Ken Russell
Steven Soderbergh mashes up the three films in the Harry Palmer trilogy: The Ipcress File (1965), Funeral In Berlin (1966), and Billion Dollar Brain (1967). Michael Caine stars as British Intelligence officer Harry Palmer in the cold war thrillers, here remixed into a feature-length music video designed to be "visual wallpaper", as a new narrative plays out in split screens and mirrored action.
Following the recent death of Ken Russell, Alan Yentob looks back over the career of the flamboyant film director responsible for Women In Love, Tommy and The Devils. Friends and admirers - including Glenda Jackson, Terry Gilliam, Twiggy, Melvyn Bragg, Robert Powell and Roger Daltrey - recall a pioneering documentary-maker, talented photographer and fearless film director.
On-set footage of the film The Devils (1971) with commentary by editor Mike Bradsell
A short promotional film for the 2010 Oldenburg Film Festival consisting of various actors and film personalities telling a joke about an exceptionally talented frog.
A cine-opera retelling of the legend of Boudica, warrior queen and her uprising against the Roman occupiers of Britain.
The work of professional photographer David Hurn, shown tackling a wide range of subjects from fashion to photojournalism to candid paparazzo shots.
The result of a challenge from Melvyn Bragg to write a film that Ken Russell himself would be eager to see banned, was A Kitten For Hitler – a 10-minute short in which a plucky young Jewish boy traverses the globe on a quest to warm the Führer's heart with the gift of a cuddly feline.
Trapped in a house of horror, seven people discover that the only way they'll get out alive is to tell their scariest stories.
In the 1970s a music promoter plucks Siamese twins from obscurity and grooms them into a freakish rock'n'roll act. A dark tale of sex, strangeness and rock music.
Ken Russell revisits the location of his 1960 documentary about coal mining in Northumberland and catches up with some of the people who appeared in the film. In 2005, the last of the deep mines was closed down. As the remnants of a once-proud industry was about to disappear, Ken returned to Northumberland to meet the men and women he filmed almost half a century earlier.
The true story of a man who posed as director Stanley Kubrick during the production of Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut, despite knowing very little about his work and looking nothing like him.
Ken Russell revisits the life of Elgar, with musical background provided by the composer's works.
Hell on Earth is an hour-long documentary presented by Mark Kermode. It's about Ken Russell's 1971 film, The Devils which is one of the most controversial films ever made. Kermode chats to Russell as well as two of the films stars Georgina Hale and Murray Melvin. Also included are scenes that were cut from the released film for being too controversial.
Rock star Roddy Usher's wife is murdered and Rod is sent to a lunatic asylum in this gothic-comedy-horror-musical.
A look at "Dracula" in the arts and his supposed real-life inspiration Vlad Tepes.
Ken Russell's 1995 TV movie adaptation. This is a re-working of the Treasure Island theme with Long Jane Silver instead of Long John Silver. Hetty Baynes plays this role in the style of Marilyn Monroe.
Documentary by Ken Russell that shows Alice traveling through a century of Russian's history, from the period of Tsarism, through Socialism and Glasnost. Alice's original characters embody ideological conflicts crossing politics, art and cultural movements. (http://alicenations.blogspot.com)
Lady Constance Chatterley is married to the handicapped Sir Clifford Chatterley, who was wounded in the First World War. When they move to his family's estate, Constance (Connie) meets their tough-yet-quiet groundskeeper, Oliver Mellors. Soon, she discovers that the source of her unhappiness is from not being fulfilled in love, and in turning to the arms of Mellors, she has a sexual awakening that will change her thoughts forever.
This biographical film of Czech composer Martinu is in two parts: the first part a recurring dream, the second a Freudian analysis of the dream.
France, 1897. Colonel Georges Picquart challenges the French government when he discovers the obscure political maneuvers that led to the imprisonment of the Jewish Captain Alfred Dreyfus after being convicted of espionage in 1894.
This trio of tales, based on classic short stories, chronicles the complicated relations between the sexes. In "The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt," salesman Gerry seduces train traveler Viki. Then, in "Dusk Before Fireworks," a night of romance between Hobie and Kit goes bad when the phone keeps ringing. Finally, in "Hills Like White Elephants," Robert discovers Hadley is pregnant.
The life of Austrian composer Anton Bruckner and his numeromania.
An expatriate British publisher unexpectedly finds himself working for British intelligence to investigate people in Russia.
Ken Russell's rather loose adaptation of the last part of D.H. Lawrence's "The Rainbow" sees impulsive young Ursula coming of age in pastoral England around the time of the Boer War. At school, she is introduced to lovemaking by a bisexual physical education instructress. While experiencing disillusionment in her first career attempt (teaching), she has an affair with a young Army officer, who wants to marry her. Unable to accept a future of domesticity, she breaks with him, and eventually leaves home in search of her destiny.
