Published date: 25th Jun 1976, Cinema Journal

Russell’s films on composers deal with subjects very neurotic and with personal disorders. If they were not neurotic, Russell feels, they would not have written their music. Their obsession endows them with a different kind of vision.

MAKING a biographical film 100 minutes long is quite a tough proposition, Especially when it’s on the life of a stormy, hypochondriacal must composer like Gustav Mahler, In Mahler, shown recently at the Festival of Films International in Bombay, director Ken Russell has achieved a high degree of perfection, You find yourself engrossed in the tempests Mahler encounters and with his neuroses, When the sympathizing 100 minutes are over, Mahler emerges at a powerful character, not Just a paragraph on the back cover of a record.

Russell filmed most of Mahler in the Lakes District of England. He has made most of his films there, He finds the place Imbued with a strange mystery. There is a lot of this mystique apparent in the tangled, lyric-heavy sequences that abound in Mahler.

Ken Russell is a strange man at the best of times. When asked what he does when he Is not directing, he replied: “Sit on a mountainside and look at the sun. Yes, and go blind in the eyes.”

Russell has had his flops. But then he makes movies mostly on music-makers, and interpreting a composer’s Images through a camera can often distort the totality of the sub-foot.

An earlier film directed by Russell, The Music Lovers, was about Tchaikovsky, and here, Russell feels the “composer’s Ninth Symphany was his best – “because it is a distillation of his entire experience in 45 minutes, the culmination of his life, a tortured life.” Run sell loves symphonies, and to him, they are almost like “inner space science fiction muster”, a “trip in the mind.”

Russell’s critics very often tear up his films, Coe Columbia executive is reported to have told him after sitting through the film he made last year, Tommy, that the film was great, except for two mis- takes. “There are two yawns in the picture. People In the film yawn, and nobody yawns in a Columbia picture”!

Tommy was a “religious” sort of film, a pilgrim’s progress. (Incidentally, one of the first straight documentaries Russell made was about Lourdes.) Tommy analyses the exploitation of religious ideals, und is above all about a teenage pop idol, trapped in his own nightmarish world of un- requited love. Roger Daltrey plays Tommy, and the funny thing is, critics have noticed that in the film, a brown-eyed boy grows up to be blue-eyed Daltrey! The Who (mainly Peter Townshend) provide the KEN RUSSELL Making films on music makers music, Eric Clapton and Elton John sing in it, and there is even a fleeting shot of the director working a hand-held camera while Elton sings. Al- together, Tommy “sends” a lot of people.

The press has always been hostile to Ken Russell. His latest film, Liszt mania, is about composer Franz Liszt. Everyone dislikes this film. Patrick McGilligan said in his review: “Liszt mania is Rus-sell at his utmost, pandering to his own overblown image, vulgar. bombastic, pretentious, gaudy, flamboyant, religious, raunchy, exciting, satiric, symbolic, meaningless, absorbing, exhilarating, trite, dull.” McGilligan obviously ran out of adjectives after the eighteenth one!

Mahler, however, can be counted among Russell’s masterpieces. He has evidently put in a lot of research before beginning work on the film, And Russell, above all, loves classical music, He has listened to Mahler’s symphonies for more than two decades. The film, therefore, appears to be just an extension of his intense infatuation with music.

Most of Mahler takes place on a train. During a journey with his wife, Alma, Mahler recalls the events of his life. The flashbacks, the frenetic uncertainty of the present, are all blended subtly, Brought up in a large Jewish family, Mahler Is always in love with music, He aspires to be a composer, and his father agrees to pay for his music lessons, Russell conveys Mahler’s delicateness too – his father is a hard man, not averse to beating up his wife now and then. So, Mahler takes refuge in his own little shell. This penchant for solitude, perhaps, proves responsible for his later musical genius.

What strikes the viewer most in Mahler is the obvious condensation of facts. For example, Mahler’s wife was supposed to be very friendly with six different men. She nearly ran off with one of them. The film is not about her ‘affairs’, but they are an important part of it, So Russell translates Mahler’s doubts about Alma’s fidelity by condensing the lovers, would-be lovers and admirers into one figure, a soldier, representing the military theme that runs through Mahler’s compositions at that time-brutal, tough, martial music.

Mahler, however, finds he cannot get anywhere in his ambitions because he is a Jew. He is eager to impress Cosima Wagner, and so he gets himself converted to Catholicism, that sequence is one of the most powerful ones in the film- Russell has Mahler jumping through a Christian hoop, Mahler hammering a Jewish star, and Mahler embracing Christ in almost Chaplinesque style.

What Russell tells us in gentle language is that Mahler was preoccupied with death. Alma finds him writing songs on children dying one day. Horrified, she asks him: “Why do you tempt providence like that?” And Mahler replies, “Oh no, I’ve just got to do it.” Alma throws the music into the lake, and he says, “No, it’s still in my head.” He goes on writing, and his youngest child suddenly keels over, dead, Russell endows the film with # chilly proneutrality in such shots.

Mahler Is also Intensely affectionate, about to break up with his wife, he hears her – – way, “Oh, I’m nothing to you.” And he replies, “You remember the second subject of the first movement of the Sixth Symphony?” She says “Yes, I copied it out for you to remember?” And be my “Well, that’s you.” After sequence, the viewer discovers these emotions he did not know he possessed.

the peculiar thing in that Raw Soll’s films on composers have subjects very neurotic and with personal disorders. If they did not have any neuroses, he feels, they would never have written their music. Their chessylite endows them with # different kind of vision.

Mahler has the compomer’s Sixth Symphony recurring throughout the film This In again noteworthy, because elites have becalmed this w. Mahler’s best work, almost autobiographical in content.

Ken Russell therefore transforms Mahler into his out celluloid symphony. The most in the background, Mahler’s crisis-ridden Life, and above all, Rassell’s total Identification with the depth of his subject-these render the film memorable.

Russell takes all the criticism that his film generates in his stride. All he filmed are tendentially symbol. He loves going on fantasy trips, Noise and gimmickry delight him. T wife, costume designer Shirley Russen, always Renda scripts before he begins thief films. Normally, Huckell ports, she says “Rubbish” 10 the first script, “Um, getting better” to the second script, and “Huh, It’s alright” to the third one. And so Russell the third script.

“I never see films if I can possibly help I… Iye scent enough – whereas I haven? mad enough books and look- ed at enough sunsets,” Russell said in a recent Interview the periodically descends on New York to grant & week of inter- views to the press], “All the #lima that have Impressed me were flamboyant – Essenstein’s films, early Griffith, Fritz Lang’s early expressionist Finns, Citizen Kane. What I like about visual things is that before you get time for the defenses to go up, it is hit the brain. . . there is no time for any sort of wall”