Mahler

Director Ken Russell made a number of biographical films of composers' lives including The Music Lovers, (about Tchaikovsky) and Lisztomania. Russell embellished the other films with certain characteristic flourishes, which include a focus on the composers' sexual obsessions, poetically telling ...more

Though Mahler may be familiar as yet another of Ken Russell's biographies of composers, this film is relatively free of the director's characteristic excesses. As the composer returns to Vienna, he contemplates such difficulties in his life as his demanding father and stormy marriage, as well as such psychological problems as his guilt over an expedient conversion to Catholicism and an obsessive fear of death. The film emphasizes the composer's need for solitude, partly due to a hypersensitive ...more