本周是我的Ken Russell (1927-2011)周--每天自己要求在YouTube看一部他導的影片。70年代中大螢幕的Tommy，印象很深。這次，看他過世的影片追憶；作曲家系列；【七層面紗之舞】、【莎樂美最後之舞】等，竟然在Wikipedia 的Dance of the Seven Veils 條目中缺席，可見世界之廣....。
Ken Russell: Sex, God and Tchaikovsky
He is best known for his Oscar-winning film Women in Love (1969), The Devils (1971), The Who's Tommy (1975), and the science fiction film Altered States (1980). Russell also directed several films based on the lives of classical music composers, such as Elgar,Delius, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, and Liszt.[4]
Film critic Mark Kermode, speaking in 2006, and attempting to sum up the director's achievement, called Russell, "somebody who proved that British cinema didn't have to be about kitchen-sink realism—it could be every bit as flamboyant as Fellini. Later in his life he turned to making low-budget experimental films such as Lion's Mouth and Revenge of the Elephant Man, and they are as edgy and 'out there' as ever".[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Russellhttp://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/29/arts/ken-russell-controversial-director-dies-at-84.html?_r=0
Ken Russell, the English filmmaker and writer whose outsize personality matched the confrontational brashness of his movies, among them “Women in Love” and “The Devils,” died on Sunday at his home in Lymington, England. He was 84.
His death was confirmed by a spokesman, Shade Rupe.
A polarizing figure who delighted in breaching the limits of propriety and cinematic good taste, Mr. Russell courted controversy through much of his career. “Women in Love,” a 1969 adaptation of the D. H. Lawrence novel, was his breakthrough film, and “The Devils” (1971), about a 17th-century outbreak of religious hysteria, was his most notorious. Both caused run-ins with censors.
The flamboyance and intemperance of his movies were all the more notable coming at a time when British cinema and television were still largely known for the kitchen-sink style of social realism. In the 1970s, his most active decade as a feature film director, he made a series of biographical films about artists and rock operas, like his adaptation of the Who’s “Tommy,” which were admired by some for their delirious excesses and dismissed by others as vulgar kitsch.
Mr. Russell’s feature-film career began with a couple of lightweight genre assignments, the romantic comedy “French Dressing” (1964) and“Billion Dollar Brain” (1967), a spy movie with Michael Caine. But it took off with “Women in Love,” a sensuous period piece that connected with the liberated sexual politics of the late ’60s. Although the film was generally well reviewed and a mainstream success — it earned Mr. Russell his one Academy Award nomination for best director and Glenda Jackson an Oscar for best actress — it was also the first glimpse of his flair for provocation.
“Women in Love” became infamous for an extended wrestling scene between the two male stars, Oliver Reed and Alan Bates, that showed full-frontal nudity. It made it past the British censorship board only after Mr. Russell agreed to trim a few shots, though nudity remained.
“The Dance of the Seven Veils,” a broad television drama from 1970, emphasized the connections of the composer Richard Strauss to the Third Reich. The Strauss estate withdrew the music rights, and the film, the last that Mr. Russell made for the BBC, remains out of circulation.
“The Devils,” based on real events that had inspired a play by John Whiting and a book by Aldous Huxley, tells the story of demonic possession at a French convent, complete with exorcism rituals and blasphemous orgies. Mr. Russell, who converted to Roman Catholicism in the 1950s, saw the film as an attack on corruption between the church and state.
Its American investors and the British censors called for cuts. The Catholic Church condemned the movie when it was screened at the Venice Film Festival. An edited version was banned by several local authorities in Britain; it was further trimmed in the United States to avoid an X rating.
Despite his affinity for classical music, Mr. Russell gravitated toward the flashy British rock scene of the day. The connection was made explicit with “Tommy” (1975), his frenzied film version of the Who’s rock opera and concept album. He combined classical and rock music in the follow-up, “Lisztomania” (1975), which starred the Who’s lead singer, Roger Daltrey, as Franz Liszt and featured a cameo by Ringo Starr as the pope.
Critics tended to welcome each new Ken Russell film as target practice. Reviewing “The Devils” in The New York Times, Vincent Canby called Mr. Russell “a hobbyist determined to reproduce ‘The Last Supper’ in bottle tops.” Pauline Kael called him a “shrill, screaming gossip.”
