Ken Russell and the Question of Authenticity: The Evolution of a New Documentary Art Form at the BBC

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Collin ColsherNovember 2012

Ken Russell and the Question of Authenticity: The Evolution of a New Documentary Art Form at the BBC

John Grierson, in his seminal 1946 essay “First Principles of Documentary,”

describes documentary as any film showing “natural material,”1 meaning any film that

captures what already exists in reality. Furthermore, the essay argues that non-actors and

non-fiction represent the world of documentary better than actors or fiction.2 Grierson

adds that the “real” or “spontaneous” aspects of documentary are “finer” than any

scripted work.3 Likewise, director Joris Ivens, in his 1931 text “Reflections on the

Avant-Garde Documentary,” gives more praise to documentary’s ability to depict natural

events and material. Ivens surmises the “cameraman brings more to [documentary]

cinema than a poet does”4 and “the good filmmaker lives surrounded by the material

world, by reality.”5 Grierson and Ivens’s claims concerning documentary held

considerable weight, particularly from the 1920s through the 1950s. However, Ken

Russell would take a different and interesting approach to documentary in the 1960s.

Russell’s BBC documentaries, primarily on the shows Monitor and Omnibus,

were an iconoclastic departure from anything that had ever been done in the United

Kingdom. Reenactments in documentary may be commonplace today, but in the early

1960s the “British Free Cinema Movement,” with its focus-on-real-subjects mantra, was

at an apex. “Free Cinema” mandated that the standard method of documentary capture

actual British working class people in their genuine environments edited into a

straightforward encyclopedic film grounded in visual palpability.6 Russell wanted his

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style of filmmaking to be the “very antithesis of the ‘Free Cinema’ championed by the

British Film Insitute,”7 a doubly radical concept because “Free Cinema” itself was a

radical manifesto against traditional documentary at the time. For Russell, “Free

Cinema” did not go far enough. He wanted to institute a more visceral, poetic type of

docudrama that incorporated noticeably stylistic aestheticism and elements of theatrical

fiction including scripted narratives performed by professional actors.

Grierson, in 1926, stated that documentaries contained elements of both artifact

and artifice,8 but Russell wanted to go beyond simple artifice and turn it into pure fantasy.

Russell’s hope was that this new less-pedestrian style would engage the viewer on a

penetrating level never before reached.

Russell’s antithetical biopic style, however, was not without precedent. Jackie

Robinson had played himself in the staged and scripted Jackie Robinson Story (1950), as

had Audie Murphy in the scripted To Hell and Back (1955). Likewise, other war flicks

and many Westerns in the 1930s through 1950s were definitive fiction films that told the

tales of real-life war heroes and cowboys. Even Grierson, Ivens, and pioneers like

Thomas Edison and Robert Flaherty were guilty of staging large portions of their films,

albeit with non-actors or real-life subjects. However, examples of staging on television

were virtually nonexistent. When not employed in the “Free Cinema” system,

documentarians that also worked on television—like Grierson, Lindsay Anderson, Roy

Stryker, and Pare Lorentz—often utilized a pretenseless formal tenor, exemplified by

Edward R. Murrow’s See It Now. If Russell was against “Free Cinema,” he surely was

going to lean as far from Murrow’s CBS take as possible. Russell did not want to simply

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stage events; he wanted to fully reenact events with actors to regenerate the biopic format

into a new artistic mode that had never been seen before in documentary.

Russell yearned for a cinema that acknowledged the indiscernibility of the real

and the imagined. He wanted pedantic control over what appeared on the screen so he

could “be free to interpret truth as he sees it,” 9 even if that truth was bizarre, shaking, and

different from other accounts. While obtaining approval for the addition of any acting

whatsoever would prove to be a difficult but significant breakthrough for Russell, his

other equally difficult goal was to convince producer Huw Wheldon that Monitor should

drop its “Ministry-of-Information-type commentary and let [the subject] artists speak for

themselves.”10 Over time, Russell would gain even more freedom to interject his own

personal interpretations of truth into his biographical films. Because of this, the artists

under review would indeed finally “speak for themselves.” For Russell, this was a

positive advancement toward removing a layer of mediation—the omniscient narrator

who normally told the story. Russell wanted to replace this mediation with his own

scenario-building and stylistic formal decisions. However, due to the insistence of

producers Wheldon and Nancy Thomas, Russell was forced to use voiceover narration in

nearly all of his documentaries—a considerable difference from “Free Cinema,” which

used little to no narration. For a director who wanted nothing to do with “Free Cinema,”

the elimination of narration, ironically, is one of the few things the two camps would

have agreed upon. However, if he had to use it, Russell deemed that his narration would

be different than the usual monologues heard in traditional documentary. With lines like

“Who Knows?” in Elgar (1962) and “Nobody Really Knows” in Always on Sunday

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(1965) it was clear from the outset, even before his more maverick shifts in esoteric form

and transition to using actors, Russell was attempting to change the game.

But if Grierson, Ivens, Anderson, the BFI, the BBC, and other purists felt there

was no place for such experimentation in documentary, then why does Russell’s

television corpus actually fit into the tradition of documentary? And if it does fit, then

how can a mixture of apocrypha, dramatization, and reenactment that ostensibly

resembles a narrative fiction film function as a documentary? Furthermore, how does

this type of documentary manifest itself within the realm of accurate historical

representation?

