Ken Russell: The Great Composers

THE FILMS of Alan Clarke, the Wallasey-born director who died in 1990 aged just 54, possessed a strange, coiled energy. Although his most famous works – Scum, Made In Britain and The Firm – reached for an extreme kind of feral realism, Clarke experimented relentlessly with different forms of narrative storytelling, most notably in a run of nearwordless films – Christine, Elephant and Contact – made towards the end of his life, that dispassionately document the emotionally deadened actions of teenage junkies, sectarian assassins and British paratroopers in Northern Ireland. But Clarke was also adept at accentuating the confines of that small box in the corner of the room, using the “limitations” of the BBC studio to create claustrophobic dramas about social control: his 1978 adaptation of Georg Büchner’s 1835 play Danton’s Death; 1981’s Psy-Warriors, about the military use of psychological torture methods. His most oppressive work, however, might well be his adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s first fulllength play, Baal. Transmitted in March of 1982, in the primetime BBC slot after the 9 O’ Clock News, Baal is no-one’s idea of an easy watch, not even Brecht’s. The bleak riseand-fall tale of an amoral poet-singer on his dissolute passage to the grave, the 1918 play-poem was pretty much renounced by Brecht once he became a Marxist in the 1920s. Subsequently, Baal was repeatedly rewritten and it’s possible to read this BBC adaptation as anything from a condemnation of Sturm und Drang German romanticism to a morality tale about the nature of evil, and an autobiographical exposé of Brecht’s own dark teen aspect. However, with David Bowie in the lead role, under Clarke’s direction, this Baal is also, about Bowie’s ’70s mythos; a genius singer-poet adored by fans, loved by women and indulged by bourgeois society, yet caught in a hell of his own devising, destroying those around him, as he heads inexorably towards corruption and death. Perhaps surprisingly, Clarke originally wanted Steven Berkoff for Baal and it was the play’s translator, John Willett, who suggested Bowie (who was paid the standard BBC actor’s rate of £1,000). But under Clarke’s direction Bowie is chillingly unnatural, a man so enamoured by his own poetry that he fails to comprehend his own decay. As the body count of his victims rises, Baal sings his harsh plainsongs to camera (far bleaker than the studio versions that appeared on the Baal EP) in split-screen close-ups, revealing putrid skin, rotten teeth. Clarke adds to the sense of alienation, Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, by shooting on long lenses, the actors denied close-ups, the camera refusing to break the proscenium. An undervalued work in the canon of both men, Baal can now be re-evaluated alongside the rest of Clarke’s remarkable BBC output, and reassessed in Bowie’s oeuvre as brutal exercise in alienation, a companion text to Lodger and Scary Monsters; the laying to rest of ’70s art Bowie, before the commercial reinvention of Let’s Dance.