I’m often not in favor of a filmed version of a work of music.

When you go to a live concert, it’s just the music.

Often the music is even better on records, because the sound is curated, the microphones placed, balance adjusted, re-takes integrated. It’s perfect.

You do miss the presence of other people, the audience of which you are a part and you become larger than you are alone.

So it isn’t always just the music.

But there’s always the danger, yes, always, when someone tries to interpret the music by visual representation.

Their interpretation may not be yours, or the composer’s, or the music’s.

And once someone implants a vision, it superimposes itself. You can cry, “No! That’s not right! That’s not the way it is or should be!” but you can’t get it out of your head.

There are many examples of mistaken interpretations and graphic tyranny, and I’ve discussed some at some length.

Like modern dress which denies the roots, or cartoons which cheapen and devalue.

But sometimes, just sometimes, a visualist can enhance the experience if the original is non-specific.

I’m thinking specifically. I just saw on Classic Arts Showcase, the last part, I tuned in late, of Ken Russell’s cinematic response to Holst’s The Planets, Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity.

Russell conflates videos of joy and energy, pure jollity. They augment the music without competing with it. Holst was non-specific.

This, by a stretch of the imagination, allows me to do two things at once, kill two birds with one stone.

I think, for example specifically, of how those nay-sayers tried to prove that the Moon Landing was a hoax and never happened.

They built a mock-up of the moon in a studio, with slow-motion to show an “astronaut” leap along in low gravity, and said, “See! This proves it was fake and never happened!”

Cooler saner minds might say something like, “Why did you waste your money? To show that something is possible is not proof that it actually did. We’ll take you to libel court before you can, we’ll win and you’ll pay. The truth will out.”

Of course, these days, when truth is outlawed and alternative reality is manufactured, it’s another and unreal world.

Just another thing I don’t know what to do about.

I think of course of the German Men’s Chorus, the Comedian Harmonists in the 1930s, singing hilariously in German in a time of national crisis, Wochenend und Sonnenschein, “Happy Days are Here Again.”

But Ken Russell has a camera sense, and I want to see more of his work, like what he does with The Planets.