In order to effectively answer these questions we must analyze Russell’s

relationship with the BBC in the 1960s, the BBC’s own views on documentaries at the

time, Russell’s filmmaking process in regard to documentary, and several important film

examples from Monitor and Omnibus.

At first it was hard to convince BBC producers to agree to add such radical ideas

into their programming, but eventually Russell (slowly) got what he wanted. In the

1960s the BBC had a rather strict policy of not using actors in any way, shape, or form in

documentaries. Monitor in particular was entirely studio-based and typically consisted of

interview segments. In attempts to hedge Monitor’s ethos relating to documentary,

Russell inserted “impersonation into the material he provided for the series in an attempt

to dismantle the barriers blocking theatrical modes of expression from attaining the status

of the historical document.”11 In fact, Russell had already tried to use a child to portray a

young version of the poet John Betjeman in Poet’s London (1959), but Wheldon axed the

scene from the final cut.12 Wheldon even chastised his director, referring to the use of

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actors in a documentary as “immoral” and “deliberately setting out to deceive the

public.”13 Wheldon added, “People will stop believing us if we’re making things up.”14

The BBC had long worried that actors portraying real historical figures, but speaking

fabricated dialogue in a documentary format, would “lend a sort of spurious authenticity

to his flights of biographical fancy—much as the newscast form of [Orson] Welles’ War

of the Worlds gave it believability.”15 Despite this initial setback with BBC higher-ups,

Poet’s London was a hit, allowing Russell to stay with Monitor and to “push the

conventional documentary format into the unexplored territory of the kaleidoscopic

biopic.”16

With an ever-growing desire to create this new kind of half documentary-half

drama hybrid, Russell convinced Wheldon to let him depict an actor as composer Sergei

Prokofiev in Portrait of a Soviet Composer (1963)—albeit Russell could only show him

as a pair of disembodied piano-playing hands and as a reflection amongst superimposed

dreamy images.17 Despite initial hesitance on the part of BBC, and critics labeling the

film pejoratively as “fictionalization,”18 Portrait of a Soviet Composer only strengthened

Russell’s resolve to continue down the experimental path. Just like Poet’s London,

Portrait of a Soviet Composer was a triumph. As historian Michael Hurd says, “Russell’s

approach was fresh and imaginative and the result delighted millions.”19 This new

irreverent take on documentary, especially on television, was something that had never

been done before and it peaked the interest of the British public.

But completely overcoming the BBC’s ban on using actors would still take

calculated steps, and Russell treaded lightly after Portrait of a Soviet Composer. In Elgar

—filmed after but aired before the Prokofiev film—the actors were allowed to be seen

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from a distance but not to speak. In The Debussy Film (1965) actors played both

fictionalized versions of themselves and Debussy’s inner circle. Bit by bit, Russell

introduced new aspects of avant-gardism into his documentaries.

To further illustrate the rationale divide between Russell’s vision of dramatized

documentary and the traditional views of the BBC in the early 1960s, one needs only to

reference Wheldon’s reaction after viewing the rough cut of Elgar where Sir Edward

Elgar (Peter Brett) flies kites and enthusiastically slides down a hillside on a tea tray.

“The idea of Sir Edward [flying kites or] sliding down a hill on a tea tray is ludicrous,”

flouted Wheldon. “Lose it, the film will be all the better for it.” To which Russell

replied, “But Huw, it’s true, he did slide down hills on a tea tray. And he used to send

telegrams to the Greenwich Observatory for meteorological reports to see if it was good

kite-flying weather.” As Russell recalls, Wheldon immediately followed this exchange

with, “Those are facts? Facts you can corroborate? Then we must tell the audience, old

boy, or they’ll never believe it.”20 Thus, the scenes were included in the final cut, but

significant narration was added, much to the chagrin of the director. Despite this, Elgar

was voted one of Britain’s most popular television programs of the 1960s,21 further

cementing Russell’s influence on the artistic trajectory of Monitor.

While convincing Wheldon and the BBC that his methodology was sound might

have been trying, by the end of his tenure with the company, Russell had “nudged

‘factual’ television into the realms of the fully fledged biopic.”22 Eventually, the

documentaries began to resemble “feature films, with screenplays and a lot of directorial

license,”23 to the point that by the late 1960s Russell will have had virtually achieved this

ideal. Although, the BBC, still retaining traces of its prior skepticism, was still careful to

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distance itself from Russell even as the decade concluded. For example, with the

broadcasting of Dance of the Seven Veils (1970), the BBC added the subtitle “A Comic

Strip in Seven Episodes on the Life of Richard Strauss 1864-1949” and the more than

usually cautious disclaimer, “It has been described as a harsh and at times violent

caricature of the life of the composer. . . . This is a personal interpretation by Ken Russell

of certain real and many imaginary events in the composer’s life.” In fact, the BBC,

throughout the 1960s, often subtly voiced its concerns over the authenticity of Russell’s

films as historical documentation via titling and subtitling. For instance, The Debussy

Film had a subtitle of “Impressions of the French Composer.” Words like “Comic Strip,”

“Impressions of,” or “Portrait of” are not usually words associated with factual and

authentic documentary as truth on film.

Of course, it is only natural that a problem with or a search for authenticity would

arise in relation to Russell’s docudramas. Russell, in straying from the tradition of the

1950s and 1960s and deploying a high level of imposture and personal ideology, entered

the realm of what many considered to be fiction film, false documentary, or pseudo

documentary. By deviating from the normative procedure, Russell’s films ostensibly

reject the idea of portraying informative and realistic representations of artists’ lives.

