Savage Messiah(197!)

Now, Ken Russell was alleged to be in attending to present his work, which really would have been quite something, but, unfortunately, having recently suffered a stroke, he was under strict orders from his doctor not to take the travel from Hampshire, sending instead a dictated introduction which was read out by Michael Bradsell who worked as film editor on this and rather a number of other Russell productions.

And, in amongst several other snippets of information, it was really gracious to see that he holds this as his real favourite piece from amongst his oeuvre, a view with which Bradsell also concurred. A bit of further research - dipping into Russell's 1989 autobiography "ABritish Picture" - offers some evidence as to why this may be the case, the most obvious being the inspiration the manager had worn from the sculptor's determination to show himself and form new base in spite of prevalent popular trends (".I felt I owed Gaudier something. It would have been so gentle to have gone into my father's business and opted for the loose living but Gaudier taught me that there was a life outside commerce and that it was worth struggling for. Long live Gaudier!" / "Savage Messiah was about love and sweat, it was almost a poverty-stricken artist who stole a tombstone from a cemetery, sculpted it into a naked and, when the dealer who commissioned it refused to pay, threw it done the windowpane of his Bond Street gallery. It was about revolution and know the art dealers of Bond Street and Madison Avenue and fuck Pinewood and Hollywood, who have never made a proper film on an artist yet!"). Secondly, "Savage Messiah" represented the grand climax of a serial of television films he'd made during the former decade or so about other artists: "Two Scottish Painters" (Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun), "Pop Goes The Easel" (Peter Blake, Peter Phillips, Derek Boshier and Pauline Boty),"Always on a Sunday" (Henri Rousseau), "The Biggest Dancer in the World" (Isadora Duncan) and "Dante's Inferno" (The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood). He so believed in the task that he double mortgaged his house in order to help finance it. I'm real glad he did, too,as it's truly marvellous.