Word: aria
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ARIA. Assign ten directors to work daft magic on ten of opera's greatest hits, and the result is this beguiling pastiche of long-haired "videos." Ken Russell wins top prize for his Turandotty dream sequence...
...ARIA. Assign ten directors to work daft magic on ten of opera's greatest hits, and the result is this beguiling pastiche of long-haired "videos." Ken Russell wins top prize for his Turandotty dream sequence...
...Half of Aria's episodes can be considered briefly and passed over, like the bacon bits at a sumptuous salad bar. The connecting sequence, by Bill Bryden, takes way too long to let John Hurt dress up as Pagliaccio. Charles Sturridge's essay for La Forza del Destino -- an urban mural of children's faces -- is all dour style, a Bugsy Malone in Nighttown. The Bruce Beresford segment, from Erich Korngold's Die tote Stadt, is content to watch two young people disrobe in an English mansion. Robert Altman had the inspiration to show a restless 17th century audience...
...Russell was made for Aria. The music is Nessun dorma from Puccini's Turandot; the images are the last frenetic dreams of a dying woman. Ancient astral priests dress her for a mysterious ritual: paint on her body, diamonds on the soles of her feet, finally a branding iron pressed to her lips. A rude flash, and we see the scene of a car accident. The jewels are mortal wounds, the priests surgeons, the vision one of hope and fear for the unknown world that follows death. Visually, Russell's sequence is pitched at see above high- see. Emotionally...
...modern film style, Aria blends two old forms: classical opera and the silent film. Both discovered unique languages to convey emotions; both eschewed irony for intensity; both declined in the 1920s -- opera with Puccini's death, silent movies with the coming of sound. So a headlong romantic like Ken Russell will embrace opera on film like a first, lost love. For him, opera is performed at peak volume because the feelings it surveys are big and deep. Matters of lust and death are too important to be spoken; they must be sung, shouted, thundered, wept -- and shown, in all their...