An actor is playing Claude Debussy in a film about the composer's life, and finds himself identifying with his subject very closely.
Already a radically different sort of biopic than the straightforward Elgar, Ken Russell's Debussy Film uses the French composer Claude Debussy's writhing, melodramatic life as the starting point for an ambitious exploration of ideas of reality and fiction in film, Symbolism, historiography (who tells our stories? and for what means?), and the glories and pitfalls of artistic expression. This passionate 82-minute TV film is less of a biographical, fact-grounded account of Debussy's life than it is a free-form, Werner Herzogian attempt to literalize Debussy's music in cinematic form. The Debussy Film tries to understand what drove the mind of Debussy, who wanted his music to match the precise emotions of the painters (Casper David Friedrich, the impressionists) and writers (Flaubert,…
My Grandfather was a keen appreciator of classical music. When I was a child he'd often use our time together to introduce me to such 'serious' music. It worked. With all points Albinoni to Wagner, his large collection of LPs, backed up by Radio 3, aided a canonical education that my formal schooling barely touched (the William Tell Overture about as close the paltry music lessons got).
Debussy, along with Stravinsky and Ravel, was at the outer edge of Grandfather's mostly 18/19th Century tastes. The director of this film on Debussy was one or two louche steps beyond that...
Three-years into his long-run of biographies, Ken Russell was pushing at the boundaries by this film, accurately subtitled Impressions of the…
"Imagine an actor saying the following. Imagine me saying the following."
No, these lines are not from Ken Russell's Debussy Film. Those lines, spoken by John Hurt, are from perhaps the only attempt at dramatizing Debussy's life that stacks up to this one in pure stylistic fascination, The Art of Noise's 1999 LP The Seduction of Claude Debussy, a bizarre (and remarkably successful) attempt at telling the composer's story by deft fusion of his melodic themes with atmospheric drum 'n' bass production alongside influences from diverse genres like opera and hip-hop. However, given The Debussy Film's approach to reality, those lines wouldn't be all that out of place.
You see, Oliver Reed (terrific as always) does not, as I was…
perhaps one of the first “unconventional” biopics (somewhat in the fashion of Mishima and Naked Lunch). very meta. i like the part where Oliver Reed tries to put on a Debussy record at a party.
Ken Russell Ranked
In Ken Russell’s early BBC days, biography was more like strict documentary. There was no place for metaphors or speculative drama. The network’s purists felt such tactics were synonymous with the kinds of exaggerations Henri Gaudier championed and that Russell yearned to create. So, Russell kept a humble exterior while secretly plotting to subvert the BBC’s codes of propriety.
“Ken was different in every way from what he is now,” Russell’s BBC boss Huw Wheldon reflected in the early 1970s on working with Russell in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. “To start with, he was virtually wordless. He was shy and quiet. Quiet in every way: his clothes, his haircut, his countenance. A little watchful, but…
Debussy, Ollie, Russell e um maluquete adorador de Wagner que gosta de atirar em gatos. Basta.
Oliver Reed as an actor playing Debussy; cast and crew of a movie hold brainstorming sessions about Debussy's life, their script, and belle epoque Paris in general... while the movie slips back and forth between their creative discussions and sequences from the film they're purportedly making. It's all very destabilized and post-fictional, but never remotely obscure... as though someone were trying to adapt Roman Nouveau ideas for a pop-culture audience.
I went to this mostly because it was a free screening put on as part of some sort of music festival thing, which meant that the film was preceded by a mercifully brief flute recital and someone reading a few Paul Verlaine (I think?) poems (in both French and English). This might have felt slightly less pretentious had it taken place in a context other than a rented movie theater for an audience of blue hairs who I can only assume were there mostly because they heard "Debussy" rather than anything having to do with Ken Russell, but whatever.
Weirdly enough, the theater was also having some sort of special screening of some new HBO show with Bill Hader or…
BBC tasked Ken Russell with the creation of an educational Claude Debussy biopic, and he gave them a fuckin Felliniesque European art film about an actor absorbed yet intimidated by the immense passion, tragedy, and creativity of his subject (with periodic Cool Debussy Fact’s); king shit. Russell’s exceptional musical montage adds a lot of heft to the modest scale of the project, really enjoyed this.
Until Ken Russell's work for the BBC is more widely available, I'm afraid he'll never be given his due. The first filmmaker to have considered the biopic a genre worthy of reinvention. Structurally provocative, at times visually astonishing, Russell attempts to convey a feeling for Debussy (and for artists in general) rather than laying out a chronology of life events. THE DEBUSSY FILM is one of a number of feature length works Russell made for the BBC during the 1960s.
this movie's final sequence had to have inspired 2001
Found this to be very unique even by Ken Russell standards. The decision to forego a traditional biopic to instead portray a film within a film and blur the lines between fiction and reality makes it quite unnerving at times. Tonally it did remind me a bit of Fellini’s 8 1/2, which I wouldn’t be surprised if Russell was influenced by. As for the performances, Oliver Reed is of course brilliant (this being the first time he worked with Russell) and Vladek Sheybal delivers a similar creepiness to the role of the director as he did as Kronsteen in From Russia with Love.