turn, becoming serious, hallucinatory, and morbid, and stays there for its last half hour. Siddal's death is portrayed in the film as suicide after she learned of Rosetti's affair with Jane Morris. (The coroner's verdict was accidental death.) It is Elizabeth Siddal's grave which is opened at the beginning of the film, and the book inside her coffin is a journal of Rosetti's containing the only copy of his early poems. Persuaded by an unscrupulous art dealer to exhume Elizabeth Siddal to retrieve those early poems so they could be published, Rosetti chose to place commerce over art, and he never really got over what he came to view as a betrayal of the idealistic principles of his youth. Already in a fragile mental state, his health ruined by alcohol and dependence on the drug chloral hydrate, Rosetti was haunted by what he had done. "He accuses and condemns himself . . . endlessly," his sister Christina says of his despair over the exhumation. Russell has said it was specifically that incident and its effect on Rosetti which inspired him to make Dante's Inferno and guided his approach to portraying Rosetti's life.

The film continues the style Russell developed in the earlier semi-documentary biographies in this box set, but with all the elements of that style more elaborate than ever. Voice-over narration, fully dramatized scenes, and a copious number of passages from Rosetti's poetry recited by Reed accompany stunningly staged, photographed, and edited images filled with detailed period decor, costumes, and Pre-Raphaelite art. Especially memorable are images of the Lake District, where Rosetti and Siddal pursue their romance, and a waterfall used as a recurring location at key points in the film. It appears to be the same waterfall where Millais posed John Ruskin for his portrait of Ruskin, an amazingly realistic, almost photographic work that illustrates the Pre-Raphaelite creed of "truth to nature." (The waterfall's exact location wasn't discovered until 2010, so the one used in the film must be a similar one, though it appears virtually identical.)

Early in the film Rosetti paints Siddal posed there. Later, after the exhumation, it appears in a hallucinatory dream/nightmare sequence while Rosetti is stoned on chloral. Still later it appears again in another hallucinatory sequence during his attempt to commit suicide with laudanum, with Siddal reaching out for Rosetti from her open coffin, which is resting on a boulder in the stream, and Rosetti plunging headlong off the boulder and into the stream at the end of the sequence. At the very end of the film, he returns to the Lake District setting of the early days of his romance with Siddal and yet again to that waterfall, which has become an image of the untamed drama of Rosetti's life.

Dante's Inferno is a wonderfully apposite follow-up to Russell's film on Isadora Duncan. Like Isadora, Dante Gabriel Rosetti was a great artist, but also a self-centered showoff who lived life on the grand emotional scale. His contradictory personality was, like Isadora's, composed of traits that were frequently at odds with one another, his serious creative urges shot through with pretension and a degree of dilettantism, his troubled personal and professional lives dominated almost as much by a showbiz mentality as by the artistic impulse. Both were youthful innovators who later ran out of new ideas, who grew stale and saw their creativity fossilize, and whose response to this and to their personal troubles was behavior that became increasingly self-destructive. Theirs was the tragedy of those artists who blaze bright in their youth and burn out in middle age.

Ken Russell at the BBC, Part 2: Always on Sunday (1965) and Isadora (1966)

After his New Wave-influenced The Debussy Film, in which he presented the composer Claude Debussy's life as an intricate Chinese box of time, character, point of view, and narrative mode, Ken Russell next turned to the life of the French painter Henri Rousseau (1844-1910). In his film on Rousseau, Always on Sunday, Russell returns to the more conventional approach of his 1962 biography of the composer Edward Elgar. He uses a combination of impersonal voice-over narration (by Oliver Reed), first-person narration by Rousseau (the voice and accent of the actor playing Rousseau, James Lloyd, sound exactly like those of the English actor Jim Broadbent), passages from contemporary critics' reviews of Rousseau's work, music, and dramatized scenes—some factual, some imagined—to tell Rousseau's story.

Rather than covering all of Rousseau's life, Russell begins with Rousseau's retirement, at the age of fifty-one, after twenty years as a French government civil servant, to devote his life to painting. The very first scene shows Rousseau packing his civil servant's uniform and the French flag (he was a customs inspector) in a trunk and pouring mothballs over them. On the soundtrack we hear a chauvinistic passage from the valedictory letter of Rousseau's supervisor expressing the hope that in his retirement he will produce art which will raise the opinion of France in the estimation of "foreigners." If the title of the film, with its word play on the title of the movie Never on Sunday, doesn't make us suspect that something not quite straightforward is up, Russell gives us a clear indication within the first minute that this is a film whose tone—both visual and verbal—will combine seriousness with satire. That is the innovation of Always on Sunday—its combination of a conventional stylistic approach and a wildly unconventional and constantly shifting tone in which scenes of restrained visual beauty alternate with scenes of outlandish comic exaggeration.

