I don't know how long this will stay on iPlayer, but it is worth a watch. And here is Humphrey Burton's eulogy, delivered at Russell's funeral in December:
Ken Russell – an appreciation for his Funeral
I met Ken in 1959. He joined the Monitor team during
its second season. His first film was with John Betjeman, then unknown to the
big public; it was a visualization
of poems he’d written about London
and the home counties: I remember I had to find a suitably leggy young lady to
en-act Miss J Hunter Dunn playing
tennis, “furnished and burnished by Aldershot sun”.
Ken was thirty-two when Huw Wheldon signed him up, on
the strength of a short amateur film of great charm called Amelia and the
Angel. He wrote, directed
and filmed it himself on a
borrowed 16 mil Paillard Bolex. He was born in Southampton and fell in love
with the movies when still only a small child thanks to weekly cinema visits
with his mother. For his tenth birthday he was given a hand-cranked home
projector on which he ran rented movies over and over again. His first film goddess
was Shirley Temple. He
soon graduated to Dorothy Lamour and Betty Grable. Later, his creative mentors were Fritz Lang and Charlie
Chaplin. Dragons and slapstick!
At thirteen, during the worst days of the Blitz, Ken
was sent to Pangbourne College,
graduating after a stormy
adolescence to a sea-going posting as a very junior fourth officer on a merchant ship. Under the blazing Pacific
sun his eccentric captain ordered him to scan the horizon hour after hour for Japanese midget submarines – this despite the war having
ended some weeks earlier. He soon
realized that the sailor’s life was not for him and at 19 he presented himself
at the gates of Ealing Film Studios asking for a tea-boy’s job in order to learn about directing.
The commissionaire turned him away. It was thirteen years before he returned.
Instead
he studied ballet dancing for four years on a scholarship
but the world of classical ballet
eventually decided Ken was
physically the wrong shape to be a dancer and after a brief season touring as a “hoofer” with a touring company in Annie get your Gun -
he gave up show dancing,
too, though his experience was useful
for his Monitor films about Isadora Duncan and Marie Rambert and the
feature films of The Boy Friend and Valentino.
Ken also
had a brief spell in the RAF, spent very unglamourously - charging batteries for Spitfire
engines. He even tried straight acting but to no avail: it was forty years before he got a
speaking role. However a real career opened in his late twenties when he
started making a name for
himself as a stills photographer
working for the fashion world and Illustrated.
I dwell
on these early days because it’s surprising, looking back, how long Ken took to find his métier. Film had remained his passion, however, and at
last, when he joined Monitor, he
was able to get going as a film-maker. He was a lovely person to work with, very demanding,
of course, and famous for his tantrums, but full of respect for his colleagues
– cameramen such as Ken Westbury and Ken Higgins; the legendary film editors Allan Tyrer and Mike
Bradsell; his devoted PAs among
them Anne James, whose production
stills of Elgar are so
valuable. And once he broke into the feature world (in which BBC
“documentaries” such as the Delius
film, A Song of Summer,
must be included he built solid and artistically fruitful friendships with
actors as Oliver Reed, Wladek Sheybal, Murray Melvin, Vivan Pickles, Glenda
Jackson and Christopher Gable.
Ken didn’t treat television work as merely a stepping stone to the
feature world. In eleven years he made thirty-five films for the BBC. Some were
quite short, such as the Guitar Craze
and Mechanical Instruments,
some, like his composer
portrait, Prokofiev, Soviet
Artist, were half an hour
long; after the success of
the Elgar film, in which actors were first admitted, there was a steady flow of hour-long “specials” such as Pop Goes the Easel and Douanier
Rousseau. A new recruit to the Monitor team, Melvyn Bragg, stimulated Ken’s imagination with a brilliant
script for The Debussy Film, the first of their many collaborations – the two of them flourished again from the late seventies onwards when
Melvyn planted the Monitor flag on ITV’s South Bank and nourished Ken with film
commissions year after year.
