The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 24

THE GUARDIAN Thursday July 11 1991 24 REVIEWPROFILE 'You know, everyone wants to rape well, wants to screw a nun, don't they? Because I psijiM rr Chftfap they're holy people, they're virgins and all Catherine Bennett profiles Ken Russell A yj A IT looking-glass i. JOURNALISTS make things up. So Ken Russell says. They don't just misquote him. "They make up their own quotes." How profligate, when Russell's own words are, like much of a "real" war as a football match whose score was 100,000 against 150-odd would be considered a real football match.

There are some brilliant apercus in this book. The notion of the Gulf war, for instance, constantly examining its image in the mirror of the TV screen (without which, Baudrillard implies, it wouldn't have been waged at all): "Am I beautiful enough, am I operational enough, spectacular enough, sophisticated enough, to take my place in the history of warfare?" The notion of that poor, helpless, oil-caked gull, that we were shown again and again, as the symbol of our own impotence as TV viewers confronted with such a gummily unintelligible event. The notion, most vertiginously, that what was at stake was not political or territorial domination, as with a "real" war, but the very status of war itself, its meaning and its future. Yet, reading his book on the terrace of a Parisian cafe, I became increasingly sensitive to the glee, the rather chilling gusto, with which Baudrillard seemed to be pouncing on this, the first of the "hyperreal as he sees it, almost as though he needed such a war to test and vindicate his theories of postmodernism just as the American military needed it to test and vindicate all their glossy weaponry And his concluding argument, that the war's SCREEN Women on the road Page 27 MUSIC Men on themselves Page 28 Plus Koning on women's fiction Page 26 I SPOKE my first line, "You know me by my habit," only to be greeted by barely concealed gestures of self-abuse. National Theatre director Richard Eyre on the time he played the French Herald Mountjoy in an ill-conceived production of Henry Vat Hornchurch rep and came on stage to be rudely greeted by the English army.

WE'VE come a long way from Janet Leigh's deathly silent bathtub. A long way, but not far enough. Naomi Wolf on the role of women in The Silence Of The Lambs, Spare Rib. Censored ALI Idrissi Kaitouni is serving a 15 year prison sentence for insulting the dignity of King Hassan II. He was arrested in 1982 shortly after a book of his poems was published which was critical of the country's repressive policies.

The King reportedly took offence at a disparaging reference to King Hussein of Jordan which he took to be about himself. Gilbert Adair THE other day I had an oddly Proustian little epiphany: on a whim I switched on breakfast television. What was so Proustian about that? The fact that only once have I ever regularly watched TV in the morning during the Gull war (a period when "the news" worked both day- and night-shift, so to speak). And as I experienced my nostalgic frisson, I recalled an anecdote related somewhere by Cocteau. In 1919 or there abouts he encountered an el derly news vendor selling copies of Le Figaro at twice the standard price.

His curiosity piqued, Cocteau duly purchased a copy, only to dis cover that it was two years out of date. When he protested, the news vendor cannily replied, "But that's why it's so dear. Because it's got the war in it" Is "nostalgia" a legitimate consequence of a war in which tens of thousands of lives were sacrificed, even if it also allowed those of us secure in the West to live for a few months at unaccus-tomedly heightened levels of intensity? Is it legitimate to "miss" a period in which the news actually made news, holding us in thrall, night after night, morning after morning, to the 1001 tales of Saddam (or Scheherasad- dam)? And is it legitimate to refer to some event of the recent past, as one may find oneself doing, as having occurred "before the as though the younger generation finally, gratefully, had a war to call its own? There being nothing more revolting than a nostalgie de boue for war, one would hope that the answer to each of these questions is negative. But what if the war were not a "real" one? For that is the premise of a new book by Jean Baudrillard, the Pope of the postmodern and the theorist of the hyperreal. La Guerre Du Golfe N'a Pas Eu Lieu (an obvious paraphrase of Giraudoux's The Trojan War Will Not Take Place) comprises three essays: The Gull War Will Not Take Place (originally published by Liberation in January of this year and reprinted in the Guardian): The Gulf War Is Not Really Taking Place (originally published by Liberation in February) and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (written for book publication only).

