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The story of the influential 19th century British poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his troubled and somewhat morbid relationship with his wife and his art.
Well who of us HASN’T spent a lifetime writing poems in honor of a woman better than you in every respect, burying them with her when she ODs on laudanum because you ignore her while she’s alive in service of your real muse Art — only to then dig up her grave 7 years later in order to publish them in a final desperate take-backsies act of mass ornamental self-branding to feed a chloral and whiskey addiction as your socialist utopian buddies drink themselves into moral-aesthetic-sexual oblivion? Who among us has not “Been There”?
I looked and saw your eyes In the shadow of your hair, As a traveller sees the stream In the shadow of the wood; And I said, "My faint heart sighs, Ah me! to linger there, To drink deep and to dream In that sweet solitude."
Ladies, do NOT fall for a man like Dante Gabriel Rossetti (even if played by Oliver Reed, as lusty an individual as ever swaggered onto the screen), who would blow ivory bone dust in your face - not a euphemism - and readily admonish you: "Ah, don't talk such cock!" He will only get furious that for the majority of a decade he's still not invited upstairs to see your etchings ("chivalry and chastity"…
guess who’s back — the muse is back, back again, risen from the realm of the unearthly dead (for she was an angel, not like the rest of us puny mortals) to wreak havoc on me, myself and i… the accursed artist, so they call me. the one who would end the world with his infernal paintings, so they call me. the man who would set his friends on fire for a woman whose kiss is as hot to the heart as the fire would inevitably be, so they used to call me… before time came with her relentless hours and snatched our seconds away, only to be replaced by contemplative, reflective, torturous days that left me in a cage…
Oliver Reed reading poems and drinking chloral. Snakes, lizards, caskets and skeletons. Incredible black & white photography and the usual Ken Russell madness. Plus the beautiful Gala Mitchell. What’s not to like?
No, not that Dante. The longer title, Dante's Inferno: The Private Life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Poet and Painter, provides much needed clarification. This Dante was an English poet, illustrator, painter, and translator. His sister is Christina Rossetti, whose complete works I own (never knew she had a brother!). But the focus of this docu-drama biopic is Dante and his muse and wife, the model Elizabeth Siddal, as well as another model, Fanny Cornsforth. Oh, and it goes over the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
The film is in black and white and extraordinarily beautiful. I think this might be his best film visually in terms of the quality of the film (as in, the celluloid) out of the 23…
I think I can finally consider myself as a cinephile by watching one of Ken Russell’s most underrated films and, honestly, I cannot comprehend why it is like that.
This is definitely one of Russell’s most astonishing works ever made! The cinematography is what distinguishes and makes this film one of the most unique pieces ever created. The only way I could ever describe the surrealist and attractive cinematography is by saying that that’s how my internal thoughts look like every single night. I still cannot process this is a TV MOVIE.
While I was watching this, I couldn’t stop thinking about The Devils, the duo between Reed and Russell is something that I would have always consider as one…
The final film in my review of the BFI's new set Ken Russell: The Great Passions. By this point it's impossible to imagine Russell remaining on television at all; his ambition has essentially swallowed any trace of actual arts documentary in this forceful drama about the tragic love affair of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddall.
Russell's compositions are wonderfully mobile and intricate, creating layers of movements along the Z axis and giving swoon-worthy close-ups of the central cast. One particular scene, where Dante watches Siddall feed her pet bird, might have influenced Gwyneth Paltrow's entrance in Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums.
John Ruskin is played by Clive Goodwin, the husband of Pauline Boty. Boty had appeared as herself in…
Every time I watch a Ken Russell biopic, it makes me never want to watch a biopic from anyone else ever again. Only he could have captured the causal cruelty and the neglect Rossetti showered upon his wife while still being as romantic as the artwork he was known for.
The artist's lot is not a happy one... But splendid for Ken Russell, who revels in the florid kinship of the brothers Pre-Raphaelite and the morbid anxieties harboured by one of their number, poet and artist, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (a glowering Oliver Reed).
Between those poles of garret-artistry and inner turmoil lie rich pickings for British cinema's (television's at this point) best kitsch reporter. Cue midnight exhumations to greedily retrieve books of poetry from a corpse's grasp; fights between sober lovers with empty beer bottles upon mountain tops; battles on bicycles wearing suits of armour... All riffs upon recorded incidence and evidence of in-truth-let-there-be-exuberance.
Russell is too often criticised for slammed excess, but there's always truth even in his silliest moments.…
Fantastic, tragic, horrific, dramatic and most of all: poetic.
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