Mr. Russell was not above fighting back. Shortly after the release of “The Devils,” he appeared on live television with the British critic Alexander Walker, who had called the film “monstrously indecent.” Mr. Russell hit him on the head with a rolled-up newspaper.
But even his staunchest critics acknowledged that Mr. Russell had left his mark on film. The nascent music-video aesthetic of the 1980s can be traced to the slick surfaces, rapid montage and voracious pastiche of his films. (He lifted liberally from the likes of Fellini and Cocteau.)
He had a knack for casting ascendant stars (Vanessa Redgrave, Glenda Jackson), and he sought out talented collaborators. Two of his ’60s films were scored by the French composer Georges Delerue, and he hired the young Derek Jarman as a production designer on “The Devils.”
Even in the prime of his career Mr. Russell cycled between hits and flops. Time and again he bounced back from critical and commercial disasters like “Lisztomania” and “Valentino” (1977).
He ventured into the American studio system with “Altered States”(1980), a hallucinogenic science-fiction film starring William Hurt. In his autobiography, Mr. Russell revealed that he had been hired by Warner Brothers only after 26 other directors had passed on the project. He feuded with the screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, who took his name off the project, but “Altered States” earned him some of his best reviews and has since developed a cult following.
Henry Kenneth Alfred Russell was born on July 3, 1927, in Southampton, England, the son of a shoe-store owner. He described his childhood as lonely. Many an afternoon was spent at the movies, alone or with his mother. As a teenager he attended nautical school, where by his account he won over the bullies by putting on amateur productions of Dorothy Lamour musicals. He served briefly in the Merchant Navy and the Royal Air Force, then moved to London, where he studied dance before turning to photography in his late 20s.
Mr. Russell’s work as a freelance photographer and filmmaker led in 1959 to a job at the BBC, where he made dozens of arts documentaries, most notably a 1962 piece on the composer Edward Elgar. It was unusual at the time for its use of re-enactments. His other subjects included the composers Prokofiev and Debussy, the dancer Isadora Duncan and the painter Henri Rousseau.
The fascination with genius, ambition and the creative process — and the project of making high culture accessible to a popular audience — continued in Mr. Russell’s later fictional features. Many of them take considerable liberties in exploring the lives and works of composers and artists: “The Music Lovers” (1970), about Tchaikovsky; “Savage Messiah” (1972), about the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska; “Mahler” (1974); and “Lisztomania,” which imagined Liszt as the original pop superstar.
Mr. Russell’s career never fully recovered from his 1984 flop, “Crimes of Passion,” although he managed one final provocation with “Whore”(1991). A drama about a Los Angeles prostitute, it was the last of his films to get a theatrical release in the United States, where it received an NC-17 rating and was released on video under the alternate title “If You Can’t Say It, Just See It.”
But even with his directing career in eclipse, Mr. Russell kept busy with films and documentaries for British television, occasional acting roles and self-financed low-budget features like “The Fall of the Louse of Usher,” a 2002 horror spoof literally shot in his backyard. He wrote several novels — including a few on the sex lives of famous composers (“Beethoven Confidential,” “Brahms Gets Laid”) — and made his Off Broadway directing debut in 2008 with the play “Mindgame,” starring Keith Carradine.
In Britain he remained a public gadfly into his 70s and 80s, appearing on television talk shows and writing a column for The Times of London. In 2007 he joined the cast of the reality TV series “Celebrity Big Brother” but left after getting into an argument with another house guest, Jade Goody.
Mr. Russell’s survivors include four sons, Alex, James, Xavier and Toby, and a daughter, Victoria, from his first marriage, to the costume designer Shirley Kingdon; a daughter, Molly, and a son, Rupert, from his second marriage, to the photographer Vivian Jolly; a son, Rex, from his third marriage, to the actress Hetty Baynes; and his wife, Lisi Tribble, an actress, whom he married in 2001.
In a column in The Times of London in 2008 about a critical biography of him by Joseph Lanza titled “Phallic Frenzy,” Mr. Russell reflected on his longtime status as a critical punching bag. “I believe in what I’m doing wholeheartedly, passionately, and what’s more, I simply go about my business,” he wrote. “I suppose such a thing can be annoying to some people.”
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