Ken Russell: Great Composers (1965-7)(Review)

The music documentary is enjoying a boom period with the likes of 20,000 Days on Earth & Searching for Sugar Man receiving both critical and commercial acclaim, there’s also the channel defining content from the award-winning BBC Four. Staying with the British Broadcasting Corporation, it is easy to forget what the world’s most famous broadcaster has brought us over the past 96 years. It’s only thanks to the greatest archive in the world at the BFI that we get to truly appreciate the lost and forgotten achievements of years past. For one, it has exhumed 6 made for TV documentaries from the 1960s by one of Britain’s kings of cinema – Ken Russell. The defunct Monitor and Omnibus series’ provided great platforms for Russell as illustrated in the trio of films that complete the Great Composers boxset.

In 1962 Russell directed Elgar, a documentary on ‘the last Great British composer’ Sir Edward Elgar in what proves to be the most traditional documentary of the three. Composed of the sweeping beauty of Worcester’s countryside and the romance of the British village, this is a documentary as English as could be; then there is the pleasing baritone of the narrator and then BBC Executive Huw Wheldon. This is the vision of a made for TV documentary from the broadcasting giants heyday. A fine example of BBC’s work, no doubt, but a piece firmly camped within the conservative giants’ predetermined parameters.

Using actors and an eager DP, Russell incorporates re-enactments of Elgar in his intimate moments with a small cast to personify the harshness of being a British composer in a country tragically apathetic to its own talent. Elgar’s early success came from Germany; it was only later in his life that he had success at home. Here is where it gets interesting; the film harbours anti-British establishment rhetoric regarding what is now considered the second British national anthem, the Land of Hope and Glory.

There are no attempts to hide Elgar’s contempt for either the lyrics that were attached to his orchestral piece or its repurposing as an anthem of war against a country he loved – Germany. With the honesty to depict the feelings of his subject matter, no matter how controversial, Russell paraded envious integrity. In spite of the anti-English sentiment hidden within and it’s through this that the visage of Elgar becomes deeply humbling. Integrity over agenda will never fail to be important for documentarians, at any level, and his supreme self-assurance was apparent even at this stage of his career.

1965 saw the broadcast of one of Russell’s final films for the Monitor strand in what is possibly one of the most experimental documentaries ever made for British TV in the Debussy Film. More of a behind the scenes drama with a flair for documenting history than a purebred documentary. Written by Melvyn Bragg and starring Oliver Reed, Debussy is an amalgamation of three narratives. The history of Debussy presented as reality, a film being shot within and a behind-the-scenes of the aforementioned film directed by Vladek Sheybal, together these narratives merge into something not too dissimilar to Godard’s brand of surrealism.

Following suit in more ways than one, The Debussy Film like Jean Luc Godard is hard to follow for its stylised impenetrability. Russell collaborator Sheybal plays both the director of the film within the film and Debussy’s pornographer, photographer friend, and it’s through him that this density is best demonstrated. In one scene he may address Reed referring to Debussy as a historical article and the next he’ll be part of a scene within this self-contained film. The lines aren’t just blurred, I think they are invisible to the naked eye. There is little acknowledgement of this narrative complexity beyond the sporadic stage directions in the dialogue. Added to this is Reed’s performance, a study in method acting sees him learning the history of Debussy while getting lost in the person and music he depicts, eroding the partition between actor and role.

It’s not often that a documentary can be surmised as experiential, as a film to sit back and let wash over you but that is the only way to characterise the second film in this set. With its playful surrealism that manages to give the composer’s story room enough to be both educational and entertaining; Russell was evidently enjoying himself in the director’s chair. The proof is in the pudding, look no further than a scene in which Reed engages in a sword fight with a fellow eccentric (one with a walking stick and the other with an umbrella) as the rest of the party slow dance to Ride of the Valkyries. Another fine example would be the funeral procession that opens the film, an ecstatic specimen on the act of directing a film within a film. The final scene is the cherry on the cake, a beautiful scene in which Reed wanders around a gallery with ghostly isolation, use of space and ether that’s not too dissimilar from horror. That this was developed and broadcast for a BBC documentary series boggles the mind, especially when considering the modern face of the corporation and its lacklustre documentary strands.

It’s 1968 and the last title in this set saw Russell adapt Eric Fenby’s ‘Delius as I knew him’, a candid chronicle of the 5 years the Scarborough born amanuensis spent with the composer. Believed by some to be the director’s best work, the director himself included, and it’s hard to argue against such a claim when considering it’s a meekly told story of a man incapacitated by illness and his refusal to surrender his creative hunger. Tragedy and inspiration are common bedfellows on both the small and big screen, but rarely has it transpired with such a refusal to pander to the mawkish norm.

In an isolated country house in Germany, Fenby (Christopher Gable) rushes to the side of Delius’ side when a bell is rung three times to either help formulate his last ever composition or read the newspaper. It’s never a simple relationship, with the blind and immobile composer uninterested in verbalising himself properly treating those around him with a lack of decency. Fenby’s Baptism of fire has him trying to decipher the music from Delius’ almost atonal series of ‘ter-ter-ter’ noises and instead of thinking the problem to be his own, the composer rubbishes his amanuensis. This is never framed as a by-product of frustration either, with his long-suffering wife, Jelka (Maureen Pryor) relieving her burden to Fenby, telling of the suffering she stomached when he was physically active. This brings back to mind Elgar, with Russell absolute in his adaptation of the truth. Song of Summer both villainizes and romanticises its subject.

BFI have once again outdone themselves with Elgar, a slyly satirical documentary mounted within establishment tropes; The Debussy Film, a madly and deeply affectionate surrealist bio-drama and Song of Summer, a moving celebration of the human spirit. This Great Composers set and the previously reviewed Great Passions are a perfect celebration of one of the finest English directors of the latter 20th century. Experimenting with what could be possible in a TV documentary while playing with the form itself, it doesn’t take The Devils or the Altered States to express the passion this man radiated, he approached every last one of his 71 director credits with the same tenacity. Seeing these early films makes Russell being reduced to directing short films in his back garden because he couldn’t get the funding all the sadder.

An impressive set which should be snapped up immediately by completists. Like those two recent documentaries cited at the top, knowledge or appreciation for the subjects matters little, the material speaks for itself. Be that as it may, Great Composers serves as a release that is a must-buy for completists and a beautiful argument that more people to become completists of the late, great Ken Russell.

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