However, Russell’s goal was quite the opposite. Not only did he want to create a visceral

new art form out of documentary, he still wanted to maintain the documentary concept of

realistically and authentically informing and educating about a specific figure. “I wanted

to dress people up in old clothes” Russell claimed, “and do it in a totally unreal way, and

thus make it more real than ever, and in the process send up this new civil

service/academic way of doing films.”24 While the revolutionary, outlandish claim that

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unreality will lead to more reality may seem like a contradiction of terms, it applies to

Russell’s methodology quite well.

In order to ground Russell’s 1960s body of work within documentary as a

legitimate depiction of reality, truth, and historical authenticity we will now look at the

documentarist’s filmmaking process while simultaneously analyzing some of his films in

more formal detail.

Russell, in all of his BBC movies, connected divergent elements and

adventurously described the “inner movements of his characters by weaving together

facts, speculations, and conjectures into penetrating glimpses of his protagonists.”25

According to critic Robert Philip Kolker, Russell’s portraits derive from manipulation of

a three-part perspective: the (objective) view revealed by the perspective of history; the

protagonist’s own (subjective) romantic self-image as an artist based upon source

materials; and Russell’s own personal vision, which can be seen through the formal

technique of the film itself.26 These three viewpoints are often played off against each

other and Kolker regards this complexity as a “major contribution to the world of film

biography.”27 Critic Ian Leslie Christie echoes this attribution of three-part model, saying

that Russell was able to “place his subject variously in relation to the viewer—first, in

historical perspective, and then, subjectively and personally—coupling basic period

evocation with either cinema verité, tableau, or pageant form.”28 By looking at Russell’s

BBC films through this three-part lens, we can more easily understand how unreality

becomes reality.

With Elgar, the film that catapulted Russell into the critical eye and garnered him

his first taste of serious fame and success, the director, as mentioned above, was still

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trying to work around the constraints and regulations put forth by his bosses at the BBC.

Even though Russell uses actors in Elgar, there is a considerable amount of re-

appropriated footage from the BBC archives, still photography montage, and omniscient

voiceover narration that often quotes historical facts and diary entries. The effect minus

the staged scenes, which resembles something like a modern Ken Burns film, functions

as the objective historical viewpoint of the movie.

But how do scenes of Elgar riding a pony, biking, or driving a car through the

Malvern Hills, the aforementioned kite and tea tray scenes, or the scene where Elgar

chases his wife playfully through a grove of trees give the effect of reality when they are

so clearly fabricated? Similarly, when Elgar is shown boating and laughing with his wife

off the coast of the Isle of White, how are we to respond as viewers? Did these events

actually happen? And if so, did they occur as depicted?

These apocryphal events, while staged, get Russell’s point across—that Elgar was

in love, that he was a child at heart, and that his music was influenced by the lush English

countryside. They also serve as both the personal and subjective portions of Kolker’s and

Christie’s tri-perspectival model. As Russell said, “My biopix were all mould-breaking

biographical studies, told in a cinematic style which mirrored the nature of the subject.”29

Russell made Elgar to be melancholy, reverent, and patriotic; Bartok (1964), on

the other hand, is “nocturnal, mysterious, violent, and expressionistic”30 albeit through

use of similar formal attributes. Because Russell was still under the watchful eye of

Wheldon, actors in scenarios with no recorded sound, lots of archival footage, voiceover

narration, and photographic montage are still present in Bartok. Although, Russell is able

to experiment a bit more by including archival footage that does not contribute to the

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historical narrative. In using montage of random wild animal, bird, and insect footage

while playing Bela Bartok’s music, Russell is able to invoke a specific troubling, dark

feeling and thus associate Bartok with enigmatic fury. On Bartok, Russell claims that

“by very ingenious editing one can assimilate rather mediocre [archival] material into

one’s own specially shot film and get quite a reasonable effect.”31

Both the natures of Elgar and Bartok—as Russell came to know the composers

through written accounts, history books, legends, and especially their music—are

captured and delivered cinematically. Cultivating mood or perception to give an

impression of a character is, for Russell, is much more engaging, kinaesthetic, and real

than other more traditional methods of relating information via film. This is an integral

part, in both Elgar and Bartok, of Russell’s application of his own personal vision, in the

Kolker/Christie sense, to the history of these musicians. Even with the strong

idiosyncratic touch, the viewer is still able to learn about Bartok in detail.

The Debussy Film is a prime example of Russell becoming more emboldened

especially since this would be his first Monitor film as director, writer, and producer.

The same formal techniques as in Bartok are employed, but this time Russell gets away

with using sound-synched actors playing out entirely staged dramatic scenes. By

structuring The Debussy Film as a self-reflexive fiction film about a director making a

documentary about Debussy, Russell is able to finally have actors portray his artist

subjects, and he is able to do so because, technically, the actors are playing actors playing

the historical documentary subjects (as opposed to simply actors playing the historical

documentary subjects outright). In The Debussy Film, Russell manages to directly

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address the question of authenticity in several ways through the many layers of self-

reflexivity.

For instance, Russell confronts the problematic nature of authenticity through the

dialogue of the director (Vladek Sheybal)—who also plays Pierre Louis in his film within

the film. Much of his dialogue is a direct meta-commentary on Russell’s biopic process.

