A British Picture

United Kingdom

1989

50 Min

Color, Black and White

English

Currently 3.0/5 Stars.
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CAST Ken Russell, Molly Russell, Rupert Russell, Victoria Russell, Vivian Russell, Melvyn Bragg

In Russell’s idiosyncratic personal documentary, his witty narration recounts the highlights of his early life, including being enamored of movies, causing a scandal by directing a drag musical at school and discovering the joys of classical music. Employed as a film director by the BBC, Russell takes the viewer on a quick tour through some of his films (and later music videos), bringing us right up to date, as the film ends with a telephone call from his producer, Melvyn Bragg, inviting him to make this film about himself. Along with home movies and clips from his films, Russell also includes some more conventional documentary material, such as footage of worshippers at Lourdes that accompanies the director’s account of his earlier fascination with Catholicism.

Russell is very selective about what he chooses to include in his life story, mentioning, for example, nothing about The Boy Friend. Lisztomania or Valentino, and next to nothing about his first wife, Shirley Russell, who provided the marvellous costumes for a number of his films. He describes his career in terms of the films’ provocation of scandal, and as a continual struggle for financing. Ironically, for a filmmaker who has so often been described as vulgar, excessive and puerile, and whose work features a fondness for bold, startling images of eroticism, physical revulsion and violence enhanced by shock editing effects, Russell presents his own life with the most spartan of means (in the first shot following the credits, his birth is visualised as simply a rocking cradle). Family members portray various people, the film’s new material looking very much life one of the home movies that Russell says he enjoys making but that don’t pay the bills. A British Picture is itself evidence of Russell’s difficulties securing funding, for its deliberately modest special effects look surprisingly similar to those in his first amateur film effort, Peepshow, a clip of which is included.

Although producers have shied away from him because of his scandalous and excessive approach, Russell revels in his role as British cinema’s enfant terrible. He is happy to repeat his once shocking description of The Music Lovers, a film about Tchaikovsky and his disastrous marriage to Nina Milyukova, as ‘the story of a love affair between a homosexual and a nymphomaniac’. Until the end of A British Picture, Russell is portrayed by his young son, with the director’s own voice lip-synched on the soundtrack, as a literal innocent child among men, wrongly stigmatised as outrageous. As an enfant terrible, the boy Russell suddenly sports a rainbow-coloured wig that he wears until the end, at which point Russell appears as himself. Accompanied by a clip of the conclusion of The Rainbow, Russell suggests that at this point he, like that film’s protagonist Ursula Brangwen, has attained a new maturity, and tosses away the wig. In the way he uses clips of his own films to comment on his life, as when he refers to the domestic tensions at home during his divorce from Shirley with the memorable shot of the lake house exploding in flames in Mahler, Russell provides further proof that he is one of the greatest auteurs in the history of British cinema. —Barry Keith Grant & Jim Hillier, BFI Screen Guides: 100 Documentary Films

Director

Ken Russell

British director Ken Russell started out training for a naval career, but after wartime RAF and merchant navy service he switched goals and went into ballet. Supplementing his dancing income as an actor and still photographer, Russell put together a handful of amateur films in the 50s before being hired as a staff director by the BBC. Russell made a name for himself (albeit a name not always spoken in reverence) during the first half of the ‘60s by directing a series of iconoclastic TV dramatizations of the lives of famous composers and dancers. And if he felt that the facts were getting in the way of his story, he’d make up his own — frequently bordering on the libelous. If he had any respect for the famous persons whose lives he probed, it was secondary to his fascination with revealing all warts and open wounds.

A film director since 1963, Russell burst into the international consciousness with 1969’s Women in Love, a hothouse version of the D.H. Lawrence novel. No director… read more

A film director since 1963, Russell burst into the international consciousness with 1969’s Women in Love, a hothouse version of the D.H. Lawrence novel. No director who staged a scene in a mainstream movie in which two men wrestled in the nude could escape notice, and thus Russell became more of a “star” than his actors. While some viewers had their sensibilities shaken by Women in Love, others had their sensibilities run through the blender with Russell’s next film, The Music Lovers. Predicated on the notion that Peter Tchaikovsky and his wife were, respectively, a homosexual and nymphomaniac, the film’s much discussed “highlight” is a scene in which Nina Tchaikovsky (Glenda Jackson) allows the inmates in the cellar of an insane asylum to reach up and play with her privates. But this was kid’s stuff compared to Russell’s The Devils (1971), an ultraviolent and perversely anachronistic adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun. Russell returned to his musical theater roots with The Boy Friend (1971), a bloated version of Sandy Wilson’s intimate 1920s pastiche, and then went back to biography with the insanely inaccurate Lisztomania (1974) and Valentino (1975). The latter film not only suggested that Rudolph Valentino (Rudolf Nureyev) performed totally nude in his silent films, but also offered up the spectacle of Huntz Hall as producer Jesse Lasky. At this point, even some of the most devoted fans of Russell’s outrageous (but undeniably brilliant) visual sense were fed up with his shock-for-shock’s-sake approach and his all-consuming narcissism. Following the mind-bending horrors of Altered States in 1980, Russel maintained momentum with Gothic, a visually lavish retelling of the weekend of debauchery that gave birth to the Frankenstein mythos in the mind of a young female author named Mary Shelley. Though the film may have had its fair share of detractors due to Russel’s signature departure from historical fact, it nevertheless aquired a cult following thanks to its heavy atmosphere and dark fantasy. After detailing the exploits of yet another famed author (this time Oscar Wilde) in the 1988 comedy drama Salome’s Last Dance, Russel turned out another curiousity in the form of that same year’s Lair of the White Worm. Based on Dracula author Bram Stoker’s short story of the same name of featuring a memorable performance by a pre-romantic comedy stalwart Hugh Grant, Lair of the White Worm’s outrageous, sex vampire excess and near surreal humor earned the effort a proud spot in many a cult movie aficionado’s collection. He was back in his old form with 1991’s Whore, which conveyed several times over that life on the streets is hell — then for good measure, said it a few more times. Backed by a childishly slavering ad campaign, Whore brought Russell into the spotlight again for what would be the last time in some while.

Dabbling in television for much of the 1990s, may of Russel’s efforts during the decade were fairly unmemorable despite featuring such noteworthy actors as Richard Dreyfuss (Prisoner of Honor) and Bryan Brown (Dogboys). Just when it seemed as if Russel’s career may have lost steam for the last time, the ever unpredictable director struck back in 2002 with the unhinged comedy horror musical The Fall of the Louse of Usher. Brimming with the director’s trademark debauchery and offering a curious meld of various stories by timeless horror author Edgar Allan Poe, the film may have found Russel back in proper form, but still somehow managed to elude audiences due to both its independent origins and a virtually nonexistant advertising campaign. —allmovie

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richmondhill

30May13

The 'enfant terrible' writ large and literally in this generally engaging subjective summary of Russell's early life and pre-occupations largely conveyed by the directors own son in mute mime overplayed with lip-syncing from the director himself. One is left none the wiser at the end except that Russell has a good line in self-depreciation and can turn a low budget to reasonable effect.