Elgar

Ken Russell – 1962 – England

Elgar is one of many films Ken Russell made for British television early in his career.  Revolutionary in their treatment of documentary techniques, they made Russell an important new filmmaker in England even before he began making features.  Like Peter Watkins and Jack Hazan, though in a very different way, he was dissatisfied with and skeptical of traditional rules of non-fictional filmmaking.  Russell’s controversial idea was to introduce actors performing scenes from a biographical sketch – (something that has morphed over the decades into the reprehensible TV reenactments that almost every magazine style show uses like a crutch).  Elgar tells the life story of England’s famed composer and marks the first of several films in which Russell applied his increasingly flamboyant artistic license to the biographies of people in the arts, especially composers, including the features The Music Lovers (1970) about Tchaikovsky, Mahler (1974) and the cartoonish Lisztomania! (1975).  The mix of fabricated scenes and documentary footage is quite fascinating, especially when at times it takes a moment to discern one from the other, demonstrating the distinct difference between a real artist using a style for a deliberate purpose and the legions of hacks who merely imitate by reflex and turn that style into yet another overused cliché.