Restless

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXmMsOBrx9g&w=420&h=315]

Shelagh Delaney (film made about Shelagh Delaney’s Salford by Ken Russell in 1960). This is such a refreshing piece 52 years later.

Shelagh Delaney also sadly died recently.

Ken Russell has died. His death creates a reflection on his work and contribution and reminds me of how important Glenda Jackson was to me in my twenties. A divine inspiration! Not least because she turned on her heel from acting and went into politics.

I’ve been rewatching some of his early films and The Music Lovers (never realized Melvin Bragg wrote the screenplay for it) for as Virginia Woolf noted, as soon as someone is dead we long to know more of them.

And since deaths are cumulative, his reminded me today of another loss Derek Jarman. I used to go to the National Film Theatre at the Embankment to see Jarman’s super 8 works projected, pieces like The Last of England and many others. They were the lamp posts that kept me going in those angst-ridden, stumbling, wondering years.

Russell told an anecdote in a interview reshown today about getting a reply from Channel 4 that said the script he’d sent them (in recent years) wasn’t cinematic enough!

I am very curious about Ken Russell’s 1958 documentary called Lourdes, but cannot find it.