At one point the director projects a rough cut of his Debussy film in progress, which

shows Claude Debussy (Oliver Reed) and Gaby Dupont (Annette Robertson) playing

with balloons in the woods. The director proudly exclaims, “They did play with

balloons. I’ve checked.” This meta-commentary not only shows Russell’s own need to

impress upon his viewers that his fantasies are in fact realities, but it also references his

conversation with an incredulous Wheldon about Elgar’s quirky hobbies involving kites

and tea trays. Furthermore, much of the director character’s dialogue explains the plot of

his own film and explains the details of Debussy’s life to his colleagues and actors. In

Russell’s film, this dialogue serves a dual process of progressing the fictional narrative

and giving the viewer the factual documentary information regarding Debussy. As the

fictional character teaches his fellow fictional characters, the viewer of the fiction learns

as well.

In another moment, Russell further explores the notion of authenticity when the

frustrated actor playing Debussy (Reed) questions the truthfulness of a scene where

Debussy stares at the sea all day long. Reed says that it seems falsified and feels

“wrong.” The director shrugs off the critique and assures his actor of the film’s historical

legitimacy.

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Russell’s questioning of the meaning of authenticity and rebuke of his purist

critics continues when the director character and the actor characters watch a play about

Debussy. During the scene the actress playing Madame Bardas (Iza Teller) snidely

comments that her counterpart in the play “doesn’t look anything like Madame Bardas.”

Although Russell often cast his actors because they resembled their subjects, this play

scene operates as discourse on the idea that reality is only in the eye of the beholder,

especially since no one can ever look exactly like the person they portray on camera. Not

only does this stage performance scene further address the notion of authenticity, but it

simultaneously continues the narrative and fills in a gap of information regarding

Debussy’s life needed to complete Russell’s story as a documentary.

The Debussy Film also interprets Debussy as being, at times, very tender with his

female companions, and at other times, quite abusive and aggressive. These meticulous

scenes are shot with every attention to detail in mind, but are also very expressive and

over-the-top. Many traditionalists during the early 1960s quibbled at the inclusion of

such dramatization in a factual picture and Russell, very aware of this, ribs his detractors

by inserting dialogue from the director character, who says, “There is so little real

evidence for what happened.” Russell is concocting the story, and in a sense, building his

own version of the truth. As scholar Hayden White theorizes:

Demands for a verisimilitude in film that is impossible in any medium of

representation, including that of written history, stem from the confusion

of historical individuals with the kinds of ‘characterization’ of them

required for discursive purposes, whether in verbal or in visual media.32

Russell embraces White’s concept as his own reading of axiom and applies it earnestly to

his brand of eclectic documentary.

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The high-level of self-relfexivity in The Debussy Film combined with objective

and subjective historical viewpoints and Russell’s own “dreamy, impressionistic, and

ambiguous”33 personal vision of Debussy bestow a lavish simulacrum of the man’s life.

These self-reflexive integuments and meta-commentaries are Russell’s attempt to not

only tackle the validity issue head-on but to reconcile the contradiction between historical

and artistic reality.34 Russell, amazingly, is able to complete this reconciliation while at

the same time tells an informative biography about Debussy.

Always on Sunday immediately followed The Debussy Film and was told in a

primitive cinematic style35 that mirrored the nature of its subject, the painter Henri

Rousseau. This piercing glance at Rousseau was yet another leap for Russell. He was

allowed, for the first time, to include the use of sound-synched actors directly portraying

their subjects, although much of the dialogue is overdubbed and there remains a godlike

authorial narrator. Despite the narration, Russell creates a moving drama that places

Rousseau into a hyper-reality that seems to reflect his paintings and his ties to the

absurdist world of his ‘Pataphysical friend, Alfred Jarry. This melancholy quasi-fictional

world not only is pieced together with references to objective historical accounts related

to Rousseau’s life, but is delivered in a way that we see the world through the eyes of

Rousseau himself. By showing the world this way, Russell uses a method—with actors,

direct reenactment, and complete fabrication—that fosters a false environment.

Ironically, this environment of falsity, by allowing us to see Rousseau’s world in a unique

way, allows its viewers a cathartic opportunity to learn more about the painter than they

could have through more traditional formats.

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Always on Sunday marked the seventeenth and final film Russell would do for

Monitor as the series concluded with Wheldon’s departure in 1966. Without the

limitations of Monitor, but still with its funding, Russell was given an opportunity to

make a stand-alone BBC tele-documentary feature with no strings attached, a picture on

the life of the dancer Isadora Duncan.

Isadora Duncan: The Biggest Dancer in the World (1966), described by Russell

as “exuberant, choreographic, humanistic, and celebratory,”36 was a mash-up of all the

things Russell had done before, but on a grander scale. The film begins with a fake

newsreel complete with a fast-talking omniscient narrator then jarringly cuts to a shot of

Sewell Stokes, the author of the Isadora Duncan biography upon which the film is based,

who then proceeds to address the screen and then continue the narration. There is

significant use of archival footage, but on the whole, the rest of the film plays out like a

weird mix of newsreel and feature-length fiction melodrama. All of his biopics up to this

point, including Isadora Duncan, were, according to Russel, “mini feature films

masquerading under the banner of television documentaries. [They] were shot in black

and white, which gave them an added . . . newsreel like immediacy and authenticity.”37

By 1966, Russell had yet to fully realize his perfected hybrid documentary form, but

Isadora Duncan comes close. Many of the campy scenes border on the edge of farce, yet

remain true to Stokes’ recollections about Duncan’s actual life and interviews with her.

