May 2008

Wild Combination (2007, Director: Matt Wolf): Until about a year ago, I’d never heard of Arthur Russell. A classically-trained cel­list who died at the age of 40 in 1992, Russell was in danger of falling into obscurity. But then some­thing won­derful happened. Those closest to him began to re-release some of the music he cre­ated and sud­denly a man who seemed out of his time while alive began to influ­ence a new gen­er­a­tion of musi­cians. The 2004 com­pil­a­tion Calling Out of Context is a good place to begin. It was around the time of that CD release that dir­ector Matt Wolf became familiar with Russell, and decided to make the film.

Russell was born and raised in Oskaloosa, Iowa, but ran away to San Francisco while still in his teens, where he joined a Buddhist com­mune. It was in San Francisco that he made the acquaint­ance of Allen Ginsberg, and the two remained friends and col­lab­or­ators for years to come. Russell soon fol­lowed Ginsberg to New York, where he soon become part of the artistic land­scape at The Kitchen. Part of the avant-garde scene that included Philip Glass, Russell wrote and per­formed here reg­u­larly, often singing along with his cello-playing. It was during this period that Russell began to acknow­ledge his homo­sexu­ality, even­tu­ally meeting and falling in love with Tom Lee, who was (and remains) a tire­less sup­porter of his work. His involve­ment in the gay scene intro­duced him to under­ground dis­cotheques, and soon he was writing dance music under ali­ases such as Dinosaur L, Indian Ocean and Loose Joints. Though he achieved some modest com­mer­cial suc­cess with these records, he never really made a break­through, per­haps because his talent was too big to be con­fined to one type of music. The film fea­tures a gen­erous selec­tion of his work, and it ranges from avante-garde to dance to pop to folk rock, all of it accom­panied by Russell’s utterly unique singing voice. He used his voice as another instru­ment but it gave all of his music a slightly odd quality, making it com­mer­cially unap­pealing at the time. It didn’t help that he was a per­fec­tionist, rarely feeling that a record was “fin­ished” and making it extremely dif­fi­cult for him to take dir­ec­tion from others. Later in his life, he began to exhibit symp­toms of para­noia, feeling that other musi­cians were stealing his ideas.

Matt Wolf has made an immersive film that right­fully fore­grounds the music, often accom­pa­nying it with evoc­ative scenes of the vast Iowa land­scape that seems to have informed Russell’s work. Another musical theme was the expans­ive­ness of water, and per­haps it was this desire for open space that led Russell to spend so much time on the Staten Island Ferry, scenes which Wolf has recre­ated by filming with vin­tage video cam­eras. I had a mixed reac­tion upon learning that so much of the “archival” footage in the film was recre­ated. As Wolf explains, there just wasn’t that much real archival footage to work with, but I think I would have pre­ferred that the film itself car­ried some dis­claimer that the footage wasn’t authentic instead of having to hear it from him in the Q&A. But don’t let that stop you from seeing the film. For those with some famili­arity with Arthur Russell, it will fill in the pic­ture behind the music, but more import­antly, it will help you to intro­duce the work of this undis­puted genius to your friends.

Here is the Q&A with dir­ector Matt Wolf from after the screening:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Duration: 13:43

Official site of the film
Teaser

(8/10)

Tagged as: homosexuality, music

{ Comments on this entry are closed }