Gay experimental musician Arthur Russell had a small but devoted following before his death from AIDS in 1992. He was a composer/performer who played the cello, appeared in various bands and worked with folks as diverse as Philip Glass, David Byrne and disco legend David Mancuso. Now, with Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, gay experimental filmmaker Matt Wolf has generated a renewed interest in Russell and his music.
The film just came out on DVD.
On the phone from his home in New York, Wolf said that he was not inclined to make a music documentary. “I am not a record-head,” he insists, indicating that his early musical tastes included the Talking Heads, the Smiths, Depeche Mode and Joy Division – bands, he claims, gave him a sense of an “alternative, artistic, gay identity.”
What prompted Wolf to make Wild Combination was that was Russell was “a gay outsider – compelling, lovable, romantic, thoughtful, and a genius. His love story with Tom drew me in. If he wasn’t gay, I don’t think I would have made this film.”
The 26 year-old filmmaker was 10 when Russell died. But he had read about the musician and was eventually prompted to contact Tom Lee, Russell’s partner of nearly a dozen years about making a film.
“I think that because I was 23 and gay and approached him with a serious interest, he felt compelled to support me,” Wolf says about the origins of the project. And Lee was incredibly supportive. The filmmaker recalls that Lee “gave me Arthur’s actual clothes for the [recreation] scenes and vouched for my integrity to the Russells.”
The most moving scenes in Wild Combination are the remembrances of the musician by his parents and his lover. A speech by Chuck Russell about seeing his dying son is powerful and poignant, and when Lee recounts how he came to meet Arthur, it is incredibly touching.
Wolf use these “emotional anchors” to frame the film and create the moving portrait that effectively draws viewers into Russell’s life, world and music.
Although Wild Combination follows a very conventional documentary approach, Wolf explains that his film provides a “false chronology.” Russell pursued the different music projects seen in the film simultaneously.
“I tried to order a progression to his [activities],” the filmmaker explains. “People wanted to force a nonlinear [narrative], but to me, that wasn’t appropriate. The conventional approach helps people connect to Russell and enhances the experience of his music for a larger audience. I didn’t want to make it overly specialized.”
Furthermore, the interviews with people such as Philip Glass, serve to “contextualize and historicize” Russell’s involvement in musical and cultural history.
“Glass was a real voice of reason that [provided] a cultural history because he’s so recognizable,” Wolf suggests, “People from the avant-garde world couldn’t understand what Russell was doing with disco music. Glass was able to say [musicians] were blurring the art and pop lines to find an audience. It was not such a radical departure. Russell just pursued it more.”
Wild Combination also uses archival and recreated footage to tell Russell’s story. Wolf, who studied filmmaking at NYU – he met the film’s cinematographer, editor and producer at school – has a fine artist’s eye and scenes in the film depicting such things as Russell’s love of ambient noise are strikingly beautiful. Wolf’s focus is as much on the visuals in the film as on the interviews and the music itself. He painstaking matched the recreated scenes of Russell – such as one of him listening to music on the Staten Island Ferry – to existing video footage of Russell to create a seamless and timeless portrait. Wolf admits that his favorite moments in the film are the “purely visual ones, driven less by narrative and storytelling.”
Given the scarcity of material available, and the fact that even fewer of the extant clips had good sound or visuals, the film’s highlights are the magical sequences of Russell auditioning or performing.
Wild Combination runs a lean 70 minutes, and the director claims he “struggled” with the length, making sure “every cut pushed the story forward.” He says, “The good stuff is in there,” adding that he was “ruthless, editorially, about who and what to include.” He talks enthusiastically about scenes that are included as extras on the Wild Combination DVD including an “anti-music video” featuring Allen Ginsberg going into an extended Buddhist mantra while Russell performs, which did not fit into the film.
Yet Wolf’s remarkable documentary is an inspiring tribute to Russell’s legacy and his music. As people discover Russell’s work for the first time here, they, too, will likely come to appreciate this gay experimental outsider musician as deeply as Wolf does.