Russell, while preparing for the film and doing extensive research, consulted with many

people who knew Duncan personally to get an objective perspective of her.38 After

gathering his facts, Russell could then begin assembling Duncan’s story by adding his

own ideology and by reimagining those facts as he saw fit. This led to “a pure fusion of

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artifice and naturalism”39 in order to paint an illuminating and profuse description of

Duncan. Even invented incidents that tremble on the preposterous, such as Paris Singer

(Peter Bowles) providing a gift of six lady harpists in a huge gold box that prompts

Duncan (Vivian Pickles) to dance all night as his reward, “succeed in the glistening world

Russell creates.”40

After working on a Georges Delerue documentary for the BBC show Sunday

Night, Russell began work for the reformatted Monitor in 1967, now called Omnibus.

His first contribution to Omnibus was a “fragmentary”41 biopic on the life of poet Dante

Gabriel Rossetti, called Dante’s Inferno (1967). Like his other films, Dante’s Inferno

also shows Russell trying to harmonize the incongruity compromising verifiable and

aesthetic realism.42 In Dante’s Inferno Russell still unable to jettison omniscient

voiceover narration, but as usual he does manage to mix objectivity, subjectivity, and his

own vision into a veritable bouillabaisse. Fantastic scenes where Rossetti (Oliver Reed)

participates in juvenile apple fights or jokingly dons a suit of armor, as Russell says, “are

inspired by fact.”43 In regard to Russell’s factuality in Dante’s Inferno, scholar Joesph

Gomez muses that a close analysis of Oswald Doughty’s biography of Rossetti (the main

reference for the film), of earlier accounts, and of other primary sources “suggests that

while all is not literally true in Dante’s Inferno, even the most outlandish interpretations

in the film have a factual basis.”44 Thus, Russell has again built a film where tradition is

tossed out the window in favor of mixing myth with verity to create what appears

outwardly as fiction. And yet, the result is a forthcoming and educational biography that

contains a level of truth and intimacy that engages the viewer and encourages him or her

to see Rossetti’s world through Rossetti’s own eyes. Russell is not only expanding

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documentary-making horizons, but is also very interested in grabbing the normally

passive television viewer and motivating him or her in an active, rather than passive,

way. Much of Dante’s Inferno is firmly grounded in probability, but much is “also

constructed from Russell’s imagination, and thus there are scenes consciously designed to

jolt the passive viewer.”45 Just as he had “jolted the viewer” by opening Isadora Duncan

with an eye-catching scene of Duncan wildly dancing nude on stage, Russell opens

Dante’s Inferno with a grisly, macabre scene of gravediggers unearthing Rossetti’s wife’s

coffin, revealing her emaciated corpse within. It matters little to Russell whether these

captivating scenes are the most important moments in his subjects’ lives, only that they

provide a knee-jerk response on the part of the viewer. Nor does it matter that in these

instances, in both Isadora Duncan and Dante’s Inferno, the opening scenes recollect

events from later in the story, thus setting the stage for a non-linear, disjointed narrative,

quite the opposite of what is normally attributed to traditional documentary. Once his

audience is sufficiently hooked, Russell can imply whatever he feels like rather than

articulating pragmatic enlightenment.

Scholar Diane Rosenfeldt comments on this process, stating that Dante’s Inferno

is an impressive example of the “Russell approach to documentary and biography. . . .

[Russell] tends to use the facts of his subjects’ lives only when they provide a

springboard for his incredible visual imagination.”46 For instance, after the death of his

wife Rossetti enters a deep depression and becomes addicted to laudanum. These are

well-documented events in the man’s life, but instead of simply delivering them

empirically, Russell inserts surreal, highly performative shots of Rossetti, shrouded in

fog, haunted by his former lovers as nuns carry a gothic coffin through the thick mist.

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Sequences featuring hallucinatory visuals, operatic stylizations, and theatrical camp are

peppered throughout Russell’s corpus.

In 1968 came Song of Summer: Frederick Delius, an “obsessive, claustrophobic,

hedonistic, and monochromatic”47 film about the composer’s life towards the end of his

career as told through the eyes of his closest associate, Eric Fenby. The film was based

on Fenby’s own memoirs about his time spent with the ailing musician. While Russell

still uses voiceover both from Fenby’s inner monologue and from an omniscient narrator,

the latter dialogue is heard sparingly. Song of Summer was Russell’s most standard

fiction-looking film at that point, made with impressionistic shots, an emotional score,

dramatized sensationalism, and pompous acting. Russell often tried to coach his actors’

performances to be as operatic as possible in order to achieve a type of “super reality.”48

In a sense, Song of Summer, with no archival footage and the elimination of any

effect of newsreel, is Russell’s most biopic-ish BBC at that point. However, its formal

structure is quite normal compared to the tortuous, hypnagogic avant-gardism of Dante’s

Inferno or Isadora Duncan. The film’s only staunchly outrageous scene is its final shot,

which occurs shortly after the death of Delius (Max Adrian). Russell uses the well-

documented fact that Delius died in his home to create a vivid scene of Fenby

(Christopher Gable) wheeling in an enfeebled Jelka Delius (Maureen Pryor), who

proceeds, while sobbing, to shower her dead husband with white rose petals. This

denouement is clearly the result of Russell’s own supposition and personal ingenuity, but

caps the confirmed bleakness of the historical narrative with a climactic endpoint. The

overall objectivity of the picture is called into question due to the simple fact that, on a

whole, it lacks almost any characteristic of the average documentary. However, Fenby

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himself was moved to tears when watching Song of Summer, believing this recreation of

his life in relation to Delius was even more realistic than he ever could have expected or

remembered. In reference to Song of Summer, Fenby said, “that’s exactly how it was.”

