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A Banana Is Not Just a Banana


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Published: Sep 25, 2007

Directors in Focus: Ken Russell

Joseph Lanza book reading, Fri., Sept. 28, 7 p.m. (followed by a screening of Ken Russell's The Music Lovers), $5-$7, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 866-468-7619, www.ihousephilly.org

As penile obsessions go, that cock-scribbling teen in Superbad has nothing on Ken Russell. According to Joseph Lanza's Phallic Frenzy (Chicago Review Press, $26.95), whose cover features a woman in burlesque garb preparing to deep-throat a banana, the legendarily libidinous director owes his obsession with all things tumescent to a childhood incident in which he was groped during a screening of Pinocchio. As one organ grew, so did another, and an artist was born.

International House's Directors in Focus series (Sept. 27-29) steers clear of Russell's most flamboyant excesses — no Roger Daltrey playing Franz Liszt, or Ringo Starr as the pope — but it includes his one bona fide prestige success, Women in Love, which garnered an Oscar for Glenda Jackson, along with The Music Lovers, his marginally straightforward account of the life of Tchaikovsky, and his appropriately nutsoid version of the Who's Tommy, perhaps the only recorded case where Russell's version actually clarifies his source material.

Although Russell is still nominally making films, his star has long since waned, and his phallocentric libertinism hasn't weathered the last three decades entirely well. But it's hard to think of a contemporary director anywhere near the mainstream who so nakedly puts sexuality at the core of his work. Russell's time may have come and gone, but it's open to question whether it's because we've progressed or backslid.