Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell

June 18, 2008 by Chris Burns  Send to a Friend

The late musical genius Arthur Russell has received fantastic attention with compilations and previously unreleased recordings in the past ten years and Matt Wolf’s Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell is a fantastic biographical documentary that gives amazing perspective on the musical cult figure through interviews, archive footage and the music itself. From his days as a misunderstood child and teen in Oskaloosa, Iowa to his untimely death from AIDS at the peak of his creativity in New York City, Russell is portrayed as a unique and pioneering character that literally followed the beat of his own drum, but was often highly self-critical and difficult to work with.

While one can garner the basic details of his life, music and involvement with pivotal counterculture, avant garde and post-punk figures in San Francisco and New York City from any number of blogs or his Wikipedia entry, the interviews with his colleagues and family give unique perspective on Russell as something than more than a mad scientist who cooked up arrangements all day in his apartment. The interviews with Russell’s parents were extremely touching and toned with a mixed (sleeping) bag of pride, guilt, regret, nostalgia and the all-too-common parental misunderstandings. Interviews with Russell’s longtime boyfriend Tom Lee also offer an intimate, personal and domestic look at the artist that juxtaposes very neatly against clips of Russell’s musical peers.

The film focuses primarily on Russell’s involvement and production of avant garde and experimental music, my only complaint is that it should have focused a bit more on his seminal dance music efforts. I think that many up and coming DJs and other lovers of music have come to “re-discover” Russell through his fantastic dance floor productions and a deeper look could have been taken in this direction. Interviews with those who helped ‘break’ this records, such as David Mancuso of the Loft or Francois Kevorkian, may (or may not) have added a different light or perspective than the other musicians and artists who were featured. Either way, they would have been appreciated. Despite these very minor objections, the film was extremely well done and paints a wonderful, in-depth portrait.

++++Definitely a must-see for the Silverdocs festival (if you can get a ticket for tonight (Wednesday).+++

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