Russell’s method of adaptation from prose account to film form is one of:

Metaphrase rather than paraphrase. . . . [He does] not simply restate facts

or events culled from [a book]; [he attempts] to evoke a certain feeling, an

attitude, and/or atmosphere which captures both the character of the

subject under construction and the period in which he lived.49

By metaphrasing Fenby’s memoirs, Russell, just as he had with his source material for

Dante’s Inferno and Isadora Duncan, builds a quasi fiction that somehow holds just as

much verisimilitude as absolute certainty.

By 1970 Russell knew his days with BBC were finished. Having just received a

Best Director Oscar nomination for Women in Love, Russell was primed to delve into the

domain of theatrical features. With this in mind he was finally completely free to do

whatever he wished in regard to documentary experimentation. Russell would only do

twelve more biographical films for television from 1970 until his death in 2011, whereas

he directed thirty-two documentaries for BBC from 1959 through 1970. Thus, Dance of

the Seven Veils was Russell’s curtain call for television biography. The film, on the life

of composer Richard Strauss, was his most controversial at the time, with its

uncompromising negative portrayal of Strauss for having turned a blind eye to Nazism

during World War II. Because of its harsh representation of Strauss, the film was only

aired once and has never been released in any format since. In one scene Russell depicts

a concert where Strauss (Christopner Gable) exhorts his orchestra to play louder in order

to drown out the noise of SS men torturing Jews in the audience. In another, a goofy and

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grinning cartoonlike Strauss literally dances around Hitler (Kenneth Colley) while

playing the fiddle. While these interpretations are seemingly extremely biased and far-

fetched, Russell has once again, “done his homework and the facts—presented in a

stylized manner—bear out this approach.”50 In the concert scene, which operates as a

rendition of truth morphed into pure allegory, Russell has “drawn on music legend for the

basic premise (Strauss is said to have urged an orchestra to greater volume in this manner

to over whelm a singer he disliked). In so doing Russell manages to capture something

of a real situation within his allegory.”51

Not only does Russell’s anti-Strauss ideology manifest itself into pure allegorical

form, although still fundamentally based in objective and subjective reference materials,

it is the first of his documentaries to use no omniscient voiceover narration (although

Gable does break the fourth wall consistently to address the audience). All of the scenes

are highly choreographed, brightly tinctorial (Russell’s first documentary in color), and

no one could ever possibly mistake a moment of the film as anything other than an

parabolic mockery. Despite this, Dance of the Seven Veils does still manage to function

as a legitimate documentation of Strauss’ life and times, and does so in several ways.

First, it depicts truth through an emphasis on Strauss’ music and its effect upon his

listeners during the era of the Third Reich.52 In the film, Russell is after the “spirit of the

composer as manifest in his music.”53 Russell had used composers’ own scores to

“capture their spirits,” to evoke moods, and to structure his narratives in nearly all of his

BBC films prior to this. However, in this case Russell links the music to Strauss’

apolitical apathy, which he equates to Nazi sympathy. Despite such a heavy-handed and

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one-sided message being delivered, the marches, sonatas, and overtures as aural physical

records speak a truth of their own.

Dance of the Seven Veils also functions as a legitimate documentation of Strauss’

life by making sure that all the dialogue spoken by Strauss in the film—every line—was

taken straight from corroborated colloquies that the maestro actually said in real life.54

When Russell has Gable use only Strauss’ own words, even if his monologue may seem

out of context or accompany an anarchic vision of Hitler goose-stepping to a German

polka, there is a degree of honesty and maxim that corresponds with what becomes an

allegorical spectacle.

On a formal level, just as Strauss is distorted and variegated by his own musical

context, Russell realizes his own work is distorted by filmic influences. Russell

intersperses Dance of the Seven Veils with passionate scenes that show Strauss stuck in a

whimsical world. Through these many scenes, Russell recognizes his own debt to

cinematic influence with “parodies of Sergei Eisenstein, Erich Von Stroheim, Walt

Disney, Busby Berkeley, and Betty Grable.”55 Again, while the idea of parody in a

biographical tale might seem unorthodox and counterintuitive to achieving a sense of

realism, Russell is able to twist this pastiche into a reality by vibrantly infusing Dance of

the Seven Veils with a blend of subjective information, objective knowledge, and

conjectural visual excess. Russell would later rise to even more success and much

infamy by employing the same tactics used in Dance of the Seven Veils in his feature

length biopics about Gustav Mahler, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Franz Liszt, and Rudolph

Valentino. While critically abhorred due to its angry tone and unabashed attack upon its

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publicly beloved subject, the effect and influence of Dance of the Seven Veils would be

recognized for decades to follow.

