A British Picture: An Autobiography, by Ken Russell

Ken Russell has created an impressive body of cinema originals, if not outright classics. Films like The Music Lovers and Women in Love bring the British director’s love of music, literature, dance, costume and the visual arts together in visual extravaganzas of breathtaking beauty and originality. In A British Film, Ken Russell brings his kaleidoscopic creativity to the printed page, producing a fast paced memoir filled to the very brim with exciting stories, fascinating film gossip, memories of the director’s upbringing and reflections on major influences.

Ken Russell wrote his memoirs, A British Picture, when he was on the comeback trail after years of struggle trying to resuscitate his flagging film career. During the fifties and sixties the British director made documentaries for the BBC, and in the early seventies he made the films that would define him as an artist, culminating with the rock opera Tommy (1975). Then a few of his films started bombing, and after his biopic Valentino (1977), the work dried up.

Ken Russell found himself in development hell, spending years preparing scripts and treatments, only to see them aborted when funding could not be found. Russell hit gold when Vestron Pictures offered a three movie deal, pretty much giving him carte blanche to do whatever he liked. That deal with Vestron Pictures produced some fine films, all made on shoestring budgets and knocked out at break neck speed. Two films alone were released in 1988, Salome’s Last Dance, a sort of homage to Oscar Wilde, and Bram Stoker’s Lair of the White Worm. The last, in 1989, was the long cherished project of bringing D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow to the screen.

Like his vivid, hallucinatory, often mercurial films, Ken Russell on the page sets a cracking pace, delighting with his enormous energy, intelligence and wit. Described in the British press as an ‘enfant terrible’, in his memoirs Russell presents more as a mix of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Shakespeare’s Puck, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with a touch of the aging cherub thrown in (if the picture on the front is anything to go by.) He’s full of child-like enthusiasm and relentless creativity, right down to his Popeye underpants that he wore in portly middle-age.

Ken Russell relates the events of his life in characteristic chameleon like fashion, frequenting changing gears up and down as new stories and incidents are introduced, leaving the reader so full of information that it takes some time to digest everything. There’s so much recalled dialogue in the book that you wonder how much of it can possibly be accurate, then simply discard such cares as the ride is so entertaining. If Russell’s memory is faulty it doesn’t matter: at least his imaginative consciousness is faithfully depicted.

Fans of the major films, such as The Music Lovers (1970), The Boy Friend (1971) and The Devils (1971), may feel a tinge of disappointment that these great films are not discussed at any great length. A few tit bits of gossip and information are thrown out here and there, like Oliver Reed’s anxiety over how big his penis would look in the nude wrestling scene in Women in Love (1969). Instead there is extensive agonising over the failures and missed opportunities. Russell frequently laments the long hours, sometimes years, spent developing scripts that fail to get the go ahead. But there’s not a note of self-pity in all of this, and Russell doesn’t wring hands for long, merrily rushing towards the next creative endeavour once the last one has gone belly up.

What film lovers may miss on the major films can be gained in gossip and revealing star portraits, from Kathleen Turner to the talkative William Hurt. When casting for Evita (another project that went no where, if only Russell had been allowed to make it!), the director hits on a surprising choice for the lead: Liza Minnelli. The rhapsodous descriptions of Liza’s test performance are exhilarating and funny, as Russell ecstatically describes her singing and emoting as being so electric that she ‘gives out a million volts’. You can almost feel Russell jumping up and down in excitement at the audition, like a kid at a candy store. Alas, the producers would never countenance Ms. Minnelli as Evita, as they always wanted Elaine Page for the role (whom Russell felt had ‘the face of a potato’.)

Ken Russell’s films owed a lot of their originality to their director’s wide sources of inspiration, from literature and painting, to music and dance. Despite his portly physique, he trained early as a ballet dancer, and this sense of rhythm and movement bursts out in his films. He was also deeply inspired by music and the visual arts outside of cinema. A love of literature he also brought to the screen, creating films directly inspired by the works of Oscar Wilde, D. H. Lawrence and Bram Stoker. It was above all his uninhibited and surreal imagination that allowed him to work these inspirations into a totally new and original cinema. Watch a film like 1975’s Lisztomania and try to think who else could possibly even think up such imagery, besides Salvador Dali, and even he may have struggled to keep up with such a flamboyant display of the subconscious.

A British Film is a highly entertaining and original memoir, full of the sort of exciting fireworks and visual extravaganzas found in the director’s films. The book should be mandatory reading for any aspiring artist. The message seems to be, don’t wait for someone to approve of your ideas, just get out there, have fun and do it.

A British Picture: An Autobiography, by Ken Russell. Published by Southbank Published. (Originally published 1989, revised 2008.) ISBN: 978-1904915324