Ken’s energy, his industry, the fecundity of his ideas
and the richness of his imagination combined to make a potent magician’s brew.
The long list of his feature films, made over a period of thirty years, defy categorization:
science fiction and gothic horror jostle for pride of place with adaptations of
D.H.Lawrence (Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow and Lady Chatterly’s
Lover) and vivid biographies
(“frenzied carnivals” was his own description) of Tchaikovsky, Liszt and Mahler, not to mention the fictional Tommy. He filmed a Puccini aria for Don
Boyd’s Diva and even strayed into opera direction once
in a while.
In his television days he said he was hopeless with
words, preferring to leave
commentary-writing for
others to deal with, the film’s story for him being primarily in the images. Yet in his 60s
and 70s Ken wrote two hilarious books about his time as an independent
spirit in the British cinema, as
well as half a dozen novels and a regular column for The Times. He was never at
rest. Lisi tells me that on the day he died he was planning to work on his next
project, Alice in Wonderland: The Musical. He was at home, by the way, not in hospital as was
widely reported: he died peacefully in his sleep – an afternoon nap.
I realize now that Ken was my first true genius. I’d met composers and poets in my radio days but nobody to compare
with this man’s imagination and creative drive. It really struck home when I
saw what he had done with Elgar and the Malvern Hills. The boy on the white pony, the young
man on the bicycle, the old man in the car - all following the same hillside track to the same glorious music. Or
think how he used Land of Hope and Glory, cutting it to
shocking images of gassed and maimed soldiers on the Western Front. For his
climax Ken filmed row upon row of white crosses in the military cemeteries of
Picardy, panning over them in dizzying camera sweeps, faster and faster, to
match the rushing finale of Elgar’s pre-war march, now so hideously mis-used as propaganda.
But arguably
the most powerful image of all
was of the three wooden
crosses which Ken arranged to have constructed and erected before dawn at the summit of the Worcestershire Beacon - they were to be the Catholic Elgar’s ecstatic vision of
the crucifixion, the climax of The Dream of Gerontius. (The crosses were
hastily dismantled before an irate park warden could remonstrate; the crew then
went down to Malvern for breakfast.)
For the last ten years of his life, Ken and I did an occasional double act on the
lecture circuit, talking about
Monitor and our music films to cinema clubs and arts festivals. We took
loads of film clips to illustrate our points but one day we were told the talk
would have to be cancelled because the cinema staff had gone on strike. “Don’t
be daft!”, cried Ken, “the show must go on : we’ll do the illustrations ourselves.’ And we did. He had an
astonishing musical memory: we described the pony charging over the hills and
scattering the sheep to the
vaulting melody of the Introduction and Allegro (sing). We evoked the courtship scenes
which were cut to Salut d’Amour (sing). Then there was the cello concerto (which Ken
could sing and I won’t); we used that melancholy music for the poignant moment when the camera
pans down from a double row of poplars and steadies at ground level on an empty
road where earlier in the film we’ve seen Elgar and his future bride
disappearing into small dots as at the end of a Chaplin film. Another example
of Ken’s unique gift of getting to the heart of the music.
Today it’s as if that camera has once again panned down through the line of waving
poplars to an empty avenue and found… a gaping hole in our minds and memories where Ken Russell used to be. Our hearts go out to his
dear wife Lisi and to his family in their loss - as we say
farewell to a “life-force”; I can’t find a better word to describe him.
Ken Russell was a great Englishman. Fearless,
independent, original, visionary. He achieved an unmatched body of work as a
film-maker which we must now
ensure is accessible to film-lovers the world over to admire and enjoy. Thank-you,
Ken. Good-bye.
___________________________________________________________________________________
Humphrey Burton Bournemouth Crematorium, December 12th, 2011
See also Making 'Elgar' in Pages
Humphrey Burton Bournemouth Crematorium, December 12th, 2011
See also Making 'Elgar' in Pages
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