Mahler movie storyline. Both trifles and structure are tossed out the door by director Ken Russell in this film. Here, historical content matters not so much as metaphors, feelings, emotions, and interpretations, and pay close attention, as every word and frame is intended to be important.
The film takes place on a single train ride, in which the sickly composer Gustav Mahler and his wife, Alma, confront the reasons behind their faltered marriage and dying love. Each word seems to evoke memories of past, and so the audience witnesses events of Mahler’s life that explain somewhat his present state.
Included are his turbulent and dysfunctional family life as a child, his discovery of solace in the “natural” world, his brother’s suicide, his [unwanted] conversion from Judiasm to Catholicism, his rocky marriage and the death of their young child. The movie weaves in and out of dreams, flashbacks, thoughts and reality as Russell poetically describes the man behind the music.
Mahler is a 1974 biographical film based on the life of Austro-Bohemian composer Gustav Mahler. It was written and directed by Ken Russell for Goodtimes Enterprises, and starred Robert Powell as Gustav Mahler and Georgina Hale as Alma Mahler. The film was entered into the 1974 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Technical Grand Prize.
Russell had long been an admirer of Mahler’s music. He said he based the film on “the rondo form in music where you present the theme and follow it with variations, then return to the theme and so on. My theme was the composer’s last train journey before he died. During the journey we flash back to incidents in his life, the variations on the theme as it were. They vary from passion to comedy. Like the scherzos from his symphonies some of the scenes are pretty grotesque, too.”
David Puttnam’s company Goodtimes planned to make a series of six films about composers, all to be directed by Ken Russell. Subjects were to include Franz Liszt, George Gershwin and Vaughan Williams; they decided to do Mahler first. The National Film Finance Corporation removed its support prior to filming meaning Puttnam had to slash the budget from £400,000 to £180,000.
Russell says the film had German backers who also pulled out before filming, forcing the movie to be shot in England not Germany. Russell says Puttnam had no creative input into the film in contrast with their next collaboration, Lisztomania. Some outdoor sections of the film were made in Borrowdale, in the English Lake District.
The film included a parody of Death in Venice which Russell disliked. “Dirk [Bogarde] gave the worst performance of his life in Death in Venice”, said Russell. “His characterization had nothing to do with Mahler. Mahler was never decaying, never sorry for himself, never given to dreaming of the past. The whole thing was a bit cheeky on Visconti’s part and very lazy. He played the very same Mahler theme in every scene.”
Mahler (1975)
Directed by: Ken Russell
Starring: Robert Powell, Gary Rich, Georgina Hale, Lee Montague, Miriam Karlin, Rosalie Crutchley, Richard Morant, Angela Down, Antonia Ellis, Ronald Pickup, Dana Gillespie, Elaine Delma
Screenplay by: Ken Russell
Production Design by: John Comfort
Cinematography by: Dick Bush
Film Editing by: Michael Bradsell
Costume Design by: Shirley Russell
Art Direction by: Ian Whittaker
Makeup Department: Joyce James, Peter Robb-King
Music by: Gustav Mahler, Richard Wagner
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Mayfair Films (U.S.), Visual Programme Systems Ltd. (UK)
Release Date: February 1975 (U.S.)
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