Once on the British show Celebrity Big Brother came a man of about 80 in a pink shirt and an embroidered gold vest. When asked who he was by the local British celebrities The Sun publishes all the time, he replied: a filmmaker. All these stupid women with silicone lips had no idea that it was Ken Russell. The man who changed the face of British cinema and gave impetus to the music video genre. The man who filmed homoeroticism in 69, when they were imprisoned for it, and invented the Rammstein group back in 75.
Yes, only Ken Russell could get involved in one of the suckiest shows in the world in his retirement years - a man whose depth of understanding of music (and anyone, he did not divide it into genres) could only argue with the desire to show the public the middle finger.
And yes, this is probably called the "eccentric Englishman" in its most classic form.
But I just adore people of such a fate.
Henry Kenneth Alfred and-what-else-Russell from childhood wanted to become a ballet dancer, and instead went to the merchant navy, and then to the Air Force (not the BBC, but to the military aviation), then he studied at the technical school for photographer and went to the ballet.
Then he gave up ballet and photography and went to TV.
Started shooting short films.
The fourth short film "Amelia and the Angel" (1959) brought him fame in narrow but professional circles.
So he got a job for the real BBC.
He grew up without a father, with a crazy mother, and his main entertainment was to walk his mother to the cinema, so he eagerly watched several films a day - no one was waiting for him at home, his mother was sitting next to him.
Apparently, the boy had an extraordinary tenacity for cultural values and a thirst for knowledge.
And all of this resulted in an amazing sensitivity, flexibility and providence in his own work as a director.
He constantly expanded the boundaries of his knowledge and from some point began to link this knowledge with his special vision of history and art as such, especially music.
The BBC had a program "Monitor" - "about culture" in the format of a newsreel.
And under the direction of producer Weldon Russell first made a short film about the composer of the beginning of the century Gordon Jacob (don't pay attention - you don't need anything), and then - the film "Portrait of a Soviet Composer".
It was about Prokofiev.
When he was filming, the producer demanded that there be live interviews with the hero, but the problem is that Prokofiev has been dead for eight years already.
Weldon dismissed Ken's proposal to include an actor playing Prokofiev in the film (“It's a documentary!” He shouted).
We left only hands on the keys and reflections, shadows, etc., woven into the visual of the picture.
But Russell, in fact, came up with the way many modern documentary filmmakers have gone, especially in historical flashbacks, to use actors.
He shot a lot for the BBC, but all the time he kept himself within the framework of his own interests in art.
He made films about the photographer David Hahn, about Gaudí, about the architecture of London.
Already in 59, he cut through the rock 'n' roll wave and shot "Guitar Madness", and since then Mahler, Liszt, Elton John and Pete Townsend - for him it is a single huge world of music.
He easily let rock and roll into his consciousness soaked with classics, but that will be a little later.
He was allowed to make longer films for TV, for example, about the composer Elgar (1962).
With Elgar, he broke the TV magazine format of the BBC art story, and it was already a complete format.
Russell's first feature film - "French Spice" (banter over Roger Vadim and his "And God Created Woman") - failed at the box office.
Russell again went to TV and made films about the naked dancer Isadora Duncan, and about the primitivist Henri Russo, and about Bela Bartok.
But he performed very powerfully with "Debussy" - here is a fantastic mix of the French new wave and the traditional "cinema about a composer", moreover, in one frame.
In this film, he revealed to the public the stunning Oliver Reed, who will continue to be filmed in the future.
He made a film about the Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Dante's Inferno), about the film composer Georges Delerue (Don't Shoot the Composer).
But something was already raging in his soul, and he was ready to destroy and destroy boring British cinema.
Probably few people have seen "The Billion Dollar Brain" (1967) - the third film adaptation of the spy novel about Agent Harry Palmer with Michael Caine. What Russell does with unspeakable malice: “The American billionaire oilman from Texas buys the most powerful computer in the world. With his help, he calculates and spreads a conspiracy to reformat the entire world system. To begin with, he is preparing an uprising in Latvia against the Soviets. In Porton Down (Salisbury), a deadly virus is being stolen to infect the Russians. When little Latvia rises, the billionaire's PMC should come to her aid, and together they will demolish the damned Soviet pagans. But it all ends with an epic battle on the ice of the Gulf of Finland in the choreography of Alexander Nevsky by Eisenstein, where PMC soldiers in white go under the ice. "
Did you realize that you have just read practically the scenario of today's confrontation between Russia and the West: from the owner of the "new oil" Zuckerberg with a "supercomputer" to Salisbury?
1967 year.
In short, the film failed at the box office, and because of this, Russell's production of the biopic Nijinsky fell off - he did not forget for a minute about his passion for ballet, becoming a very large man with a belly.
In 1969, he released a picture that made people talk about him - "Women in Love" by Lawrence.
He here demonstrates an unprecedented amount of eroticism, including homosexual.
Yes, Lawrence had it all.
But what had been allowed in literature for 50 years was not allowed in the cinema before Russell.
He was nominated for a BAFTA - not because of eroticism, but for the fusion of color, movement, camera, sound - everything that makes cinema an art, not a collection of pictures.
The picture is closely associated with the beginning of the sexual revolution in Britain.
Several Oscar nominations followed, including Best Director.
In general, he has already begun to break the tradition of British film narrative.
No voiceover telling a story.