The updated autobiography of Britain’s most controversial film director, the maker of Women in Love, The Devils, The Music Lovers, Tommy and The Rainbow, is as unconventional and brilliant as his best films. Moving with astonishing assurance through time and space, Russell recreates his life in a series of interconnected episodes – his thirties childhood in Southampton, his first sexual experience (watching Disney’s Pinocchio), his schooldays at the Nautical College, Pangbourne, early careers in the Merchant Marine and the Royal Air Force, dancing days at the Shepherds Bush Ballet Club and of course his career as a film-maker, beginning with an extraordinary interview with Huw Weldon for a job on Monitor. Full of marvellously funny anecdotes and fascinating insights into the realities of the film director's life, A British Picture is a remarkable autobiography.
Arrigo Boito's Il Mefestefele was first performed in 1868 and his most known work. In Ken Russell's modern interpretation presented by the Genoese Opera, it has Faust as an ageing hippy. He smokes marijuana and is tormented by his lost youth. Mephisto makes a bet with God that he can turn anyone to pagan life, even someone as innocent as Faust. From then on it is a battle of good against evil in a flamboyant, surreal display of primary colours, PVC costumes, nurses with swastikas, rocket trips, love and even characters dressed as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse. Ken Russell said because the devil is always with us is his reason for the contemporary setting.
London, England, November 5th, 1892, Guy Fawkes Night. The famous playwright Oscar Wilde and his lover Lord Alfred Douglas discreetly go to a luxury brothel where the owner, Alfred Taylor, has prepared a surprise for the renowned author: a private and very special performance of his play Salome, banned by the authorities, in which Taylor himself and the peculiar inhabitants of the exclusive establishment will participate.
In a remote corner of England's Peak District, a mysterious skull is unearthed. But even weirder is that Lady Sylvia steals the skull for use in worshiping - very erotically - her pagan god, The White Worm, who hungers for the taste of virginal flesh.
A courtroom 'drama' featuring Bob Guccione versus Ken Russell in a breach of contract case regarding disagreements over a script for a film version of Daniel De foe's "Moll Flanders" which Guccione hired Russell to direct.
The year is 1816. A sprawling villa in Switzerland is the setting for a stormy night of madness. On this night of the "Haunted Summer," five famous friends gather around an ancient skull to conjure up their darkest fears. Poets Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, Shelley's fiancée Mary Godwin, Mary's stepsister Claire Clairemont and Byron's friend John Polidori spend a hallucinogenic evening confronting their fears in a frenzy of shocking lunacy. Horrifying visions invade the castle - realizations of Byron's fear of leeches, Shelley's fear of premature burial, Mary's fear of birthing a stillborn child - all brought forth in a bizarre dreamscape. They share the terrifying fantasies that chase them through the castle that night. The events of that night later inspired Mary Shelley to write the classic "Frankenstein" and Dr. Polidori to pen "The Vampyre," which became the basis for the creation of Dracula..
Mexican tenor Francisco Araiza stars as Faust, and Erich Binder conducts the Vienna State Opera and Chorus in this 1985 production of Charles Gounod's five-act opera based on Goethe's poem. In an epic tale of good versus evil, Faust sells his soul to the devil (played by Italian bass Ruggero Raimondi) and tries to save Marguerite (Slovakian soprano Gabriela Benackova) from an eternity in hell. Walton Gronroos and Alfred Sramek co-star.
Joanna Crane lives a double life. During the day she works as fashion designer but during the night she is the high class prostitute China Blue. As she is accused for industrial spying, Bobby Grady is hired to shadow her. However, they fall in love. Meanwhile a psychopathic preacher starts stalking her.
Based on the famous Gustav Holst musical suite, this musical film takes watchers on a magnificent journey of the planets of the Solar System.
A research scientist explores the boundaries and frontiers of consciousness. Using sensory deprivation and hallucinogenic mixtures from native American shamans, he explores these altered states of consciousness and finds that memory, time, and perhaps reality itself are states of mind.
Composer and pianist Franz Liszt attempts to overcome his hedonistic life-style while repeatedly being drawn back into it by the many women in his life and fellow composer Richard Wagner.
The film begins on a train journey with Gustav Mahler (Robert Powell) and his wife Alma (Georgina Hale) confronting their failing marriage. The story is then recounted in a series of flashbacks (some of which are surrealistic and nightmarish), taking one through Mahler's childhood, his brother's suicide, his experience with anti-semitism, his conversion from Judaism to Catholicism, his marital problems, and the death of his young daughter. The film also contains a surreal fantasy sequence involving the anti-Semitic Cosima Wagner (Antonia Ellis), widow of Richard Wagner, whose objections to his taking control of the Court Opera were supposedly removed by his conversion to Catholicism. In the process, the film explores Mahler's music and its relationship to his life.
