by Adam Ferenz
The late, great Allan Fish, to whom this festival is dedicated, was a scholar not just of film but of television, which he saw as intrinsically linked. Indeed, my ongoing work on the greatest programs in television history, owes a great debt to his encouragement and generosity, and it is because of that that I once again selected television works for my selection for the Festival. Both of these essays have been published here before. The following films harken back to an era when the BBC was much more adventurous, yet at the same time, much more educational and cultural minded. It is no coincidence that some of the great directors of the past fifty or sixty years, got their start on the “small” screen. We are often reminded of people like Sydney Lumet and Sam Peckinpah. We forget that talents like Ken Russell, Alan Clarke and Peter Watkins were known as much for their television work-if not, in the case of Clarke, almost entirely their television work-as what was released in the cinemas. Here are two of the best from a bygone era in British Telly, something the subject of this festival would no doubt strongly approve. And perhaps, one day, we can see a proper release of Dance Of the Seven Veils. Fingers crossed.
Dance of the Seven Veils
Ken Russell did many crazy movies during his career, with The Devils often cited as his most insane work, and that is hard to argue. Unless one has seen this film, which is impossible to find in an un-bowdlerized edition-as the only available copies are not properly color timed and still have time stamps on them-which makes properly assessing this somewhat difficult. Telling the story of Richard Strauss, the film was part of a BBC series of programs, directed by Russell, in which he tackled major figures from classical music. His final film for the BBC, and for television, this film can be seen as a bold “fuck you and goodbye forever” from its director.
In this one, Russell upends the music of Strauss-here made caricature by a director who despised him- and explores themes that today might be considered offensive to sensitive types on the bullying right, particularly their Swastika wearing idols, but such was the bravery and openness with which Russell approached this material. There have been surrealists and absurdists in film. They have sometimes gone together but rarely have the two approaches combined so well as here. Scenes of nuns flogging themselves give way, eventually, to dancing Brownshirts, and Nazi Officers, including Goebbels giving a piggyback ride to a violinist who looks suspiciously like Hitler, during a playful sequence that appears to be set at Hitler’s retreat at Berchtesgaden. This is not a deep portrait.
Instead, what we receive as viewers is an impression of Strauss, as hollow metaphor, for a failed view of the world and philosophy of control. In this film, Strauss kills his critics with his music, plays his music ever more loudly to drown out his ignorance and culpability in the rise of Nazism, and, most importantly, is credited as co-writer on the film. This is testament to how Russell used the journals, letters and interviews with Strauss in order to indict him. Every word, then, is essentially true, and straight from the source. That the film is presented as a fevered nightmare is part of its charm.
Despite being a true story told in part through the unwitting confessions of its subject, the film is not a straight biography nor one hundred percent genuine. Again, it is an impression. Until David Lynch gave audiences the eighth episode of Twin Peaks: The Return, I was ready to call this film the greatest work of surrealism I had seen on television. Maybe one of the greatest, anywhere, starting with that epic romp among the nuns, through to the horrors of the Nazi era and finally, the end, of course. Or was it? Watch for yourself, and see. Words cannot truly do this one justice and I encourage you to experience this for yourself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7r2JHq7LMs&t=22s
Song of Summer
Frederick Delius was an English composer who lived from 1862-1934. His final years were spent with him largely in a state of invalidity. Song of Summer is named after a tone poem for orchestra, completed in 1931, by Delius, during the final six years of his life, the period covered in the film, which focuses on the relationship between Delius and his amanuensis, Eric Fenby. At the time Fenby came to work for Delius, the great composer was living south of Paris with his wife, Jelka, and suffering the consequences of tertiary syphilis. Director Ken Russell had done several other works for the BBC series Omnibus, and would do a few more, before moving on to the big screen, but he considered this film his very best, a film he would not change a single thing about. It is hard to argue with the man.
Song of Summer is a deceptively complex film, which in its presentation becomes Delius’s poem. That this film has a phenomenal score, completely consisting of Delius and Fenby’s work, is a big plus, as is Russell’s use of black and white cinematography to mask the budget shortcomings. He can be forgiven if the trip up a mountain late in the film seems more like a trip through the hills of Scotland, but such is the case when dealing with a 60’s BBC budget. Instead, the film relies on a sharp script, inventive direction that evokes the essence of its subject’s work, and three superb performances, with Maureen Pryor as Jelka, Christopher Gable as Fenby and Max Adrian as Delius. Here, Fenby and Delius are not friends from the start but there is a trust, and yet always a tension, for Delius was a difficult man, and his condition did not lend him a quiet temper, nor did his disinclination to religion, the opposite of the devoutly catholic Fenby. Indeed, according to Music Web International, Fenby is shown having a crisis of faith after finding the parish priest making love to a girl, an episode which Fenby had told to Russell in what he believed was the strictest confidence.
As with all Ken Russell films, there is form and substance and bravery and daring. This is a film that knows what it wants to be and does not care if the audience agrees with how it will get there but does its best to convince them this is the only possible way the story could have been told. The scenes with the three main characters are often dreamlike, with certain sequences, such as Jelka scattering rose petals over her husband’s body, reminding one of sequences from the works of Dreyer in terms of how they are presented. This is a remarkable achievement because it manages to do so much with so little time, to summarize the core of an artist’s work while telling only a fraction of their life story. That Delius came from a rich family, ran away to the United States and became fond of African American music is given mention, but beyond that not explore except in the way its lasting impact remained on his life as a musician. Those looking for a Chaplin or Ghandi type of biopic ought to keep searching. As with all of Russell’s work for Omnibus, this one is more about ideas than biography, and all the richer for it. One of the greatest programs in one of the best presentational series ever made.
(note on link: film does not begin immediately, beginning about ten seconds in)