Altered States: The Autobiography of Ken Russell
- ISBN-10
- 0553078313
- ISBN-13
- 9780553078312
- Series
- Altered States
- Category
- Performing Arts / Film / General
- Pages
- 337
- Language
- English
- Published
- 1991
- Publisher
- Bantam Books
- Author
- Ken Russell
Description
"With apologies to no one, this is the unvarnished autobiography of Britain's most controversial film director, the maker of Women in Love, The Devils, Altered States, Tommy, The Boy Friend, and The Lair of the White Worm--a book every bit as unconventional and brilliantly inspired as his best films. Moving with astonishing assurance through time and space, Ken Russell re-creates his life cinematically in a series of set pieces, dissolves, and flashbacks, all eventually interconnected in a colorful and complicated whole. He paints wonderful episodic descriptions of his thirties childhood in an English working-class family, his first sexual experience (watching Disney's Pinocchio), and his brutal boarding-school days in a naval academy during World War II. Then there are his oddly eclectic early working years in the Royal Air Force, the Merchant Navy, and the Shepherds Bush Ballet Club. At age thirty-two, there was still no sign of Russell's talent as a movie director--until all these disjointed efforts of his youth fell into place after an unnerving but ultimately successful interview with the BBC for a position with the ground-breaking television film program Monitor. The show made Russell's career. Thirty years and fifty films later, Ken Russell looks back on a life filled with more than its share of highs and lows--a direct consequence of his inability to do anything in moderation. Written in the flowing, intercutting style of his films, this autobiography peels back the layers to explore the core Ken Russell. This is a man not instantly known on the streets as the director of the latest action sequel...but as a playful, sometimes serious, always inventive expander of the cinematic realm. In Altered States, Ken Russell's descriptions of his own disastrous behavior are as candid as his bitingly accurate portraits of his fellow inhabitants of the movie world, while back at home he describes with equal frankness the breakup of one marriage and the making of a new one. Altered States is perhaps best described by the 1974 ad campaign for Russell's film Tommy: 'Your senses will never be the same.'" --Dust jacket.
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Other editions
-
- 2017-12-05
- 480 pages
- Paperback
- Anthology Editions
-
- 2016-06-24
- 240 pages
- Paperback
- Oxford University Press
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