12 - Ken Russell and the Sexual Dimension of the Outsider Artist: An Exploration of Elgar: The Erotic Variations and Delius: A Moment with Venus

Summary

INTRODUCTION: KEN RUSSELL, OUTSIDER ARTIST

Here you see the typical Englishman,’ says Percy Grainger in Ken Russell’s 2007 novel Delius: A Moment with Venus, ‘one mention of the word sex and he disappears behind a smoke-screen.’ This comment from the Australianborn composer is aimed at Eric Fenby, the youthful amanuensis to the acidtongued Frederick Delius. Yet it could just as easily be read as a barbed response to Russell’s critics. In his home country and in the United States, Russell’s films came under constant scrutiny for their portrayals of sex, with the director’s flamboyant and baroque sensibility mistaken for a voyeuristic leer. While one could quote any number of negative reviews he received over the course of his career, Roger Ebert’s withering opinions of Salome’s Last Dance (Vestron, 1988) typify the attitude of many of the film-maker’s critics:

Russell demonstrates again that he is most interested in literary figures when their trousers are unbuttoned. And even then, he isn’t interested in why, or how, they carry on their sex lives; like the de-frockers of the scandal sheets, he wants only to breathlessly shock us with the news that his heroes possessed and employed genitals.

Attacks of this kind were levelled at Russell with the release of almost every new film. He was vilified by critics who thought his depictions of sex were onedimensional and superfluous and, more often than not, the attitudes expressed by contemporaneous reviewers betrayed a puritanical streak in the world of film criticism. This is especially true during the 1960s and 1970s when the full pantheon of human sexuality was restrained by a social conservatism that wrapped its tendrils around the views of many commentators on the arts. Such sexual myopia was coupled with an understanding of arts criticism which relied heavily upon nineteenth-century attitudes towards taste, class and decorum, and a circle of critics with prudish values comparable to those of the Lord Chamberlain’s office, which censored the theatre until 1968. As Melvyn Bragg remarked of Russell, ‘He was at the start an outsider and in a country such as ours which had in the sixties an exclusive hierarchy of taste, Ken’s erudite eclecticism, self-taught and self-thought, again marked him as a gypsy, not one of “them”.’