He plunges the viewer into the life of the characters on a grand scale, in the very center - and everything he wants to say, he speaks primarily with music.
In 1970, he directed The Dance of the Seven Veils for TV. The film that defined his contribution to cinema in principle. He declared himself to be the forerunner of an amazing genre - a "creative portrait of a composer", as no one has seen him. He illustrates the biography and development of Richard Strauss with a series of symbolic, surreal, provocative episodes: musical, ballet - it is difficult to define the genre. But he sticks to biographical facts, breaking off fans and feeding relatives of the composer. And his Strauss is a blond beast who dances with Hitler on an alpine lawn, and it's hard to see it. Yes, Russell speaks directly and shows a very evil parable about the Nazi years of Strauss, which no one wants to discuss. But after the war he was tried for cooperation? They tried. True, they acquitted. And this is a fact.Strauss Russell - actor Christopher Gable - you yourself can judge or forgive. Maybe just for the music that sounds from the first minute to the last. And Strauss conducts it while a Jew is beaten in the stalls. After all, writing music for the 1936 Berlin Olympics is just a job.
The Strauss family was so furious (and other ordinary people too) that they immediately revoked all rights to the sounding music in the film.
He was shown once on TV despite being nude.
And the picture after that could only be shown in 2019, when the rights to Strauss's music passed into the public domain.
Another stone in the copyright garden.
In 1971, Russell's heyday began - he shot three films at once, in which he collected everything that can unbalance the audience: crucifixion, nudity, music, violence and sex.
Until now, he is the only director in the world who could so weave it all into tight storm charges, clearly passing along the line that separates art from kitsch.
Although he is also art.
Music Lovers is about Tchaikovsky, Devils is based on the book by Aldous Huxley, Boyfriend is a musical.
All this is pure unalloyed Russell.
He wanted to shoot Sparrows about Piaf and about King Ludwig of Bavaria, because Richard Wagner haunted him, but it didn't work out.
He began to deal with Wagner in the 1974 film Mahler, which flows like a classic musical biopic, until the episode with Cosima Wagner, the professional widow of the great Wagner, bursts in.
Who is known to be such a professional widow that Courtney Love is just Vinnie Mandela compared to her.
And everything turns into a wild Russellian grotesque, where Wagner's widow directs the conversion of the Jew Mahler to Catholics, spreading her body over the cross - in a helmet, black stockings and with a swastika on the priest.
In life, Mahler was afraid of Cosima (and who was not afraid of her?) And believed that she could prevent him from hiring at the Vienna Opera.
And maybe that's why he was baptized, although he was never a particularly zealous Jew.
"The Devils" is a powerful film about fanaticism, politics and the fact that all the madness and political instability comes from hysterical women deprived of sex.
Aldous Huxley wrote his book Demons of Loudun about the real priest Urbain Grandier, who was accused by local nuns of seducing them because he is the devil.
Outright violence, massive nudity scenes - everything as it is.
Many did not like it.
It was cut by censorship, and although later, in 2002, one critic found a copy and digitized it without clippings, no one dared to show it.
His version of the rock opera "Tommy" by The Who marked his complete acceptance of rock music, and he went to great lengths here - a kaleidoscope of images. Rock opera, in fact, is an artificial genre and rather flawed, not to mention that The Who is a respected band, but none of its heritage can remember anything by heart except Behind Blue Eyes (and that is because of Limp Bizkit) ... But that's why Ken Russell is great, that after "Tommy" it is impossible to watch "The Wall" by Alan Parker, because it is already deeply secondary. And again, it is worth a lot to look at the live Eric Clapton, playing from the pulpit of the church of St. Marilyn Monroe. And Keith Moon is still quite alive.
And "Listomania" must, of course, be revised.
Roger Daltrey from The Who plays here too.
Russell is at odds here - his creative method is at full throttle.
Every phantasmagoric scene from Liszt's life, from sex on the rails to the depraved palace of his Russian mistress, everything is documented, but this is done in the form of a surreal dream, where Wagner is again to blame.
And I am to blame for my daughter, and that I stole List's talent, and that I founded Hitlerism.
When Wagner's roof finally goes off in the film, he rises from a prone position on stage, like Marilyn Manson at Mechanical Animals concerts with a machine gun, like Rammstein framed by red and white swastikas.
It becomes clear who is the author of the concepts for today's musicians.
No, not Wagner.
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And then there will be "Altered States" - his immersion in the world of drug trips researcher John Lilly, who was no different from Timothy Leary. Then the amazing "Gothic" about Lord Byron, in which it is not clear whether his swinging fueled creativity, or vice versa. Great movie, by the way. Salome's Last Dance by Oscar Wilde. Bram Stoker's Lair of the White Worm is a very sarcastic film. He captures the sexuality of young Kathleen Turner in Crimes of Passion. He will even stage an opera in Vienna (and who else will stage a modern opera, if not him?), Will be a member of the jury of the Moscow Film Festival in 2003.
His latest feature film, The Fall of Asher's Nit, was filmed entirely with his own money.
Critics have called the film "school amateur performance", but in fact, its primitive aesthetics brings us back to medieval theater.
Which, in fact, is.
He died in November 2011.
But what pleases: any scene from any of his films tears apart an idiot from among the SJWs, like a drop of nicotine to a hamster.
And the further, the more.
Watch Ken Russell more often!
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.