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Savage Messiah by Ken Russell with Lindsay Kemp



"Every blow must be a true one. Every blow is a risk.You take your whole life in your hands."




The photo shows Lindsay Kemp on the left and Scott Antony on the right. This is from a scene I like in this movie. A sculptor Henri Gaudier (Scott Antony) talks to his agent Angus Corky (Lindsay Kemp ) and girlfriend Sophie Brzeska (Dorothy Tutin) about what art means to him. Dame Helen Mirren, the well known Shakespearean actress also stars in this film. The production designer was Derek Jarman. This is a biographical film of the sculptor Henri Gaudier -Brzeska and is based on the letters he sent to his lover, Sophie Brzeska. This is the central scene in this film. The director made this film because the letters Henri Gaudier wrote were what inspired him to go into the arts and finally become a film director. The director said, "It would have been so easy to go into my father's business and opted for the easy life, but Gaudier taught me there was a life outside commerce and it was well worth fighting for.". The director's passion can be felt throughout the entire movie. He double mortgaged his house and financed most of the money himself.

I would recommend this film to anyone that aspires to go into the arts. It was a huge inspiration for me. The director also said "it will ever be an inspiration to anyone down on their luck with a belief in their own talent, despite the hostility of those who should know better. Here was a tale worth telling on film."


Here are some dialogues from this scene in the photo.


Gaudier as he hits the stone to make a new work of sculpture:

"The only kind of work I like is when every blow is a good one.

Where you know the man can see what he wants in the stone before he opens the stone.

No messing about.

Yet unless you let the stone influence you, you’re lost."


"Every blow must be a true one. Every blow is a risk.

You take your whole life in your hands."


"You can always tell a bad artist like a bad doctor by the fact that he always tries to surround his art by some hocus-pocus.

Sure there’s a mystery. But then it is as much a mystery to the one who is doing it as to the one who is looking at it."


"If it doesn’t give anything while doing it, how the hell is it going to give anybody else?"


The music in this film is wonderful. I learned to love Debussy's "Nocturne" through the experience of seeing this film. In 2010, I would make a strange ensemble version of "Nuages" from Debussy's "Nocturne" featuring acoustic guitar, cello, electric bass, toy piano, accordion, recorder, violin, prepared piano, tabla, and a mezzo-soprano voice.

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