Ken Russell's "Lisztomania" (White Elephant Blogathon)

What follows is my contribution to the Blogathon hosted by Philip Tatler IV at his apparently ever-name-changing film site. 

My God, what have I done: Roger Daltrey and Nell Campbell (yes, THE Nell Campbell). 

I had rather high hopes for the almost universally reviled 1975 gonzo biopic of composer pianist Franz Liszt as I prepared to view it in full for the first time. Celebrity culture is, we perceive, even more over-the-top today than it was in the 1970s or the 1840s, so I thought it entirely possible that the film, directed by Ken Russell very shortly after his wrapping what would be his pretty-commercially-successful film of The Who's "rock opera" Tommy, might demonstrate a certain prescience viewed in 2015.

But no, actually. Lisztomania remains fixed in its time a two-pronged demonstration of both amusingly wretched excess and what a resourceful and fortunate mad artiste could get away with as a studio-sponsored filmmaker during one decade in the last quarter  of the 20th century. 

Ken Russell was a longtime music maven, one of exceptional taste and, yes, in some cases, prescience: he made a documentary short featuring Davy Graham all the way back in 1959. He gave John Corigliano his first film-scoring gig, for Altered States, in 1980. And so on. Even prior to his feature film examination of Tchaikovsky, 1970's The Music Lovers, Russell had an exceptional and idiosyncratic track record with respect to films on music and musicians, both documentary and fictionalized, largely produced by the BBC. (He cited one of these films, 1968's Delius: Song of Summer, as a personal favorite.) The film follows from the not inaccurate but facile observation that Franz Liszt was something like a 19th century rock star. (As it happens, the coinage "Lisztomania" was a contemporary one, invented by the poet Heinrich Heine.) Hence, one casts a real rock star, The Who's Roger Daltrey, to play super showman Franz. And, because he's Roger Daltrey, you have him flounce about with his shirt off quite a bit. You make an array of Romantic composers look like the after-party of an arena show, with plenty of vulgar and possibly anachronistic dialogue: “Liszt, my dear fellow—" “Oh piss off Brahms." Then you...

Then you what? Russell seems to have not put a lot of really coherent thought into his screenplay, and the film plays out like a series of Russell-lized sketches from Liszt's life, with half-hearted but ticcy pastiche largely ruling the day, as in a depiction of Liszt's child-producing years that see Daltrey donning a Little Tramp uniform, complete with Chaplin mustache. While his sense of story construction, such as it is, abandons him, Russell's musicological chops stay somewhat keen albeit increasingly deranged. Russell really, really, really doesn't like Wagner. The fellow first turns up in a sailor's cap with Nietzsche's name circling its brim, arrogant but nevertheless flattered by Liszt's attention and compliments. But he walks out of a Liszt recital after seeing Franz scatter some Wagner themes into his musical extrapolations only to constantly fall back on the teeny-bopper-fan-pleasing "Chopsticks," Liszt's big hit single. Wagner: The First Rockist, apparently.

Interestingly, it's Wagner, played with stalwart conviction if no particular insight by Paul Nicholas (again, I must insist that what he's given to work with would have flummoxed Daniel Day-Lewis), who gets the most personality here, hopping from petulant student to Dr. Frankenstein to Dracula to Hitler in less than an hour and fifty, while Daltrey's Liszt is a strutting mooncalf with a May Pole-sized dick. (That's not meant metaphorically. There really is a scene in which he grows a giant phallus, and his female coterie do a May dance, or something, around it.) 

One of said coterie is played by Nell Campbell, and she is in several scenes dressed pretty much identically to the way she is in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. See her in this chorus line, third from left.

The movie actually has a great number of what I'll kindly call affinities with the London stage version of Rocky Horror and its subsequent film. Campbell was in both, and her uninhibited work as the "groupie" Columbia won her a small cult that grew sufficiently to propel her to Texas-Guinan-style heights in '80s New York night life. Rocky Horror Picture Show was shot, very nicely, by Peter Suschitzky, who I dare say must have felt a more than slight case of deja vu while working on Lisztomania, to which he contributes many beautiful vistas  Not just due to Campbell's presence but the lifting of the Frankenstein's monster conceit. In Rocky Horror Dr. Frank N. Furter uses Universal monster movie methods to create his ultimate dumb hunk, Rocky. In Lisztomania Wagner does the same thing, albeit with a higher budget and more elaborate production design, to create his Siegfried, the hero of the Ring cycle and Germany's redeemer. The punchline of Russell's joke is that he cast Rick Wakeman, the prog-rock keyboard hero who oversaw the movie's soundtrack, as Siegfried, and dressed him in a Thor Halloween costume or something (I think it's too late to sue, Marvel Studios). Wakeman's kind of lanky and soft, nobody's idea of an ubermensch, and the first thing he does on stepping off the lab's slab (in platform boots, no less) is quaff a stein of pilsener and belch. Is this some kind of clever anti-nationalist joke, or just a bunch of drunkards taking the incoherent piss?

For better or worse, it's most probably the latter, and the joke truly curdles after Wagner rises from the grave brandishing an electric-guitar-machine-gun and shooting down cartoonish skullcapped Jews in a backlot ghetto. 

The pop-art trappings of this period of Russell film are sometimes deemed psychedelic but their garishness and incoherence are more truly representative of the alcoholic bender. Lisztomania is certainly a curious film, and very watchable in its curiousness, but it's ultimately a hectoring film. It's like you met a guy at a bar and he was telling you some interesting stuff—"That's pretty fascinating, that you should find a similarity between Cosima Wagner and Kundry in Parsifal!"— but then there's that one-too-many point that you now can't put your finger on, and suddenly you're stuck under the table with the guy and he's telling you his tab has run out and you've got to spot him something. 

