14 - Nicolas Winding Refn and the Ken Russell Style

Summary

INTRODUCTION

This chapter will provide an analysis of the cinematic style of Ken Russell, a style that led Linda Ruth Williams to declare Russell a ‘cinematic brand’ and ‘almost a genre in his own right’. From the release of Women in Love (United Artists, 1969), Russell embarked on a remarkably prolific run of films which crystallised a style of montage editing and a high camp approach to subject, performance and the cinematic image. Throughout the 1970s Russell’s work displayed a consistent formal approach in his conceptualisation of a unique type of musical cinema. It was the formation of the more bombastic formal elements of Russell’s work which led Williams to propose Russell to be the patron saint and one-man genre of ‘British Extreme’.

In 2008 the release of Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn’s Bronson (Vertigo, 2008) (a film biopic of the man dubbed by the tabloids ‘Britain’s most dangerous prisoner’) caught the eye of critics, as a result of its unusual tone and texture, and drew comparisons with elements of the iconic and controversial British cinema of the 1970s. A comparative analysis of Refn’s film and the work of Ken Russell reveals a cross-generational stylistic dialogue between these two auteurs of different eras working with similar modes of style and approaches to adaptation. It is the aim of this chapter, therefore, to consider Refn’s work as part of the legacy of Ken Russell in the twenty-first century, and while films like Bronson and Women in Love (for instance) are clearly very different in a range of ways, this chapter argues that stylistically Refn’s work adopts a similar style to Russell. Russell’s legacy is (visually) stylistic and musical, rather than being in content or text.

THE RUSSELL STYLE: RUSSELL AND REFN

Before becoming a photographer and starting work for the BBC in 1956, Russell secured a scholarship and attended the International Ballet School in South Kensington. Although he did not complete the schooling, he did have a brief stint working with the British Dance Theatre in the early 1950s. From Hermione’s (Eleanor Bron) devised entertainments and Gudrun’s (Glenda Jackson) encounter with Highland cattle in Women in Love to the serpentine movements of Lady Sylvia Marsh (Amanda Donahoe) in The Lair of the White Worm (Vestron, 1987), dance is a persistent Russellian device, working in natural partnership with the power of the musical soundtrack.