In the 1960s, Russell fought against the traditional rules associated with

documentary practice in the UK. From Elgar and Portrait of a Soviet Composer to

Dance of the Seven Veils and beyond, Russell worked to achieve a new radical form of

hybrid biographical film that fused fiction with documentary. The resulting biopic not

only was revolutionary and influential, but it directly addressed the issue of authenticity,

truth, and reality in regard to the construction of a documentary. Russell, with the BBC’s

helping (and often hindering) hand, was able to turn unreality into reality and then into

hyper-reality by correlating aberrant components and entwining together documented

facts, mere speculations, and apocryphal conjecture, items he placed equal to one another

on a pedestal. Thus, Russell’s films became interpretations of truth, no less reputable

than any other representation or account. Scholar Robert Sklar argues that documentary

is a domain where truth is never found, only interpreted. He states, “The urge to

document is the urge to tell the truth, to present a vision of reality, yet opinions differ as

to what is true or real.”56 Russell, through his own personal vision by virtue of a dynamic

formal style, grandiose directorial choices, and rhapsodically staged scenarios, sculpted a

type of film where objective history could be delivered through the subject’s own

personal image of one’s self—albeit a subjective image interposed by Russell. In this

way, the viewer became not only engaged and informed, but was able to see through the

subject’s eyes. All documentaries contain some form of authorial mediation, but

Russell’s biopics, which focus on obtaining an interior truth, contain multiple levels of

deliberate mediation: from his own vision, from a historical foundation, and from the

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vision of the subject under scrutiny. In Russell’s documentaries, the subject authors his

own film—in a sense, the subject tells his own story—creating a penultimate realism.

There is no denying that his uncommon quality of filmmaking bolstered in a new

era of documentary, not only for English television, but global television and film as

well. The imperatives of traditional documentary lie in the achievement of an

ontological, epistemological truth through the straightforward construction of an exterior

truth, but Russell’s approach was different.

Russell’s overt use of fiction, recreated adumbration, undisguised use of music,

and general theatricality also appealed to the human sensibility. Most of the time, a still

image of Rousseau or Rossetti, coupled with narration about their lives, would not do

well to represent the “spirit of the artist.” Ironically, by showing a false version of

Rousseau or Rossetti and using fiction, Russell was able to enhance the feeling of

realness. Reality is wholly un-representable in its exact form in any medium. Therefore,

Russell’s films are just as real as any other traditional documentaries or, as Russell would

argue, maybe they are even more real.

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________________________________________________________________________

NOTES:

23

1 John Grierson, “First Principles of Documentary,” in Forsyth Hardy, ed., Grierson on Documentary (London: Faber & Faber, 1966.), 78.

2 Ibid, 80.3 Ibid, 80. 4 Joris Ivens, “Reflections on the Avant-Garde Documentary,” trans. Richard Abel, in Richard

Abel, ed., French Film Theory and Criticism: 1907-1939; Volume II: 1929-1939; A History/Anthology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 79.

5 Ibid, 80.6 Kevin MacDonald, “NFT Interviews: Free Cinema,” (Interview with David Robinson, Walter

Lassally, Lorenza Mazzetti, and Karel Reisz on BFI.org, 7 October 2007) <http://www.bfi.org.uk/features/interviews/ freecinema.html >, 1.

7 Ken Russell, Altered States: An Autobiography, American edition (New York: Bantam, 1991), 16.

8 Grierson, “Flaherty’s Poetic Moana,” New York Sun (8 February 1926), 25-26. 9 Len Deighton, The Billion Dollar Brain, American edition, (New York: Berkley

Medallion/G.P. Putnam, 1973: London: Jonathan Cape, 1966), 237.10 Russell, Altered States, 26.11 Kay Dickinson, “‘The Very New Can Only Come From the Very Old’: Ken Russell, National

Culture and the Possibility of Experimental Television at the BBC in the 1960s,” in Laura Mulvey and Jamie Sexton, eds., Experimental British Television (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 71.

12 John Baxter, An Appalling Talent: Ken Russell (London: Michael Joseph Ltd, 1973), 17.13 Russell, Altered States, 26.14 Toby White and Ken Russell, Ken Russell in Conversation, DVD, on Ken Russell at the BBC,

Produced by Toby White (London: Ballistic/2|Entertain, 2008). 15 Diane Rosenfeldt, Ken Russell: A Guide to References and Resources, (Boston: G.K. Hall &

Co, 1978), 6. In fact, this anti-actor, anti-reenactment mentality was so ingrained within the traditional documentary process at the BBC that it ultimately contributed to the dismissal of Russell’s peer and fellow BBC documentarian, Peter Watkins. Although, Watkin’s The War Game (1965), while criticized from within for its fictional aspects, was actually under more fire for its extremely violent content. In any case, unlike Russell, Watkins was unable to gain creative leverage at the BBC the way the former did by methodically testing the boundaries of producer/friend, Huw Wheldon.

16 Ken Russell, Fire Over England: The British Cinema Comes Under Friendly Fire, (London: Hutchinson/Random House UK, 1993), 60.

17 Baxter, 17.18 Ibid, 17.19 Michael Hurd, Elgar (London: Faber, 1969), 66.20 Russell, Altered States, 26.21 John Gardiner, “Variations on a Theme of Elgar: Ken Russell, the Great War, and the

Television ‘Life’ of a Composer,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 23:3 (August 2003), 197.

22 Dickinson, 72.23 Russell, Altered States, 26.24 Baxter, 138.25 Robert Philip Kolker, “Ken Russell’s Biopics: Grandier and Gaudier,” Film Comment Vol. 9,

No. 3 (May-June 1973), 42.26 Ibid, 43-45.27 Ibid, 45.28 Ian Leslie Christie, “Women in Love,” review of Women in Love, film by Ken Russell. Sight

and Sound 39 (Winter 1969-1970), 49-50.29 Russell, Fire Over England, 100.30 Ibid, 100.

