KEN RUSSELL’S ALTERED STATES

The movies as medium haven’t begun to exhaust their possibilities. Nearly a century after they were born in their present projected-on-screen form, they are still discovering new things to do. It is a large part of the allure of film for those who love it and take it more than half-seriously.

New technologies keep coming along, of course, making it possible to experience deep space or time warps or the bestiaries on imaginary planets, or to see in the dark. But there are also the film makers with what can be called the extended imagination, who are trying to move beyond straight-line storytelling to convey states of soul and mind and distorted, distended emotional upsets.

The heirs of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” that pioneering German attempt at conveying off-center mental processes, are very much among us. The innocent dream sequences and even some of the nightmare passages of the Hollywood past look very innocent by comparison.

Like Michael Wilmington, who reviewed it in these pages, I’m not sure that “Gothic,” Ken Russell’s essay in historical hallucinatory states, quite succeeds as he intended it to succeed. Too often, especially in its florid and operatic acting, it appears merely preposterously mannered.

Yet there are sequences in which Russell’s camera, and his montages, do convey something like the real horror of altered perceptions.

And the true horror of those altered states Russell is demonstrating is not that they are wholly unbased and imaginary (pink elephants turning malevolent and thundering toward you). It is that the most shattering of these waking nightmares arise from, and make visible if not tangible, all the subject’s deepest fears. It is their immediacy, and the credibility that comes of having thought about them during normal or non-altered times, that generates the awful power of these visions.

Leeches, snakes, claustrophobic confinement, premature burial, intimations of their own deaths or the deaths of loved ones--whatever gives his principals the shuddering sweats in half-waking moments--receive the full-color, stereophonic treatment from Russell in “Gothic.” (The music by Thomas Dolby is extremely supportive and impressive, a Russell trademark.)

But beyond these acted-out specifics, Russell, working from Stephen Volk’s original script, is also dealing with a crisis point in intellectual history. The seemingly limitless powers of science, being revealed almost daily as the 19th Century began, were evoking alarms about the dark powers of science, and the consequences of man’s arrogant defiance of God and traditional beliefs.

Out of the fateful 1816 gathering of Byron, Shelley and their women at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland, which is the substance of “Gothic,” Mary Shelley (as she became) wrote “Frankenstein.” It grew out of a literary game the guests set for each other to see who could write the scariest text. Another guest, Dr. James Polidori, wrote a short story called “The Vampyre.” It wasn’t published until 1819, but it was to have unending reverberations for Hollywood. Polidori killed himself two years later.

“Frankenstein” is about the ultimate dream: that science could create or restore life itself, and about the monstrous results of an attempt to prove it. (The book as read is affecting in a deeper way than the films have been.)

The statute of limitations has long since expired, else the descendants of the poets and their ladies could sue for defamation of character. Russell makes it impossible to believe that these indulgent fools could write their names, let alone an ode.

But however intricate their sex lives, they all got a lot of work done, and there was something of the Scarlet Pimpernel about Byron, who worked in the cause of Italian and then Greek independence, and who died of a fever even as he sailed toward Greece on a ship he had outfitted to aid the fight.

Russell did choose an eventful few days. Yet, as is often the case with him, they seem less an end than a means to test the elasticities of film and to prove the medium’s power to be felt and not merely followed. The question you ask after a Russell film is not “What did you think?” but “What did you feel?”

It may be true that Russell did not go far enough in the nightmare visions; but it may also be true that “Gothic” is all so operatic, flirting from the start with the slapstick preposterous (a fall in the mud), that he gave himself no prepared ground from which the hallucinations could rise like skyrockets. Still the sweats and shudders are, now and again, undeniable. A Ken Russell film, now as before, is like nobody else’s.