Comments

[Petey]

I'm fully with you on the 'very watchable, but...' takeaway, though I admittedly haven't seen the flick in a long time, and have little desire to re-visit.

But I'd like to make my semi-annual point that Ken Russell is criminally neglected these days. An uneven career, but his good films are far too good for him to be as ignored he is. And even his misfires are quite, as you say, watchable. Glad to see you helping to correct that oversight.

[lazarus]

This is the next Russell I planned on seeing, having recently checked The Devils, Women In Love, and The Music Lovers off my list. I'm going in with measured antici....pation, but I've loved everything I've seen of his so far.

My favorite is easily The Boy Friend, a brilliant meta adaptation with multiple levels of reality portrayed, a fantastically deep cast (headed by Twiggy, who couldn't be more disarming), and imagery that's consistently jaw-dropping. Russell was equally adept at the intimacy of moments between friends/members of a theatrical company as he is at the over-the-top flights of fancy. And the latter material does Busby Berkeley proud, and there were also some images reminiscent of Powell & Pressburger's more ethereal work in Tales Of Hoffmann.

A shame it's only on the Warner Archive label, but at least we have it.

[george]

I remember a comment by the then-head of Vestron Pictures, which hired Russell to direct several movies in the '80s (including GOTHIC and LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM).

He said: "When Ken Russell is your house director, you know things have gotten weird!"

I'll check out LISZTOMANIA, which I've never seen.

[Michael Brooke]

The most obvious companion-piece to 'Lisztomania' in Russell's oeuvre is the 1970 TV movie 'Dance of the Seven Veils', which is technically banned (or rather, the Richard Strauss estate won't permit any further screenings, and their copyright lasts until 2020), but there's a timecoded copy on YouTube with rather faded colours - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7r2JHq7LMs . (The BFI has a much better copy in their archive, sourced from Russell's personal 16mm print, but they can't do anything with it commercially because of the Strauss situation.)

I completely agree with Petey that Russell is criminally neglected, not least in his native country. One of the most stimulating research jobs that I've ever had was ploughing through almost the entirety of his 1959-70 BBC output, which consists of over thirty films, very few of which have had a commercial release since what was often a one-off television broadcast. (I wrote up my research at http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/1030140/ )

A DVD box collected most of the feature-length pieces (although unsurprisingly omitted 'Dance of the Seven Veils' and, more sadly because it's one of my absolute favourites, 1964's 'Béla Bartók') but the shorts are still largely terra incognita, although they do very occasionally pop up as DVD extras (for instance, his film 'Antonio Gaudí' turned up on Criterion's release of the eponymous Hiroshi Teshigahara film).

The real miracle is that they virtually all survive, given the BBC's notoriously cavalier approach to preservation in the 1960s, but I suppose it helped that they were shot on film and dealt with "high culture" subjects. Also, Russell was something of a public BBC star ever since 'Elgar' was broadcast in 1962 - one of the very few TV directors to achieve that kind of acclaim. Indeed, you'll see at the start of 'Dance of the Seven Veils' that the BBC announcer describes it as "a new film by Ken Russell", as opposed to "the latest Omnibus arts documentary".

[colinr]

I haven't watched Lisztomania yet, but your post (and the description of the rivalries) makes it seem like a wackier version of the relatively more sedate Amadeus!

The other key 'Little Nell' film that comes slightly after these ones is as Crabs in Derek Jarman's apocalyptic anti-punk, anti-musical Jubilee! She gets the rather pushed into the background and doomed 'quest for a man' subplot

[Rand Careaga]

There was a certain kind of bad moviemaking of the guilty-pleasure variety that required a kind of genius to deliver. Ken Russell was such an artist. The first time I sat through "Gothic" I declared it a masterpiece, but my critical faculties were seriously compromised that afternoon. It still reminds me, though, of certain undergraduate all-nighters circa 1970.

[Gordon Cameron]

Masterpiece it ain't, but I still dig Gothic.

[Petey]

"There was a certain kind of bad moviemaking of the guilty-pleasure variety that required a kind of genius to deliver"

Jeez. You're a Worse Monster than Justine Sacco.

Neither Gothic nor Lisztomania are "bad moviemaking". Neither Gothic nor Lisztomania are a "guilty-pleasure".

Rococo is not bad art. Baroque is not bad art. Over-the-top is not bad art. Bad art is bad art, but that a separate category.

I share Glenn's reservations about Lisztomania. But Gothic is a fine movie.

You could play the same schtick with Hitchcock.

=====

"The first time I sat through "Gothic" I declared it a masterpiece, but my critical faculties were seriously compromised that afternoon."

Y'know, (all due respect to our host), I've always believed in Better Living Through Chemistry. And I've had the luck of avoiding addiction / habituation / problematics in my usage, with the exception of the Demon Goddess Nicotina.

So, (all due respect to our host), I spent multiple decades trying to see films for the first time in cinema with some chiba freshly flowing through me. Breaks down the transference from the audience pit through the screen, at least for me. And if I liked the movie, I went back to see it stone cold sober, first to see if it still worked, and more importantly, to see THE MECHANICS of how it worked.

And oddly enough, my initial judgment was proven out 98% of the time stone cold sober.

I first saw Lisztomania that way, and had no desire to see it again, though I wouldn't warn folks off it. And I first saw Gothic that way, loved it, and went back to see it stone cold sober. It worked again, and I paid attention to how Russell's tricks were played. I even saw Gothic a third time, years later, and it was still digable.

#WhenDoesRandCareagaLand