Séminaire public pré soutenance de thèse: Christophe Van Eecke sur Ken Russell

Séminaire public de presentation des résultats de recherches de doctorat

Christophe Van Eecke (Université de Maastricht & ULB)
Pandaemonium: Ken Russell’s Artist Biographies as Baroque Performances

Mercredi 21 octobre de 14h00 à 16h00 en la salle H.1308
50, Avenue F.D. Roosevelt, 1050 Bruxelles

Ken Russell (1927-2011) was a renegade talent and the self-styled enfant terrible of British cinema. His legacy as a film-maker consists of a large number of films on the lives of artists, mainly composers. But Russell’s approach to artist biography was highly unorthodox: rather than reconstruct a factual account he offered a deeply personal interpretation of artists’ lives based on his own understanding of their work. In a programmatic text for his film on Mahler (1974), Russell explained that his films ‘evolve through a stream of consciousness in which the man and the myth, the music and its meaning, time, place, dream and fact all flow and blend into the mainstream of the film itself’ and that ‘my film is simply about some of the things I feel when I think of Mahler’s life and listen to his music’.

My research has attempted to explain what that statement means and to unpack its implications for the practice of life writing. It takes a baroque approach to performance and performativity to show how Russell not simply made highly inventive films on other artists, but also constructed those films as a kind of self-portrait. Russell’s work then becomes a performance of self through art. Through detailed analysis of several of Russell’s films I have reconstructed Russell’s method, from the very first documentaries he made for the BBC in the early 1960s through his major feature films of the 1970s and 1980s.

Monsieur Christophe VAN EECKE présentera les recherches qu’il a menées dans le cadre de sa thèse de doctorat en Histoire, histoire de l’art et archéologie (directeurs: Maaike Meijer, Université de Maastricht & Karel Vanhaesebrouck, Université Libre de Bruxelles)

Annonce VAN EECKE Christophe – séminaire public