Rousseau retired the same year the avant-garde painters of Paris founded the Salon des Indépendants. This was an annual exhibition in which painters like Manet, Monet, Cézanne, and Seurat could display work that had been rejected for the annual exhibition of the conservative Academy of Painting and Sculpture. In fact, anyone could enter work in the new exhibition, and this is exactly what Rousseau did that first year and nearly every year for the rest of his life. But Rousseau, a self-taught painter and ordinary middle-class retiree, was not part of the Impressionists or any other artistic movement or group and was ignored by other artists and scorned for his primitive style even by critics and those members of the public sympathetic to the new style of painting. This gives rise to a jaw-dropping scene early in the film in which Russell gives full rein to his mordant sense of humor and his extreme sense of dramatic hyperbole.

At the first exhibition of the Salon, a group of onlookers gathers around Rousseau, who is standing beside one of his paintings, and ridicule him. At the front of the group are a rakish gentleman and a woman in tawdry dress. As she gorges on a huge box of chocolates she is holding, the two trade repartee in working-class British accents for the benefit of amused bystanders. The painting, of Rousseau's Army unit, is titled 51st Artillery: A Portrait of the Artist and His Brothers at Arms (it's pictured above), and the couple are making fun of the fact that all of the soldiers look pretty much alike. (They do.) "Which one's he then?" the man asks. "That's him," she says, pointing to one of the soldiers. "No, uh, that's him," he replies, pointing to a different soldier. The pair continue trading those two lines—"That's him!" "That's him!"—faster and more shrilly as the whole group breaks up with laughter and the abashed Rousseau looks on in humiliation. Finally the woman silences the man by shoving a chocolate in his mouth. The entire absurd routine wouldn't seem out of place in an episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus.

Things get even more peculiar when Rousseau is adopted as a protégé by the proto-surrealist dramatist and poet Alfred Jarry, who promotes Rousseau's original painting style as "unconscious" genius. "Why should strangeness provoke mockery?" he asks. Their scenes together are filmed in a frenetic physical style which recalls that of silent comedy, not the balletic comedy of Chaplin or the acrobatic comedy of Keaton, but the hyperactive knockabout farce of the Keystone Kops. Rousseau and Jarry, who is played by the five-foot tall actress Annette Robertson from The Debussy Film, become a weird comedy team of physical opposites in the style of Laurel and Hardy.

If the film later settles into a comparatively more sedate style, it never loses its satirical edge. Yet even though it pokes fun at just about everything in sight, it never makes fun of Rousseau, portraying him as a naïf (he actually considered himself a "realist" painter) and as a perennial outsider, too odd to be fully accepted by the straight world, too unfashionable to be embraced by the avant-garde art movement. Russell treats the neglect of Rousseau's talent during his lifetime—he was consistently dismissed by the public, critics, and other artists—seriously as well. Despite being championed by Jarry, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, and very late in his life by Pablo Picasso, who discovered Rousseau after buying one of his paintings for a few dollars in a junk shop, Rousseau was only truly recognized as an innovative genius by the Cubists and Surrealists, who claimed him as a forerunner of their styles, years after his death.

Russell takes the satirical exaggeration of Always on Sunday even further in the fourth film in the set, his biography of Isadora Duncan (1877-1927), Isadora: The Biggest Dancer in the World, and this time extends it to the subject of the film herself. The film begins with a narrator reading from newspaper articles describing events in Isadora's life: being banned from Boston after a nude performance, the death of her two children when their car rolls into the Seine, the suicide of the mad Russian poet she married, Isadora's suicide attempt on the French Riviera, finally her bizarre death and her funeral. Accompanying this Citizen Kane-like opening, however, are images played strictly for farce, filmed in fast motion and edited like a manic two-reel silent comedy. The rest of Isadora continues in this vein, as lyrical passages lead to outrageously comic ones. But mostly the tone is comic, covering just about every variety of comedy—farce, satire, irony, parody, visual and verbal humor.

