Wednesday 23 November 2011

Ken Russell: A House in Bayswater (1960)


"But buried in the middle of 1960 is a film called A House in Bayswater, which is interesting for a number of reasons. At nearly half an hour, it was double the length of a typical Monitor item, and it was also the first of his BBC films not made for Monitor -- he produced it himself during the programme's summer break. It was also by far his most personal film to date -- as the title implies, it's a portrait of a house in Bayswater, but what it doesn't tell you is that Russell himself lived there in the 1950s. Most of the film is straightforward reportage -- we meet the eccentric landlady Mrs Collings and her current tenants, who include the photographer David Hurn, later the subject of Russell's 1963 film Watch the Birdie -- but at the very end there's this extraordinary dreamlike coda, which is quite unlike anything Russell had done up to then. The house is about to be demolished, but just before it vanishes from the map, there's a montage of its occupants and their defining characteristics, seamlessly dissolving into one another as if to cram as many of their memories as possible into what time is left to them before they're irretrievably lost in the rubble." Michael Brooke
http://michaelbrooke.wordpress.com/auteur-of-the-arts-ken-russell-at-the-bbc/
Oh it was such a different time then...(the year I was born!)

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