And Baudnllard's thesis is that this war was but a simulacrum (one of post-modernism's key words) of a war; its "televisual a war made, as one now makes love, with condoms; a war not declared, not fought and not truly won; as DRAWING: PAUL HAMLYN his films, so calculated to shock and offend, so sure to arouse feelings of embarrassment, pity, rage. Which journalist, having seen Russell's latest film, Whore, in which the Whore dis courses to camera on the dangers and difficulties of whoring, could imagine that Ken Russell would sit back and say that prostitution is "easy Who would have invented that? Or this? "Well, yeah. I think prostitutes generally are happy about being prostitutes. It's not a bad way to earn a living. No worse, he implies, than being a film director.

Because being a film director not only means being misquoted, it means being an artist. Which means being a mighty albatross, fallen among mocking fatheads. Misunderstood. Accursed. "Artists are about 50 years ahead of the general public," Russell said, pushing off his shoes to reveal bare feet, and toenails painted red to match the varnish on his fingers.

He had been appearing on television, and had dressed up artistically, with blue eye shadow, an odd sight on his round, brick-red face, which looked, as he chomped nuts out of a packet, as if it might burst. "I mean," he said. "That's why they are artists, they have visions of the future. I mean, being an artist is to be a visionary. Not to see what is here," he gestured disparagingly at the furnishings of the Groucho Club "But to see them in the context of history.

So artists see that, and people say 'it's just a television, a lamp and a chair, don't hassle me. It's just what it is'. And it's not what it is, it's a statement." He screwed up the empty nut packet and tossed it over his shoulder, onto the floor. What was the point of talking about his new film, he demanded, ungraciously? "I mean, what can come out of it? I mean, the statement is the work. The work is the statement." But Whore is rather a confus ing statement It's adapted from a play called Bondage written by David Hines, a London taxi driver and playwright.

Hines had often had King's Cross prostitutes in the back of his cab. "I was moved to anger and pity at the sad brutality of their lives," he told the Guardian. It something out of Hieron- ymus Bosch out there at three in the morning." Ken Kusseu wanted to mm Bondage. He told Hines he wouldn't alter a thing. But the title, meant to suggest slavery, was immediately changed to the simpler, more stirring, Whore.

When Russell could not get British funds, the scene moved from stinky King's Cross to spanking Hollywood Boulevard, LA, and big, bounc ing Theresa Russell was cast as the gplden-hearted tart, looking none the worse tor her years on the game. Bosch became bosh. Everything Theresa Russell says in the film, about the trials ot prostitution, is immediately undermined by her own luxuri ant glamour, and the question of why a nice girl like this, who doesn even have a drug naDit, can't find a better, safer job. Maybe it's because like Russell's previous, ridiculous 1 'STIBMOB Ever been taken for a ride? Jennifer Phillips' hilarious account of the mini cab business. Previews from Tonight HAMPSTEAD THEATRE 071-722 9301 ing thing." Though not, perhaps, for the woman acting the prostitute.

But the experiment was not tried. Whore, it turns out, is another of Russell's attempts to shock the brainwashed masses from their "cocoa drinking" torpor, by rinsing them in his own, corrective fantasies. "I mean there was a time when I did put mine in," he says, of his earlier films. "I had this fantasy, I've always had this thing about nuns. I mean, you know, everyone wants to rape well, wants to screw a nun, don't they? Because they're holy people, they're virgins and all that.

And I think most men would be liars if they said they didn't want to screw an air hostess I put that fantasy into Crimes Of Passion." Then there were the liberating castration fantasies in Lisz-tomania. "Oh yeah, well, I was having problems with my wife then," Russell explained. So it was a rather strange sort of mass therapy? "Well, that's tough," Russell said, "nothing's perfect in life." If you don't share his fantasies, that's tough, too. "I'm not saying I do the perfect thing. I just say I do the thing which excites trie.

All my films are a thing about self-discovery, of myself. They are not so much about Mahler they are about composers, but on the journey to finding out about them, you also find out about yourself. So I make my films for myself, I want to find out about myself. I whore, China Blue, in Crimes of Passion she really likes it? Or are we misunderstanding the Artist again? We are. Whore, it turns out, is not just about prostitutes, but about people.