Aside from that opening newsreel-style sequence and a few passages where Isadora (Vivian Pickles) reads from her letters, the narration is by Sewell Stokes, a writer who was a friend of Isadora and is given credit along with Russell for the screenplay and sole credit for the dialogue. "I suppose Isadora had the most sensational life of any woman who has lived during this century," he begins, and what follows makes a strong case that he is not exaggerating. The film really has two stars. One of these is, of course, Isadora herself as portrayed by Pickles. A stage and television actress who was also a trained dancer, Pickles, with her flat-voweled, drawling imitation of an American accent, is a marvel as Isadora, whose motto was "To dance is to live."

A self-taught dancer born in California who modeled her movements on what she imagined to be those of dancers in the statues and frescoes of ancient Greece, Isadora didn't set out to shock, even if that was often her effect on others, but to express herself without the customary constraints of society and to spread her "message of beauty and freedom." She did this above all by using the fluidity of her body in motion to express through movement her inner life and blend her entire being with the moment. If Isadora as portrayed in this film is impossible to take completely seriously, Pickles makes it clear that Isadora took herself seriously. No matter how extravagant her private life or how theatrical and impetuous her behavior, Isadora was absolutely serious about her dancing, which Pickles makes seem earnest, graceful, and spontaneous.

The other star of Isadora is Ken Russell. Here Russell takes the application of the auteur principle to the film biography, begun in The Debussy Film, and goes all the way with it. One expects a film in this genre to be serious, especially when it is dealing with a life as frustrating, unorthodox, and at times tragic as Isadora Duncan's. (Think of Karel Reisz's Isadora with Vanessa Redgrave, which was made at the same time as this film.) Yet nearly everything about Russell's Isadora pulls the film in an opposite direction from its serious subject. Russell's seemingly capricious style is all over the map, veering from gorgeous high-contrast scenes that might have come from a Murnau silent, to scenes of decadence reminiscent of those in a Stroheim silent, to sequences inspired by Mack Sennett and by British New Wave films like Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night and Tony Richardson's Tom Jones. The choice of music is sometimes serious, sometimes jokey—everything from Satie, Prokofiev, and Beethoven to John Philip Sousa, "Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie," and "Bye Bye, Blackbird." Serious subjects like death, suicide, drug and alcohol abuse sit side by side with hysterically funny passages that will have you laughing out loud.

For all the gravity of its subject and the quirkiness of Russell's treatment of it, this is one seriously entertaining movie. It's an incredibly dense movie too, covering in one hour more than most films could manage in twice that time. Yet in the end, Russell's synthesis of opposing styles is not merely self-indulgent cleverness, but rather an intentional choice used to make some very important points. Of all the films in the set I've written about so far, Isadora has the most vivid and clearly defined main character. And for all Russell's stylistic shenanigans, this is also the film that makes the strongest statement so far on the nature of art and artists. If anything lingers after watching Isadora, it's the paradox of just how close individualism is to narcissism, genius to foolishness, and a life's tragedy to farce.

Ken Russell at the BBC, Part 1: Elgar (1962) and The Debussy Film (1965)

In 2008 BBC Video released Ken Russell at the BBC, a three-disc DVD collection of six biographical documentaries Ken Russell made for the BBC between 1962 and 1968. For the next few weeks I'll be writing about these groundbreaking films.

When John Schlesinger left the BBC arts program Monitor in 1959 to pursue a career in feature films, Ken Russell was hired to replace him on the program as a director of documentaries. According to Russell, his task there was to make films that were "inviting, accessible, and entertaining." He made short documentary profiles of people as diverse as Spike Milligan, the creator and costar (along with Peter Sellers) of the BBC Radio comedy program The Goon Show, the playwright Shelagh Delaney (A Taste of Honey), and the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí. He stayed with Monitor and its successor series Omnibus for the next ten years, until he too left to make feature films. When Russell made his first documentary on a composer for Monitor, on Sergei Prokofiev in 1961, he asked the producer if he could hire an actor to re-create some scenes from Prokofiev's life. The producer was horrified at the idea of adding anything remotely fictional to a serious, high-toned documentary film but finally relented and allowed Russell one shot of an actor impersonating the composer, but only seen in reflection in a pond filled with floating leaves.

