Foreword

Summary

The first Ken Russell film I saw was Mahler (1974), and from the opening sequence I knew I was in the presence of something utterly different: a chalet sits peacefully by the side of an idyllic lake – birdsong – and then a sudden fireball engulfs the wooden hut; we don’t hear an explosion but the grandiose, terrifying orchestral sounds of Gustav Mahler. I was instantly hooked. But before I could settle into whatever doomy but grand film this was obviously going to be, Russell had segued to a strange ballet: a naked woman lies encased in a cotton chrysalis, stretching and tearing at her strange wrapping, lying on a volcanic rock formation, trying to ‘be born’. How do I know that’s what was happening? Because Georgina Hale (as Alma Mahler) explained it as her dream in the next scene, suddenly a naturalistic costume drama in a train.

Russell said many times that he learned how to begin something starting from his BBC days. He wanted to shock and arouse the audience before his Dad could get up off the couch and shuffle over to the TV to turn the dial to the (only) other channel. In this opening Russell gives himself permission to do anything; to ‘explode’ the concept of a classical music biography, to express ideas in dance rather than dialogue, to make a film that is more about Alma Mahler than Gustav Mahler (the title is just Mahler). And of course to make a film that was as much about his troubled marriage to Shirley Russell as it was any sort of biography of a third party.

I remember my first screening of this film vividly: it was at the Odeon Haymarket on its first run, presented in four-track stereo. I was thirteen and ran to tell anyone I could that this was a movie they simply had to see. Most did not agree, some vociferously, and I heard the epithets that were often hurled at Russell; he was ‘vulgar’, ‘childish’, ‘obscene’ and, the most common, ‘over the top’. As if he didn’t mean to be. I soon realized that my love of Ken Russell (and I sought out every one of his films after that) was considered pretty unacceptable in mainstream cineaste circles.