11/05/2023, 01:32 BFI Screenonline: Debussy Film, The (1965)

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Debussy Film, The (1965)

   
Courtesy of BBC
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For Monitor, BBC, tx. 18/5/1965 VIDEO CLIPS

82 mins, black and white
  1. Creative differences (3:03)
Director Ken Russell 2. Domestic problems (3:50)
Production Company BBC Television
Producer Ken Russell 3. The House of Usher (5:34)
Scenario Ken Russell, Melvyn
Bragg
Photography Ken Westbury, John
McGlashan
Music Claude Debussy, GALLERY / SCRIPTS / AUDIO
Richard Wagner

Cast: Oliver Reed (Claude Debussy); Vladek Sheybal (Director/Pierre

Louys); Annette Robertson (Gaby); Iza Teller (Madame Bardas); Penny
Service (Lily) SEE ALSO
Show full cast and credits Reed, Oliver (1938-1999)
Russell, Ken (1927-2011)
A film company shoots a dramatised account of the life of the French Ken Russell on Television
composer Claude Debussy Ken Russell's Composers
Ken Russell: The Monitor Years
Show full synopsis

Ken Russell's penultimate film for Monitor (subtitled 'Impressions of the

French Composer') was originally planned as a feature film about Claude
Debussy (1862-1918), though after the failure of his theatrical debut
French Dressing (1963) he ended up making it for television. Little else
was sacrificed, as the 82-minute result (co-written by the young Melvyn
Bragg) was easily his most ambitious film up to then, and still represents a
career high point. This opinion was not shared by Debussy's estate, which
initially prevented repeat screenings, though the composer's copyright has
since expired.

The film operates on, and constantly switches between, three levels. First,
there's the dramatised life story of Debussy and his stormy relationships
with lovers, friends, colleagues and patrons. Then, there are visualisations
of his music, along similar lines to those in Elgar (BBC, tx. 11/11/1962)
and Béla Bartók (BBC, tx. 24/5/1964), beginning with a startling sequence
in which a young woman, representing Saint Sebastian, is shot at point-
blank range with arrows. And finally, there's the film within The Debussy
Film, as an ambitious director attempts to capture the complexities of his
subject while negotiating his actors' own turbulent relationships.

Although this treatment might seem gimmicky, it represents the logical

culmination of Russell's Monitor output. In constantly pushing at the
boundaries of what was considered acceptable for a BBC documentary, he
had to spend much time thinking about what he was attempting, not least
in order to justify it to his boss Huw Wheldon, a stickler for factual
accuracy. His director frequently voices these dilemmas, musing about
how to convey particular ideas on film, incorporate additional material
without unbalancing the narrative, or simply to vouch for the accuracy of
individual scenes. Russell confirmed that the line "They did play with
balloons - I checked" was a cheeky dig at Wheldon.

Cast primarily because of his physical resemblance to Debussy, Oliver

Reed has surprisingly little to do except intersperse smouldering
broodiness and violent rage. The dominant performance is by the
saturnine Vladek Sheybal as both the film's director and Debussy's own
Svengali, the pornographer-poet Pierre Louÿs. Decades before the
introduction of the DVD, Sheybal supplies a near-constant 'director's
commentary' on the soundtrack, though he also knows when to let 'his'
film speak for itself, notably the climax of the extraordinary sequence that
fuses Debussy's own decline with the subject of his unfinished opera, The
Fall of the House of Usher.

Michael Brooke

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