Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell
| Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell | |
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| Directed by | Matt Wolf |
| Produced by |
Philip Aarons Shelley Fox Aarons Kyle Garner Ben Howe Mark Lewin Kyle Martin Matt Wolf |
| Cinematography | Jody Lee Lipes |
| Edited by | Lance Edmands |
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Release date
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Running time
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71 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell is a documentary film about musician Arthur Russell. Released theatrically in 2008, the film was generally well received by critics, winning various awards at international film festivals. Its world premiere was at the Berlin International Film Festival (Panorama), and its theatrical premieres were at the IFC Center in New York and the ICA in London.
The title, Wild Combination, refers to one of Russell's songs by the same name.
Due to the lack of actual interview footage of Russell, the film uses artificial archival materials of an actor wearing Russell's clothes, filmed around Iowa and New York City. Filmed using the outmoded VHS and Super8 formats, the film's recreations are inexact reconstructions of Russell's life, attempting to produce a dream-like quality similar to Russell's music.
Wild Combination begins with interviews of Russell's parents discussing their youngest offspring's childhood. The film describes how Russell as a young boy is obsessed with Timothy Leary and insecure about his acne. Leaving Iowa for San Francisco in the late sixties, he joins a Buddhist collective and befriends Allen Ginsberg. Russell decides to move to New York in the early seventies, where he starts working as the musical director of the Kitchen and becomes part of the downtown scene of artists, sharing an apartment building with Allen Ginsberg and Richard Hell. Russell engages in nearly every music scene the city has to offer: disco at David Mancuso's Loft, rock at CBGB, minimal composition at the Kitchen, and Allen Ginsberg's poetry recitations. In 1978, Russell begins dating Tom Lee, whom he stays with until his AIDS-related death in 1992.
Other footage shows Russell later in life, ravaged by AIDS, but still able to play his cello and sing. Russell eventually succumbs to dementia and throat cancer. The film ends with Emily Russell, Arthur's mother, speculating that had Arthur continued to live past forty, "He would have made it, he would have gone far".
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