The film fictionalizes the real relationship between French sculptor Henri Gaudier and Polish writer Sophie Brzeska, twenty years his senior, who came to Paris, she says, for its “creative atmosphere.”
The assistant stage manager of a small-time theatrical company is forced to understudy for the leading lady at a matinée performance at which an illustrious Hollywood director is in the audience scouting for actors to be in his latest "all-talking, all-dancing, all-singing" extravaganza.
A dramatised historical account of the rise and fall of Urbain Grandier, a 17th-century Roman Catholic priest accused of witchcraft following alleged demonic possessions of sexually repressed nuns.
Composer, conductor and teacher Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky struggles against his homosexual tendencies by marrying, but unfortunately he chooses a wonky, nymphomaniac girl whom he cannot satisfy.
Documentary featuring candid Ken Russell interviews and unique footage of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies recording his score.
Russell's composer biopics were usually labours of love. This was the opposite: he regarded Strauss's music as "bombastic, sham and hollow", and despised the composer for claiming to be apolitical while cosying up to the Nazi regime. The film depicts Strauss in a variety of grotesquely caricatured situations: attacked by nuns after adopting Nietzsche's philosophy, he fights duels with jealous husbands, literally batters his critics into submission with his music and glorifies the women in his life and fantasies. (BFI Screenonline)
Growing up in the sheltered confines of a 1920's English coal-mining community, free-spirited sisters Gudrun and Ursula explore erotic love with a wealthy playboy and a philosophical educator, with cataclysmic results for all four.
The last five years of Frederick Delius's life through the eyes of a young composer and aide, Eric Fenby.
The story of the influential 19th century British poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his troubled and somewhat morbid relationship with his wife and his art.
A former British spy stumbles into in a plot to overthrow Communism with the help of a supercomputer. But who is working for whom?
The outrageous life of the American dancer of the 1920s, Isadora Duncan, whom Ken Russell described as "part genius and part charlatan".
Documentary shows Ken Russell at work on various BBC TV documentaries, with clips from Diary of a Nobody, The Debussy Film, Always on Sunday, Don't Shoot the Composer, Elgar and behind the scenes directing of Isadora Duncan. He discusses his working methods and filmmaking philosophy and is also shown at home entertaining his daughter Victoria.
Always On Sunday is a bio-pic on Le (Henri) Douanier Rousseau, a French naive painter.
An actor is playing Claude Debussy in a film about the composer's life, and finds himself identifying with his subject very closely.
A deck-chair attendant at a British resort promotes a film festival featuring a French sexpot.
Ken Russell's silent film treatment of the 19th century comic novel by the Brothers Grossmith - George and Weedon. Starring Bryan Pringle, Avril Elgar and Murray Melvin. Adapted by Ken Russell and John McGrath. First shown on BBC2 at 10.10pm on Saturday 12th December 1964 - as part of the 'Six' strand.
One of the most conceptually original of all the films that Ken Russell made for Monitor, this imagines an expedition of alien archaeologists (represented only by the soundtrack commentary) examining various artefacts strewn along a stretch of Britain's coastline and musing on their possible significance.
A partly dramatised account of the life of Sir Edward Elgar classical composer. Huw Wheldon narrates the life story over backdrops of beautiful mountain scenery, especially memorable is the image of young Elgar riding his horse around Malvern Hills.
Pop Goes the Easel was Ken Russell’s first full-length documentary for the BBC’s arts series Monitor. It focused on 4 British Pop Artists - Peter Blake, Peter Philips, Pauline Boty and Derek Boshier.
Peter Blake explores his passion for pop icons, Peter Phillips is featured with his cool companions, Derek Boshier voices his concerns with the American influence on British life and culture, and Pauline Boty, Britain's great female pop art painter who was to die only four years later, performs in a short dramatic dream piece.
Explores the worldview of A.W. Chesher, who has a special interest in painting steam traction engines.
Ken Russell's third Monitor documentary from 1962 is both a development from and inversion of the first, Lonely Shore. In that, an alien presence surveys a stretch of coastline strewn with assorted objects from early 1960s British lifestyles and tries (and mostly fails) to divine their meaning or purpose. The Preservation Man is also set in a series of object-strewn settings, but here they're part of the artist Bruce Lacey's collection of random junk, and their original function is irrelevant. Sensibly, Russell and commentator Huw Wheldon keep analysis to a minimum, preferring to use the film as an excuse to spend quarter of an hour in Lacey's amiable company.
