Mahler (1974)
Country: GB
Technical: col 115m
Director: Ken Russell
Cast: Robert Powell, Georgina Hale
Synopsis:
Passages from the composer's symphonies provide the director with the musical stimulus for a visualization of the factors affecting Mahler's life: his love and reverence of nature, Alma's infidelity and the shadow of anti-semitism.
Review:
An arresting opening gives way ultimately to camp excesses such as the conversion to Catholicism of a jackbooted Cosima Wagner and a rather mixed funeral sequence. Filmed in his beloved Lake District, this essentially did for its subject what The Music Lovers did for Tchaikovsky, with another androgynous lead, though it did not go quite as far as Lisztomania would. In spite of evocative moments and bravura execution, as in the young boy's horse ride through the forest to Mahler 3, setting great music to pictures risks trivialising it more often than not.
Country: GB
Technical: col 115m
Director: Ken Russell
Cast: Robert Powell, Georgina Hale
Synopsis:
Passages from the composer's symphonies provide the director with the musical stimulus for a visualization of the factors affecting Mahler's life: his love and reverence of nature, Alma's infidelity and the shadow of anti-semitism.
Review:
An arresting opening gives way ultimately to camp excesses such as the conversion to Catholicism of a jackbooted Cosima Wagner and a rather mixed funeral sequence. Filmed in his beloved Lake District, this essentially did for its subject what The Music Lovers did for Tchaikovsky, with another androgynous lead, though it did not go quite as far as Lisztomania would. In spite of evocative moments and bravura execution, as in the young boy's horse ride through the forest to Mahler 3, setting great music to pictures risks trivialising it more often than not.
Country: GB
Technical: col 115m
Director: Ken Russell
Cast: Robert Powell, Georgina Hale
Synopsis:
Passages from the composer's symphonies provide the director with the musical stimulus for a visualization of the factors affecting Mahler's life: his love and reverence of nature, Alma's infidelity and the shadow of anti-semitism.
Review:
An arresting opening gives way ultimately to camp excesses such as the conversion to Catholicism of a jackbooted Cosima Wagner and a rather mixed funeral sequence. Filmed in his beloved Lake District, this essentially did for its subject what The Music Lovers did for Tchaikovsky, with another androgynous lead, though it did not go quite as far as Lisztomania would. In spite of evocative moments and bravura execution, as in the young boy's horse ride through the forest to Mahler 3, setting great music to pictures risks trivialising it more often than not.