Ken Russell understood Mahler in this film better than any historian ever could. Because Mahler’s music is this entire film: vulgar, excessive, sacred, unbearable, and divine all at once. It feels like the director read his biography and thought: “Let’s add more nazis, jealousy, latex, and then boom, masterpiece.”
If you want to know what the film is like before watching it: imagine you fell into an orchestra pit during a performance of the Fifth Symphony and started hallucinating about your own death, that’s it.
And if after watching it you don’t feel like screaming “ALMA!” from a cliff in the Austrian Alps, then you either don’t have a heart, or you’ve never listened to the Sixth Symphony. This film is literally a representation of what goes on in my head when the Adagietto transitions into the finale.
10 smashed Wagner busts out of 10.
P.S. Am I going crazy, or are all artists, writers and musicians kind of young sensitive men? Just affectionate, sometimes cold, and brilliantly hysterical people.
Ken Russell understood Mahler in this film better than any historian ever could. Because Mahler’s music is this entire film: vulgar, excessive, sacred, unbearable, and divine all at once. It feels like the director read his biography and thought: “Let’s add more nazis, jealousy, latex, and then boom, masterpiece.”
If you want to know what the film is like before watching it: imagine you fell into an orchestra pit during a performance of the Fifth Symphony and started hallucinating about your own death, that’s it.
And if after watching it you don’t feel like screaming “ALMA!” from a cliff in the Austrian Alps, then you either don’t have a heart, or you’ve never listened to the Sixth Symphony. This film is literally a representation of what goes on in my head when the Adagietto transitions into the finale.
10 smashed Wagner busts out of 10.
P.S. Am I going crazy, or are all artists, writers and musicians kind of young sensitive men? Just affectionate, sometimes cold, and brilliantly hysterical people.