About us. "It said a lot about just straight forward situations with men and women and sex," Russell elaborated. For example: There's this myth that you've got a big cock, that's what women want. But it's obviously not." No? No. In Whore, Theresa Russell is made to observe that size is not important I think that the most revolutionary statement that's ever been made in the history of the world," said Russell, laughing, but possibly serious.

"I think it will give a lot of males tremendous hope, because how many men have got a 16-inch cock?" It's a rhetorical question. But probably not that many, eh? In this way, Whore is "a helpful film about There are sex lessons for women, too. Even women who aren't prostitutes. "Because prostitutes are really women," Russell declared, innovatively. "They are not prostitutes.

They are basically the honest part, they don't have to pretend to themselves." If his audience realises this, it will help them. They might like to act out an honest, whore-client fantasy. "I think most women some he amended, "would love to play being a prostitute. In fact I know some women who love it. I know various couples who pretend not to know each other, to be a client and a prostitute, because then they don't have to be ashamed We don't know each other, but if we did, and I went out of that door and I came back and pretended to be somebody totally different, and asked you to do this or that or the other, because you were acting being a prostitute, you would do anything, because prostitutes do anything That is a tremendously liberat NOV 16 JAN 26 BOOKING NOW victims were not "real" cadavers, was enough to turn even me into a bluff Johnsonian pragmatist.

AND then it happened. Distractedly turning a page, I spilt some red wine and, horrified at the stain it made on my white linen jacket, I confess that for a moment or two I didn't eive a damn about the war or the gull or the tens of thousands dead. Stains are like that, they bring one's own petty little existence into outlandish close-up, they suddenly make one realise that the world the world before the stain was maybe not as ugly a place as all that. Especially as one now has to contend with both the world and the stain. And if one must go hunt ing, Baudrillard-fashion, for metaphors, it might make better and more modest sense to regard the Gulf war as a stain on the world.

One reacts violently at first, with the realisation of just how comfortable one was with the pre-stam world. One en deavours to erase it with some "wonder" product (New Improved World Order, possibly), which, however, usually only succeeds in spreading it. Then, little by little, one learns to live with it, until, as with every other stain the world has sustained, one ends by barely noticing it. arcrarettwra reran ists' table, next to Byron, Mah ler, Lawrence, and Gaudier Brzeska. Has not he, too, in his horrible way, shocked the pub lic, and paid the pnce? After Valentino flopped, Russell was, tor several years, unbankable.

"All the means of expression in this country are governed by the establishment," he complained. But why should they pick on him? "It's just that they don't like people who are mav ericks, they want people really to conform, they want people that they, the press, can build up to be their nice little guys. And anyone who kicks against this, they try and knock down." There was a time when crit ics loved Russell's sensitive bio- pics for the BBC's Monitor, his Women In Love some of them even liked his Tommy. He was a hero. "Well, I was when it suited them," he said.

"I made a film on Elgar, ponies galloping across English landscapes, and of course that was all very pretty, but when I began to get a little hyper-critical, they just got upset." Well, maybe the critics will love Whore. It's not critical, or not so's you'd notice, and Theresa Russell is pretty. And if they don't, Ken Russell clearly learned a lot of whys and wherefores. So did David Hines, wno had the original idea. Hines sold his play to Hollywood, but he's still a taxi driver.

He doesn't understand it. The film cost $16 million, and he can afford a new cab. He went to the Whore preview, and couldn't find a seat He congrat ulated Theresa Russell, who didn't know who he was. After wards, the Hollywood party repaired to the Groucho Club while Hines picked up his cab, and started looking for fares. "It was unreal." A real suffering artist, is David Hines, cast down among the fatheads.

If only nuns took cabs as often as whores, that Ken Russell could make a film about him. Whore opens on July 19 that there are disadvantages. Anyone with me gets their private life gone over. It isn't nice and it isn't easy. But it's part of the game.

I've chosen to play it but I can't expect too many others to want to. "Besides how do I find a man who likes me for myself? If you are in my position, you trust, but you are often let down. "Yes, I'm afraid of growing old without this wish being fulfilled, but also because I'm a very physical person I love to run and dance and I'm full of energy and I hate to think that a day will come when I can't do it. But that's life. You grow up.

