The Savage Messiah

ONCE AGAIN, this time with The Savage Messiah Ken Russell has reduced the art of biography to semi-porno voyeurism in Bohemian meller terms the least we might expect from biography is a token effort at vensimulitude. But Russell ransacks the facts and substitutes his hyped-up version of artistic truth in tasteless tribute to the life of Henri Gaudier Brzeska.

Historically Gaudier Brzeska (1891-1915), was the Vorticist and precocious member of the London circle of U.S. Eloit and T.E. Hulme. Wyndam Lewis and Ezra Pound. The Vorticists took their name with the idea that all art must originate in a state of emotional vortex and their aim, according to Pound was to establish what we consider to be characteristic in the in the consciousness and form content of our time. Henri Gaudier left his established family when they banned his Platonic love. Sophie Brzeska--a Polish writer twice his age--from their estate. He then adopted her name and lived with her until his death though their relationship was never consummated. Unrecognized during his life he suffered perpetual ridicule and abuse at the hands of fellow Bohemians, and lived in constant penury until his death he front in World War 1.

In Russells hands Gaudier Brzeska's life history has become the means to exploit in a richer vein Hollywood drivel about driven genius. His Graudier Brzeska is Artiste Extraordinaire; sacreligious, spontaneous ironic, innocent; ahead his time and shunned for flouting truth that shock prevailing social mores Russell films a disconnected string of melodramatic conceits to give us this bravura story of genius martyred through the neglect of bourgeois complacency.

EARLY IN THE FILM, Gaudier Brzeska is chased by guards from the Louvre for indecent dress, an untucked shirttail. He cludes them to emerge sprawied stop a giant Negro sculpture, screaming with messianic fervor. "Art is alive! People have to be shocked into life!" At a Bohemian dinner Gaudier Brzeska's lack of restraint disgusts his pseudo-sophisticate hosts. An art dealer, Shaw baits him maliciously until his braggadaccio traps him into promising an exhibition of non-existent marble sculptures the following morning. So the irrepressible Gaudier Brzeska drags a simpering homosexual friend out of bed rushes to a cemetery to steal his stone and starts fiendishly to sculpt. He pours sweat and blither in a steady stream of inspiration until the light of dawn the impossible stands before him--a revolutionary bus of Beauty Shaw of course, never shows up So the by now manic messiah carts his statue through a violent downpour to Shaw's gallery in the center of Paris and to a crescendo of stormy musak, he hurls his bust exultantly at the horrified faces behind the gallery glass.

These sorts of hyperbolic vignettes are piled one stop the other without logic or order. Russell has no intrinsic rationale for his boned-up effects. It's pure Hollywood chi-chi. The movie lasted less than a week in Boston. Consider for example a scene of Sophie and Henri husting stones by the seashore. He scales a lower of white rock, and straddling he peak, black cape whipping in the winds, he cuts a lone prophet figure against a clear sea; meanwhile the dances out her care-free spiritual applause on the sand, crying. "It will be a hymn to Truth and Beauty!" Or take the ending of the film: Gaudier-Brzeska's last unsculpted block of stone stands forgotten in a Paris sewer. Through the grating above, all of Paris can be seen celebrating the end of the war, while below Sophic Brzeska circles the stone in silent mourning.

IN SO TELESCOPING A LIFE. Russell has descended to pure scandal-mongering. It is simply naive to explain artistic creation solety by sexual trauma, and cheap to elicit sympathy for an artist by the sordid expose of private scandal. Russell twists the facts and fabricates the milliew. The result is an hysterical film, rather than a film about hysteria. Even worse, Russell revels in his gossip--he has a fiesta turning a genuinely moving story into a turgid peephole show.

The problem is that Russell's idea of a psychological study probes no deeper than surface sensuality. He is indifferent to the artist beneath. For his empathy with Gaudier-Brzeska is based on no more than the latter's rebellion against society's distrust of freely expressed emotion. It is finally a shallow empathy that perverts sympathy into sensationalism. He sees himself as the artist messiah, bridging the gulf between art and life with a film style incarnating creative energy. But his subject depends on its special social and artistic history for its form and interest, and Russell piles on period decor more for effect than for comprehension.

Russell films as if life were a field day for the senses, but senses robbed of the emotions that give them substance. He makes Gaudier-Brzeska's tragic sex life into a raucous wrestling match, and uses dazzling film effects as if they came off a camera's vanity table. As he wallows in style he turns what should be a tribute into an exercise in his taste for the absurd. This is simply anti-erotic and all too conventional.

OI LATE, RUSSELL has grown steadily more obsessed with madness and artistic alienation and more self-indulgent in his exploitation of the crude, the excessive and flam-boyant. To this point, his chief forte as a director has been his handling of theatrical effect. "Women in Love" was audacious and over-ripe in imagery, and over-fancy in cinematography--lavish in caricature and lacking in precise meaning. Lawrence's form had been tortured into the shape of Russell's own Gothic sex fancies. And it made as offensive, though visually awesome, film. With "The Music Lovers," a biography of Peter Tchak ovsky, Russell's glory, felling reached operatic heights that could at least balance out the ludicrous hamminess and involuted romanticism of his film. In The Devils, the case of Father Urbain Grandier burned at the stake in 1634 for bewitching the Ursuline nuns of London, Russell's cinematic extravagance came to border on pathology. The film was a festival in debauchery, horror, perversion, and sadism.

The Savage Messiah is not only as offensive as Russell's earlier films, but lacks their only redeeming virtue, the power of visual shock. Its ingredients are the same: scenes of destruction and decadence, of incredible decor, exaggerated sentimentality, twisted passions and a non-stop dialogue of references to the terrors and joys of artistic fervor. But by now, this melange of heavy drama and unbroken noise-making is as old as Hollywood's infant epics. The vulgar baroque that once amazed, is muted in The Savage Messiah and serves only to exacerbate the bankruptcy of Russell's vision. He projects his messiah pose as a ploy to forestall criticism altogether. It is understandable for an artist to indulge privately the idea that art is the savior of culture. But to force his own messianic fancies on the public is hardly fair. He flaunts his faith in the sublime at the risk of the ridiculous, and his gamble fails.