MINDBENDER
Ben Flanagan braves Ken Russell's Uri Geller biopic to find just how bad things can get for a maverick filmmaker.
Welcome back to the final installment in VOLUME 20: Ken Russell’s History of the World. Today, Ben Flanagan explores Russell’s artistic nadir in the 1990s, leading him to Israel.
Ken Russell’s period films bring history to life. In their scenes of dancing and abandon, notably in his composer biopics and D.H. Lawrence adaptations, the immediacy of Russell’s form captures these characters' lives as totems, bursting through the constricts of their respective eras into a new age of enlightenment. But when confronted with the present, Russell began to lose his sense.
As a result of endless controversy and commercial failures, Russell’s 1990s films consist solely of for-hire affairs—a sign that he was bereft of British funding. As though Russell were self-flagellating, his attempts at workmanlike direction were consistently corrupted by his wild man personality. First, Whore (1991), which retreads Crimes of Passion (1986) as a Ferrara-esque street life fable. It came out the same year as his staid and muddled made-for-TV telling of the Dreyfus Affair, Prisoner of Honour (1991). Later, he’d drop Dogboys (1998), an enjoyable HBO romp that fulfils its thriller framework while bringing the Russellisms in surprising ways. By the millennium, Russell would abandon sense entirely and commit to sheer video art Gothic experimenta in The Fall of the Louse of Usher (2002). But, if time is luck, as Gong Li once said, then by the 1990s, Russell had run out.
In these 1990s films it’s clear that Russell was working towards a certain simplicity and visual clarity. The constrictions of TV budgets, especially in Dogboys, forced Russell to find other means of expression. Often, the camera is planted to a single setup for a scene, cutting out his baroque editing style and celebrated handheld, relying instead on production details and highly physical performances within a static frame to achieve the same Gothic abjection of his most lurid works. This, to my eye, is most fruitful when turning his mythmaking viewpoint to a contemporary figure, as Russell did with the Uri Geller biopic Mindbender (1994).
‘I like exploring the gap between image and person,’ the director says in Paul Sutton’s book Talking About Ken Russell (2016). Which is certainly less of a challenge when it comes to Franz Liszt or Tchaikovsky, than with a recent historical figure. Geller is the Israeli illusionist who took popular culture by storm in the 1970s through ever-so-daring magic tricks, often involving the bending of keys and cutlery. But he is perhaps equally known for accusations of fraudulence, and for, as described in the BBC documentary, The Secret Life of Uri Geller (2013), possessing a ‘Zelig-like ability to pop up in the highest circles of power.’
There are cursed films, film maudits, turkeys. Their formula often revolves around bad production value and formal elements, or some kind of moral failing. And then there’s whatever the hell Mindbender is. Russell’s visions of myth, legend, iconography translated through an Israeli TV production serves to capture universal anxieties at the dawn of a new millennium. It’s a recipe for disaster, with Russell’s minimised formalism slowed down to more closely resemble a generic, commercial biopic. But given Geller’s life, filled with controversy, dispute, half-truths, it’s as though Russell feels an inherent push to abstract the iconography of his subject. Per Geller, Russell made the film because ‘he liked the idea of going to Israel.’
Mindbender was co-written with Yael Stern-O'Dwyer, of the 1993 mini-series Night Shift: For the Glory of the State of Israel fame. It opens with a hallucinatory sequence conveniently brushing over Geller’s involvement in the Israeli Army Paratroopers during the 1967 Six-Day War. A woman in a red dress dances suggestively on a tank, harkening to Russell’s greatest influence—Fellini’s own late style epic, Roma (1971)—and pulling the sex and death drives into one obvious symbol. A set amassed from giant clocks winds backwards, telling the viewer that this man’s experiences are outside of time, unbound to Israel’s misdeeds or any trauma. He is unstuck, a Billy Pilgrim figure. This is Russell by numbers—a Brass Eye (1997-2001) parody version of his style.
From here, Mindbender covers the basic history of Geller’s rise, focusing on the period in 1973 during which American scientist Joe Hartman (Terence Stamp) brought Geller to the USA to conduct scientific experiments, used by the mystic as a way to introduce himself to the American public and media. A truly miserable actor named Ishai Golan portrays Geller as a flat, doe-eyed dreamer. It doesn’t capture the real man’s magnanimous enigma, one of a man who wears shades indoors because he’s worried people might notice he’s an alien. ‘I believe there are better things in life than being a male model,’ he complains.
The fixed camera angle approach doesn’t cut through a bad performance to truly bring Geller to life. Russell is more interested in emulating his sleight of hand, such as a wedding that’s revealed, through a slow zoom, to be a photoshoot. Geller shoots a forlorn look into the middle-distance as he contemplates his magical gift, ‘I’m tired of everyone writing me off as a phony.’ But he’s soon exposed as a fraud by a cynical manager who just wants Geller to play the hits, driving him to meet narrator Shipi (Idan Alterman), who makes a pledge to serve Geller by painting a mandala on his car. Shipi too claims to be telepathic, and the pair share a moment of loaded mind-linking. A strange ambivalence—the film is Geller approved, but Russell seems skeptical, if not openly contemptible, of the story.
At a certain point, Russell loses interest in his Geller avatar and just starts focusing on his real-life wife, Hetty Baynes. who portrays Kitti Hartman as a gauche American who blacks up in the bath and drapes herself around the contours of a whitewalled ‘LA’ house, often cast in visual symmetry with her giant poodle. But Geller can’t escape his past forever, and soon finds himself at a garish hotel built on the beach in Tel Aviv, the sea mocking either him or his audience as he swiftly resolves a Freudian conflict with his IDF father.
There’s a clear gap between the events on screen and their formal depiction. But perhaps this is too generous to a Russell who’s as in thrall to depicting celebrity as Geller is in seeking it. When he goes to the USA and features on a talk show (the vaguely Ed Sullivan-spoofing The Don Drake Show), he’s treated like a disruptor, part of a ‘flower power’ movement. But Geller doesn’t have any ideas of his own. He doesn’t push back against hegemonic power, only promoting his own individualism. A psychotic belief in his own importance, a cult leader without a cult. A climactic car chase even has Geller use telekinesis to drive. Russell goes beyond even Geller’s own claims here, begging the question of how much he’s taking the piss.
In the last scene, Russell imagines a future where spoon bending is an Olympic sport (complete with a giant boxing kangaroo). Geller goes on TV dressed in messianic attire and coaxes the global audience to ‘neutralise the nuclear weapons that threaten us all.’ Cut to a Chinese (?) dictator watching who fires a nuke which, through Geller’s harnessing of collective mind powers, explodes mid-flight. Cut to credits, ‘Rocket Man’ plays. It’s nice for an avowed Zionist like Geller to posit generic disarmament messages, and not sinister at all.
Russell ironises Geller, but whether through budget or lack of interest, the satire tries to have it both ways. None of it really excuses him filming in Israel. Russell cynically filmed this film just to film it. Geller clearly feels salty about the film—otherwise he wouldn’t occasionally post on Facebook about how bad it is. Geller is totemic of a cringe post-hippy capitalism: imagined spirituality, cheap psychedelia. If he emerged today, he would be another social media influencer, a Jeremy Fragrance or Bryan Johnson. Perhaps by delivering the story Geller ostensibly wants, Russell achieves an ugly satire of the ridiculous spoon man.