Product Description

The iconic award-winning English director Ken Russell is best known for his flamboyant style his attention to detail and for being a controversial and visionary artist. Russells approach was determined by a desire to knock the dust off the biofilm genre: The whole idea had degenerated into a series of third-rate clich s. I wanted to dress people in old clothes 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. This collection includes two early films starring Oliver Reed The Debussy Film and Dantes Inferno about Dante Gabriel Rossetti as well as Always on Sunday about Henri Rousseau Isadora: The Biggest Dancer in the World A Song of Summer about Frederick Delius and Dance of the Seven Veils about Richard Strauss. These early films paved the way for his brilliant carrier that has spanned six decades.System Requirements:Running Time: 477 minutesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: TELEVISION/BBC Rating: NR UPC: 883929019694 Manufacturer No: 1000038761

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #35204 in DVD
• Brand: Warner Brothers
• Released on: 2008-09-23
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Box set, Color, DVD, Subtitled, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 3
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds
• Running time: 409 minutes

Features

• The iconic award-winning English director, Ken Russell, is best known for his flamboyant style, his attention to detail and for being a controversial and visionary artist. Russells approach was determined by a desire to knock the dust off the biofilm genre: ?The whole idea had degenerated into a series of third-rate clich?s. I wanted to dress people in old clothes and do it in a totally unreal way

Amazon.com
Many American fans, like myself, who have seen most of Ken Russell’s films, probably don’t even know these biopics he did for the BBC prior to his feature film career exist. And these six hour-long documentaries collected on Ken Russell at the BBC may be his finest works. Russell is well known for narrative features with revolutionary undertow such as Women in Love, The Devils, and Tommy, a rock opera about the Who. The films included on this three-disc set, all shot in black and white, are clearly those in which Russell established his affinity for portraying iconoclastic eccentrics, and each has its own experimental merit, stylistically and conceptually. Though it is unfortunate that there is a proliferation of cheesy re-enactments in today’s film and television, one will be surprised to see how brilliantly this pioneer did it. Each documentary, here, enlists actors to portray the artistic luminaries of various historical periods. But the films so keenly observe their characters’ behaviors, factually and poetically, that one learns about Russell’s subjects on the sly, being entertained all the while. Occasionally narrators tease their subjects by pointing out absurd moments, reminding the viewer of documentary’s subjective nature, and of the humorous potential in many historical tales.

The documentaries heighten their subjects’ flair for drama, and take interpretive liberties to recount the lives of those on screen. Impassioned explosions, nervous breakdowns, and tragic calamities are the norm. Always on Sunday (1965) studies how genius is manifest at great cost in Henri Rousseau, after the death of his wife and a friendship with Surrealist colleague, Alfred Jarry. Dante’s Inferno (1967) depicts the Pre-Raphaelite set, focusing on Dante Rosetti’s fiery persona and its negative effects on his muse, Elizabeth Siddal. In Isadora Duncan: Biggest Dancer in the World (1966), the arts and crafts-era mistress of movement maniacally travels the world in search of funding for her dancing schools. Though the characters depicted are wildly different, they share blinding passions and melodramatic means of achieving their ambitions. Many of these films are narrated in the third person, but occasionally their subjects share dialogue, elaborating the dramatic sense. Song of Summer (1968) is the breakthrough, starring young composer, Eric Fenby (Christopher Gable), who moves in with blind, paralyzed elder musician, Frederick Delius, to help finish his scores. Third-person narration fizzles out early on to allow the characters to speak about the need to create, even when handicapped. Delius and Fenby’s relationship strengthens as the two develop their music together, and gorgeous landscape scenes, or scenes depicting high human emotions, roll as soundtrack to the composer’s works as the film progresses. Heavily dramatized, the only documentary aspect to this film seems to be Russell’s dedication to tying film to music, by showing how Delius visualized his music. Ken Russell at the BBC says as much about the quality of BBC programming during the era as the director’s unhinged imagination, and it’s a wonder to view these films as precedents to what the BBC also pioneered a decade later in the 1970s, namely the much more fact-based documentaries, hosted by scientists and scholars like nature man, David Attenborough. —Trinie Dalton

Customer Reviews

Foundation work of an iconoclast
Product correction: This set does not include The Dance of the Seven Veils (70), the controversial bioassassination of Richard Strauss. Presumably the Strauss estate has blocked the release of this film as it has done in the past. I would appreciate correction on that statement if I am wrong. In its place is Russell's earlier work, Elgar (62).