You become more tolerant of yourself and other people. I'm more patient now not much more, but a bit. I want some hair left when I'm 80, whether it's blonde or not." Copyright reserved bore whole cinemas with last night's dream, to use the director's chair as a psychiatrist's couch. As a result, we know he has difficulties with squirmy things and spiky bits. With worms, snakes, vomit, suspenders, Catholicism, rape, women, death, and prostitution.

And sadism. Russell's still very interested in that. For his next trick, he hopes to alert audiences to their suppressed masochism. He's going through a period of sexual liberation, he's heard some interesting things about "subjugation He wants to film Venus In Furs. "I'm beginning to feel that most people, although they don't make a song and dance about it, have these feelings.

I think that expressing it in a film is something people would go with." THE extraordinary thing is, that someone may well give this amateur sex-therapist the money to do it. Why not? They gave him money to film The Lair Of The White Worm, two hours of sticky self-indulgence which made a clown out of every participant actor. "This was the first horror film that had something to do with English mythology and all that," Russell averred, importantly. Lair notwithstanding, Russell was invited to film his life story for the South Bank Show. He cast his two-year-old son as himself, waggishly confirming his status as "the oldest enfant terrible in the film business," one popular cliche he has never tried to deny, and which, as he gets older and more terrible, will become ever less contest able.

The film said very little about his art, but much about being an artist which in Russell mythology, means starving, shrieking, communing rowdily with nature, and being wronged by pig-headed critics. And the more Russell is wronged, the more it confirms his right to a place at the art- be like going to group therapy or something. He's going to be confronting one of my brothers' alcoholism and Christopher's homosexuality as it were in open court, though for me there's no judgment involved whatsoever. I've got quite a big family and we are all insane in one way and another. But I think he's already come to terms with most of it, and he'll survive this OK.

"Yes, I think I'd have been a very different person if my mother hadn't died when I was so young. But you survive these things, and now I would like to marry and have children of my own oh, six or seven of them. I'm cast as a very aggressive person but I'm also pretty maternal too, as you can see in the film. But first, I have to find a man and that's more difficult than you might suppose. "He'll have to be pretty strong and he'll have to know jUfj DlwmitfVfctulRifll, Qfli EMflfe-MiFi iinnnmw mmmtr In bed with the woman who dares Hjjjft ffl BARCLAYS want to explore the why, the wherefore, and the fact that someone's given me a million dollars to do it, that's fine." Which confirms what many have long suspected about Ken Russell.

His films don't mean anything, unless you're him. He did sensationalise the lives of composers in order to promote his own, malodorous fantasies about sex, corruption and death. He thinks it's artistic expression. But being Russell simply means being paid to for me to think that my marriage to him didn't work and that now he's with someone else. But I'm not devastated and paralysed by it I know everyone would like to think that I am.

But I'm not. I still love him, and I probably always will. But I have to get on with my life. "As to that life, well, perhaps my father was right when he said that I was growing up on stage. And in a way I'm confronting him about a lot of issues through this movie and, though it may be painful in the beginning, in the end it's very growth-provoking for us both.

I think he'll understand, given time. "Actually, he hasn't seen the movie yet. He lives in Michigan and I didn't want to put him through all the insanity of the Los Angeles premiere. So I'll probably set up a private screening for him. It's going to 8 Ha HELEN ANDY APaWSOWTOOPIDE LA TOUR VICTORIA CARLIHG ALAN HAYWOOD from preceding page few favourable reviews and people said he looked pretty good, so he stopped worrying.

He's the voice of sanity in the movie if you like. "Of course, Kevin Costner didn't sign a release either but there were notices posted up everywhere saying that if you walk into certain rooms you will have the camera there, so he knew the score. "No, I wasn't angry when he called the show 'neat', just irritated. Because if that's all it is, I've failed. So I made my feelings clear.

He probably wasn't too thrilled about it, but he's got seven Oscars now so why should he care? "As for the bit about Sean Pennl, it was there because somebody asked me the ques tion who was the love ot my life? And I said, quite truthfully, that he was. It's very sad by JENNIFER PHILLIPS Director GEHALdNE McEWAN Kathy Burke Eleanor David Leonard Fenton Bob Goody Peter Jonfleld Domlrrio Keating Kevin MoNally Christopher Simon Reginald Tslboe Tom Watt III nam.