Ken Russell is often cited as one of the fathers of the music video, with Tommy (1975) widely recognised as one of the pivotal works in the development of the form. However, as the far more obscure Monitor item London Moods from 1961 proves, he was experimenting with non-narrative illustrations of pre-recorded music fourteen years earlier.
Prokofiev (BBC, tx. 18/6/1961), subtitled 'Portrait of a Soviet Composer', was the second of Ken Russell's composer biopics, though it takes a rather different approach from his first, Gordon Jacob (BBC, tx. 29/3/1959). Whereas in the earlier film Russell had access to the composer himself, Sergei Prokofiev had died eight years earlier (coincidentally, on the same day as Stalin), and there appeared to be no authentic moving-image footage of him in existence
Ken Russell directed a short document of German actress (and widow) of famed composer Kurt Weill performing many of his best known compositions for BBC TV series "Monitor"
A study of Antoni Gaudí's architecture (especially the Church of the Holy Trinity in Barcelona), his sources of inspiration and his influence on Picasso. (BFI)
Mrs Wilhelmina Sterling shows her vast collection of pre-Raphaelite paintings, pottery and other artefacts at her home in Battersea.
Short documentary about Shelagh Delaney and her hometown Salford.
While most of Ken Russell's documentaries for the BBC's Monitor arts strand focused on a single creative figure, he would also occasionally make more wide-ranging surveys of the state of a particular art. The Light Fantastic (BBC, tx. 18/12/1960) was written and presented by Ron Hitchins, a Cockney barrow boy who has long been interested in a great many dance forms, and who has recently taken up Spanish dancing. Hitchins participates in some of the dance sequences, but his main contribution is an enthusiastic commentary that helps personalise what could have been simply a disparate collection of dance footage. He's not shy about expressing likes and dislikes, being none too keen on ballroom dancing (too choreographed), rock'n'roll (too monotonous) and Morris dancing (just doesn't like it), though anything genuinely spontaneous gets a thumbs up, even if it's a room full of people dressed in black swaying to the sound of a gong.
In 1960, Ken Russell visited Bedlington Colliery, Northumberland to make one of his first documentary films, following life in the mining community.
A personal and nostalgic film about an apartment building in Bayswater, where Russell once lived, and about the residents who inhabited it. The building is demolished to make way for an unattractive and bland office.
John Betjeman reminisces on Britain's great historical exhibitions since the 1870s: including Alexandra Palace, the Empire Exhibition at Wembley and the Festival of Britain. Also features a very special guest appearance by the National Film Theatre (today’s BFI Southbank).
Portrait of Spike Milligan, then part of The Goon Show examining his views on comedy,
Also known as Guitar Craze and the more evocative Hound Dogs and Bach Addicts, this Monitor item (Ken Russell's third for the pioneering BBC arts strand) offers a whistle-stop tour of how Britons are enthusiastically taking up the guitar in all sorts of ways. The instrument's sudden popularity came about as a by-product of the skiffle revival, which led a wide range of people to form bands whose instrumentation was generally as cheap and cheerful as possible. Washboards and comb-and-paper combinations were common, and the only conventional musical instrument was often the humble acoustic guitar.
A double portrait of the painters Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun, seen at work in their Suffolk studio while discussing their paintings.
The film was Ken Russell's first for television and was commissioned by Huw Wheldon, the head of the BBC's Monitor arts programme. Betjeman is shown visiting locations including Vauxhall Park, Aldersgate Street station (now the Barbican), Camden Town and Hatfield. He recites his poems 'Monody on the Death of Aldersgate Street Station', 'Business Girls', 'The Olympic Girl' and 'Hertfordshire'.
Ken Russell directed short documentary for the BBC TV program me "Monitor"
A young girl (Amelia) is distressed and feeling guilty about losing the wings she was to wear in her school play. Then she notices an angel and follows the angel into a dark building. Upstairs in the attic, bathed in heavenly light, is an artist's model - the ANGEL. The painter ascends a ladder until he is out of shot - supposedly to heaven-and reappears to restore Amelia's joy with a pair of wings.
PUZZLEFACE - 18min short film (CAN) Episode #7 from Spookey Ruben's Dizzy Playground TV series starring: Denis 'SNAKE' Belanger & VOIVOD, Ken Russell (RIP), Lisi Tribble, Maylee Todd, Rodrigo Gudiño (Rue Morgue), Rae Matthews, Jef Farquharson, O.T. Biggs and Spookey Ruben.
1983 documentary concerning the life and music of Ralph Vaughn Williams.