When Russell made his next film on a composer the following year, it was immediately apparent how far his and his producer's vision of what was permissible in a BBC documentary had progressed in the interval. This time the subject was the British composer Edward Elgar (1857-1934), and the complete title of the episode is Elgar: Portrait of a Composer. If this didn't convey the message that Russell's approach to his subject was going to take the definition of such a film in new directions, then the opening minutes of the film certainly did. After a brief voice-over statement that Elgar spent much of his boyhood riding in the Malvern Hills of Worcestershire, where he was born and grew up, for the next two minutes we see nothing but a young boy riding a pony across Malvern landscapes while Elgar's rhapsodic Introduction and Allegro for Strings plays on the soundtrack, a two-minute long cinematic tone poem.

Elgar contains no spoken dialogue, only voice-over narration that summarizes the composer's life and occasionally quotes from letters, diaries, and even postcards written to his daughter. But if the narration is conventional, the imagery that accompanies it most definitely is not. Russell illustrates the straightforward biographical narration with a combination of dramatized re-creations of scenes from Elgar's life—some shot with a hand-held camera to emulate the immediacy of newsreels and home movies—landscapes, still lifes, still photographs, and genuine period newsreel footage, all set to the glorious music of the composer. Using a mélange of images, inventive camera work and editing, music, sound effects, and narration, Russell overturns the traditionally impersonal tone of an established genre and replaces it with the personal vision of an inspired filmmaker. If today this approach to the biographical documentary seems less experimental than it once did, Elgar still seems remarkably fresh, and I think that's because of Russell's thorough commitment to finding creative ways to tell the story of Elgar and his music.

He also uses Elgar to explore themes he would delve into in greater detail in later films made for Monitor and Omnibus on composers and painters. Taken together, his ideas on these themes can be considered a working treatise of Russell's views on the nature of art and artists. Through Elgar's relationship with his wife Alice, Russell explores the intersection of artists' personal lives and relationships with their art. In emphasizing how many years it took Elgar to be accepted as a serious composer—in part at least because of his lower middle-class background and lack of formal musical training—Russell explores the ways that artists' battles with society can inhibit critical and popular recognition of their genius. Most significantly, he explores the sources of the artist's inspiration, here by focusing on the relationship between Elgar's music and the natural world. Elgar was a self-professed plein-air composer who always composed outdoors and claimed to draw his inspiration from nature, a source of inspiration hinted at from the very beginning of the film in that opening sequence of the young Elgar riding across the countryside.

Above all, Russell tells the story of Elgar's life through his music, using the music to comment on events in the composer's life. This marriage of Elgar's music with Russell's images reaches its peak in the last few minutes of the film. As a passage from the elegiac Second Symphony plays on the soundtrack, we see newsreel footage of the funeral procession of King Edward VII in 1910, which then segues into newsreel footage of World War I, while the soundtrack slowly segues into Elgar's most familiar work, the Pomp and Circumstance march. We are told how the sentimental and patriotic associations with that work were exploited to manipulate public feelings about the war and how this jingoistic appropriation of his music appalled Elgar, leading to his dismay with the modern world as a place with "no soul, no romance, and no imagination" and finally to his last great work, the hauntingly beautiful and mournful Cello Concerto, one of my own favorite pieces of classical music. (You may recall Jacqueline du Pré's exquisite version from the movie Hilary and Jackie of a few years ago.) After the sudden death of his wife Alice, Elgar gave up composing and returned to Worcestershire, and we see him making the journey across the Malvern landscapes in his automobile in a mirror image of the opening sequence, as the concluding section of Introduction and Allegro for Strings, the same piece used in that opening sequence, plays. The closing montage of the elderly Elgar confined to his bed as he drifts through his memories while the Enigma Variations plays on the soundtrack is almost unbearably sad.

If Elgar seems far removed from the standard highbrow BBC documentary of the time on a great artist, the next work in the set seems to come from another universe altogether. To call The Debussy Film innovative would be a tremendous understatement, so extreme a departure is it from anything one might have expected from the BBC circa 1965 or even from the imaginative director of Elgar. Revolutionary would be more like it, for the film constitutes an all-out assault on the traditional documentary film biography, finding startling new ways to tell the story of the life of a famous person on film and to match storytelling technique to the particulars of the subject's life.