31 Rowan Ayres, Ian Keill, and Ken Russell, “Russell at Work.” Late Night Line-Up, Episode 2, DVD, on Ken Russel at the BBC, Directed by Ian Keill, Produced by Rowan Ayres, aired 1966 (London: BBC, 1966). Most of this archival footage, and the aforementioned archival footage was taken from and re-appropriated from the BBC’s own film vaults.

32 Hayden White, “Historiography and Historiophoty,” American Historical Review 93:5 (December 1988), 1198-1199.

33 Russell, Fire Over England, 100.34 Baxter, 24.35 Russell, Fire Over England, 100.36 Ibid, 100.37 Ibid, 100.38 Toby White and Ken Russell.39 Paul Sutton, “Ken Russell at the BBC, 1959-1970,” in Kevin M. Flanagan, ed., Ken Russell:

Re-Viewing England’s Last Mannerist (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2009), 16.40 Baxter, 23.41 Toby White and Ken Russell.42 Baxter, 24.43 Joseph A. Gomez, Ken Russell: The Adaptor as Creator, American edition (Oxford:

Pergamon Press/Frederick Muller Ltd, 1976-1977), 51.44 Ibid, 51.45 Ibid, 52.46 Rosenfeldt, 6.47 Russell, Fire Over England, 100.48 Ken Hanke, Ken Russell’s Films (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1984), 425.49 Gomez, 38.50 Hanke, 40.51 Ibid, 40-41.52 Baxter, 30.53 Russell, Fire Over England, 75.54 Ibid, 30.55 Ibid, 30.56 Robert Sklar, “Documentary: Artifice in the Service of Truth,” Reviews in American History

3.3 (September 1975), 299-300.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:____________________________

Ayres, Rowan, Ian Keill, and Ken Russell. “Russell at Work.” Late Night Line-Up, Episode 2. On Ken Russel at the BBC. DVD. Directed by Ian Keill. Produced by Rowan Ayres. Aired 1966. London: BBC, 1966.

Barnouw, Erik. Documentary: A History of the Nonfiction Film, 2nd rev. edition. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.

Baxter, John. An Appalling Talent: Ken Russell. London: Michael Joseph Ltd, 1973.

Christie, Ian Leslie. “Women in Love,” review of Women in Love, film by Ken Russell. Sight and Sound 39. Winter 1969-1970.

Deighton, Len. The Billion Dollar Brain, American edition. New York: Berkley Medallion/G.P. Putnam, 1973: London: Jonathan Cape, 1966.

Dickinson, Kay. “‘The Very New Can Only Come From the Very Old’: Ken Russell, National Culture and the Possibility of Experimental Television at the BBC in the 1960s,” in Laura Mulvey and Jamie Sexton, eds., Experimental British Television. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.

Gardiner, John. “Variations on a Theme of Elgar: Ken Russell, the Great War, and the Television ‘Life’ of a Composer.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 23:3. August 2003.

Gomez, Joesph A. Ken Russell: The Adaptor as Creator, American edition. Oxford: Pergamon Press/Frederick Muller Ltd, 1976-1977.

Grierson, John. “First Principles of Documentary,” in Forsyth Hardy, ed., Grierson on Documentary. London: Faber & Faber, 1966.

———. “Flaherty’s Poetic Moana.” New York Sun. 8 February 1926.

Hanke, Ken. Ken Russell’s Films. Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1984.

Hurd, Michael. Elgar. London: Faber, 1969.

Kolker, Robert Philip. “Ken Russell’s Biopics: Grandier and Gaudier.” Film Comment Vol. 9, No. 3. May-June 1973.

Ivens, Joris. “Reflections on the Avant-Garde Documentary,” trans. Richard Abel, in Richard Abel, ed., French Film Theory and Criticism: 1907-1939; Volume II: 1929-1939; A History/Anthology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.

MacDonald, Kevin. “NFT Interviews: Free Cinema.” Interview with Robinson, David, Walter Lassally, Lorenza Mazzetti, and Karel Reisz. BFI.org. 7 October 2007. Last accessed on 13 December 2011. <http://www.bfi.org.uk/features/interviews/ freecinema.html>.

Rosenfeldt, Diane. Ken Russell: A Guide to References and Resources. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co, 1978.

Russell, Ken. Altered States: An Autobiography, American edition. New York: Bantam, 1991.

———. Fire Over England: The British Cinema Comes Under Friendly Fire. London: Hutchinson/Random House UK, 1993.

———. Ken Russell at the BBC. DVD Collection. Directed by Ken Russell. London: BBC/Ballistic/2|Entertain, 2008.

Sklar, Robert. “Documentary: Artifice in the Service of Truth.” Reviews in American History 3.3. September 1975.

Sutton, Paul. “Ken Russell at the BBC, 1959-1970,” in Kevin M. Flanagan, ed., Ken Russell: Re-Viewing England’s Last Mannerist. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2009.

White, Hayden. “Historiography and Historiophoty.” American Historical Review 93:5. December 1988.

White, Toby and Ken Russell. Ken Russell in Conversation. On Ken Russell at the BBC. DVD. Produced by Toby White. London: Ballistic/2|Entertain, 2008.

FILMOGRAPHY:________________________

Poet’s London (1959)

Elgar (1962)

Portrait of a Soviet Composer (1963)

Bartok (1964)

The Debussy Film (1965)

Always on Sunday (1965)

Dante’s Inferno (1967)

Song of Summer: Frederick Delius (1968)

Dance of the Seven Veils (1970)