This set presents 6 of the films that the British auteur made in the 1960s for the BBC television programs Monitor and Omnibus that move from narrated documentary - Elgar (62), to interpretive biopic - Dante's Inferno (67), and straightfoward drama - Song of Summer (68). In these films we meet 6 great artists - 3 composers: Elgar, Debussy, Delius; dancer Isadora Duncan; primitive painter Henri Rousseau; and Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. All are on display with flaws intact whether struggling for recognition or sponsorship or with their own self-destructive personalities. Russell's sometimes ambiguous feelings for his subjects is evident in that he avoids polite and safe hagiography, which is realistic -- [...] may often be lurking behind works of great beauty. The casts of these films will be familiar faces to those familiar with Russell's troupe in his 70s films: Oliver Reed, Christopher Gable, Max Adrian, and Vladek Sheybal.

The films presented are fairly crisp with many an evocative sequence both in natural settings and in studio. The only flaw is inherent to the quality of the audio of the time, particularly in respect to the soundtracks of the composer films, i.e. tinny. The contemporary interview of Russell describing these films is enjoyable and insightful.

I hope that this release presages the official reissues of this director's great 70s work, most of them biopics, that have been long out of circulation: The Music Lovers, The Devils, The Boyfriend (all 1971!); Savage Messiah (72); Mahler (74); and Lisztomania (75).

For more on Russell: read Joseph Lanza's excellent book, Phallic Frenzy: Ken Russell and His Films, Chicago Review Press, 2007; and visit Iain Fisher's website at [...] . To see what Russell has been up to in this decade, check out his bit of guerrilla filmmaking, The Fall of the Louse of Usher, 2001.

An incredible bargain for what you get.
Six films on DVDs, including one never released on any home medium before--the superb, "Always on Sunday". Includes two excellent interviews with Ken Russell: one in 1966 during the making of "Isadora", the other one made just for this DVD. For those who want to experience some of the greatest television films ever made, this collection is a bargain at the quoted price.

'Ignore the Immortals, Go Out into the Fields and Listen to the Music of Nature'
'Ken Russell at the BBC' is an extra-ordinary dvd box-set. In it are some of the great mans greatest works, scandalously only released in the US on R1(in one fell swoop, the obscene amount I paid for a multi-region dvd player has been rendered money superbly spent).

'Song of Summer' is probably the finest, most inspiring film ever made about a composer, 'Dante's Inferno' and 'the Debussy Film' both have a simmer/bellow/simmer/bellow performance from Oliver Reed, 'Isadora' is better than the Vanessa Redgrave film version, 'Always on a Sunday' has a real-life French realist painter being played by a real-life Yorkshire realist painter(!) and 'Elgar' was the first music bio to feature actors, though compromised by them only appearing in long-shot.
30 seconds to read and 477 minutes to look, listen and be immersed.

Possibly the most essential collection of BBC films ever assembled in one place (outside of their vaults of course). Imaginative, unique, mystical, lyrical, anti-cliché, anti-intellectual, funny, sad, moving, haunting and not one frame could've been shot by any-one else;

Not one blistering, believable, fevered performance could've been prised out of the superb casts by any-one else.
Not one film-maker in the history of tv OR film has been SO on the side of his audience.
No other 80 year old man could sit on a park bench and be so mesmerising and deliriously enthusiastic about films he made over 40 years ago, and if I was to type 'til I was 80 - I would not come close to properly assessing his work on this dvd set.

There are other's involved; Melvyn Bragg writes a couple of creditable scripts, Huw Wheldon writes and narrates the excellent commentary for 'Elgar' and there's some fine work from Dick Bush -the greatest ever British lighting cameraman - but it's Russell's genius.
Emblazoned and embellished on every edit, every rising symphonious dawn, every artistic tantrum, every slightly alien look at a European city from an English South Coast perspective, every beautiful girl fighting a futile battle against art AND temperament, every achievement, gain and much, much pain- the eye on the lens and the ear at the stylus is Russell's.

'Ken Russell at the BBC' is the ultimate review.
A legacy that will last, and grow in appreciation even when we're all dead and gone for as long as the subjects of Russell's mini-masterpieces.