As in Elgar, Russell announces his intentions in the opening minutes of the film. The first thing we see is a group of modern cars arriving at what appears to be a French château, where props and actors in period costume are already waiting. Then we see a film director, played by the Polish actor Vladek Sheybal, explaining to a small boy in costume that the scene about to be filmed is the funeral cortège of the French composer Claude Debussy (1862-1918), played in the film by Oliver Reed. (This was the first of nine times he would work with Russell, who says he cast Reed because he thought the actor looked like Debussy.) After this we watch the actual scene being shot while the director shouts directions to the actors from offscreen.

What we are watching is not a straightforward biography at all, but a film about the making of a film about Debussy. For nearly an hour and a half Russell slides between episodes from Debussy's life re-created for the film biography, dramatized scenes of that film being made, scenes of the fictional director and actors discussing the documentary both outside filming and during filming, and scenes of the performers in the documentary acting out events in their own lives that mirror the relationships of the people they are portraying in that film. At one point, right in the middle of a scene in the documentary, the director steps into the frame, yells "Cut!" and begins discussing the scene with the actors. At another point the director, now in period costume himself and playing the part of Debussy's controlling patron Pierre Louÿs ("What he really liked was to manipulate people . . . a kind of Svengali," the director has explained to Reed without even a hint of irony), suddenly breaks out of character and yells "Cut!" directly at the camera. Later in the film, Russell takes the concept of the play within the play even further, as the director and cast watch other actors in period costume theatrically overacting a scene from a real play, The Naked Lady, which was based on a sex scandal from Debussy's life that they plan to cover in the documentary. To characterize The Debussy Film as multi-layered would barely begin to describe its intricacy.

In The Debussy Film Russell emphasizes his subject's personal life even more than he did in Elgar. The entire narrative of the film is organized around Debussy's love life and his succession of lovers and mistresses, especially Gaby Dupont (Annette Robertson), suggesting erotic underpinnings to Debussy's sensual music. Naturally, the actors playing these people are having a tempestuous offscreen love affair. Russell also explores how Debussy's scandalous sex life—he was part of the French avant-garde movement of the late 19th century that consciously set out to live up to its motto, épater le bourgeois (shake up the middle class)—set back his musical career.

Russell also examines the way artistic movements of the time influenced Debussy's music. It's interesting that although Debussy is usually described as an Impressionist composer, the Impressionist painters are never mentioned. Instead Russell dwells on the influence on Debussy's music of the Art Nouveau style and the English Pre-Raphaelite painters (a movement Russell and Reed would examine in detail in Dante's Inferno, their 1967 film on Dante Gabriel Rosetti). In one scene, the director explains to Reed Debussy's fascination with the Pre-Raphaelites as he guides Reed through the Pre-Raphaelite collection at the Tate Gallery. It's a good example of the imaginative ways Russell repeatedly disguises biographical and background information about Debussy as part of a narrative rather than simply having someone read the information in voice-over as was traditionally done in biographical documentaries, including Elgar.

Debussy was also inspired by the French Symbolist poets Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Stéphane Mallarmé, whose poems he transposed into symphonic compositions. Mallarmé's "Afternoon of a Faun" inspired one of Debussy's best known works, which in Russell's hands becomes one of several passages in The Debussy Film that are forerunners of the music video. As well as the music of Debussy, Russell manages to mix in, thanks to the modern, non-biographical sections, music as disparate as The Ride of the Valkyries, Rodgers and Hammerstein's "It Might As Well Be Spring," and even the Kinks' "You Really Got Me." Talk about musical diversity! But the most impressive musical passage in The Debussy Film is La Mer, and rightly so, for as Russell has his director character explain to Reed, this was the culmination of Debussy's musical innovation and the work that made his career.

The final minutes of The Debussy Film are a knockout. In a long, dreamlike passage Russell relates Debussy's obsession during the last days of his life with Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher." He came to identify strongly with Roderick Usher, the main character of Poe's story, and to identify his former mistress Gaby Dupont with Usher's dead sister. Visually, these are some of the simplest but most arresting parts of the entire film, the compositions reminiscent of those of Citizen Kane or Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible movies in their austere, formal beauty. And this section of the film points ahead to Russell's increasing preoccupation with bohemian eccentricities that border on, and sometimes cross over to, madness. As in Elgar, Russell brings The Debussy Film full circle at the end, by showing us straight, without any manipulation of the film's point of view, the scene of the funeral cortège that was being prepared and shot in the opening sequence. It's a marvelously unembellished, stately coda to what has been a thrilling rush of nonstop invention that transforms a staid format into something exciting, passionate, and visionary.