Enigmatic musical chameleon Arthur Russell gets the cinematic treatment he deserves. By BASIL LAWRENCE.

AS MUCH an exercise in portraiture as it is a period piece, this loving tribute to the chameleonic Arthur Russell will hopefully open more eyes and ears to the ineffable brilliance of his music. Disappointingly, the session I attended for this intimate biopic was sparsely patronised; perhaps I’m being presumptuous in expecting more than 30 people to be au fait with Russell’s exceptional talents, but somehow I expected an audience akin to the one for The Devil and Daniel Johnston from a couple of years back. After all, it’s no small deal to have the likes of Philip Glass, Allen Ginsberg and David Toop singing your praises. And Jens Lekman fans, where were you!? Don’t you want to know who your humble hero’s been cribbing from all this time? Obviously not, or I would have seen you slinking into one of the Scott Walker sessions from last year, too.

Musicologist Toop – as erudite as ever – aptly describes Russell’s music as having a feeling of ‘oceanic formlessness’, from which fragments of shapes were melded and married to a malleable melange of sounds. Russell was in the habit of constantly re-working, discarding and inventing ideas and sounds – with one piece of his fine-tuned for more than five years. Yet this was no high-falutin’, precious composer doing serious A.R.T. – no sirree Bob –; instead he could be found getting down and dirty in amongst the dubplates and discotheques, a fish-out-of-water breathing new life into a genre ripe for experimentation. A stubbornly single-minded individual, Russell found himself in the middle of it all and yet forever on the perimeter; his generic goulashes astounding those around him while keeping him far away from the wider attention he so often craved. Indeed, for all the words written about his supposed avant-garde leanings, it may come as a surprise to some that Russell actually entertained dreams of becoming a pop star, albeit a highly unconventional, skewiff one. However, as one interviewee bluntly points out, he had none of the characteristics required to be a chart star. It didn’t help, either, that the closer he got to the limelight, the more he seemed to recoil from it.

One gets a sense of how Russell’s music took the shapes it did through the confluence of the natural and man-made environments he lived in: the wide-open spaces and maize mazes of his Iowan childhood; the nooks and crannies of the library he turned to as an acne-scarred adolescent; the claustrophobic atmosphere of the San Franciscan Buddhist commune where he honed his playing skills; the cloistered cosiness of his New York apartment juxtaposed with the pendulous expanse of the harbour he’d drift over on regular Staten Island ferry jaunts. As with other cult-figure-of-fascination docos such as Jandek on Corwood and Scott Walker: 20 Century Man, the impressionistic visuals attempt to spatio-temporally evoke Russell’s enigmatic existence, with a much greater degree of success than the aforementioned films. At times the fluid sideways movement recalls Stan Brakhage, while the aesthetic contrast between grainy footage from the late ’70s/early ’80s and the crisp colourisation found elsewhere functions as something of a metaphor for Russell’s music and approach to life.

Given the film’s meditative tone and leisurely tempo, it’s easy to take for granted the extraordinary amount of detail ventured by the interviewees. Instead of the abstract-associative sycophantism of the Bonos of this world (sorry to have to pick on you again, Mr Hewson), the blanks are filled with love and admiration by those who knew Russell best: his sweetly amusing parents; fellow musicians and producers; and his faithful, incredibly supportive long-term partner Tom Lee – who in one particularly heartbreaking segment reveals how the discovery that Arthur had contracted AIDS meant their monogamy had most assuredly come to an end.

Russell’s battle with AIDS, a disease which had decimated so many of his colleagues and friends, did not prevent him from exploring his unique world of sound. If anything, it made him even more determined to bridge the gap between a child-like state of innocence and an ecstatic, synaesthetic sexuality; between unforgettable melody and pure sound. Ironically, according to some, he was only getting stronger musically as he grew weaker mentally.

There have been few musicians to my knowledge who have articulated such an atmospherically varied sonic spectrum, particularly those who focus on just one instrument. And what better instrument to explore these realms of sound than the cello, an instrument capable of evoking something akin to saudade – simultaneously melancholic and joyous, chthonic and interstellar; leaping up to stamp the ground; the therapeutically communal feeling expressed by Russell in his song ‘Go Bang’: “I want to see all my friends at once”.