Ken Russell

A cine-opera retelling of the legend of Boudica, warrior queen and her uprising against the Roman occupiers of Britain.

A plucky young Jewish boy traverses the globe on a quest to warm the Führer's heart with the gift of a cuddly feline. (The result of a challenge from Melvyn Bragg to produce a film that Ken Russell himself would be eager to see banned.)

The work of professional photographer David Hurn, shown tackling a wide range of subjects from fashion to photojournalism to candid paparazzo shots.

Trapped in a house of horror, seven people discover that the only way they'll get out alive is to tell their scariest stories.

A 'radical Brontë' ballet for young people.

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.

A short directed by Ken Russell.

Russell revisits the life of composer Edward Elgar, using his own music as the score and featuring evocative, visually rich scenes, often set in the Malvern Hills where Elgar grew up.

Rock star Roddy Usher is confined to an insane asylum after murdering his wife. There, he is given various shock treatments by Nurse Smith and Dr Calahari, resulting in a series of bizarre and nightmarish adventures.

A short musical directed by Ken Russell.

Marine veteran and former middleweight boxing champion Julian Taylor loses control in a bar fight and ends up serving time for aggravated assault. Soon after his arrival, Julian is introduced to Captain Brown, a menacing, overbearing guard who tags him "Dogboy" and orders him to a claustrophobic dormitory called the doghouse. There, Julian meets fellow inmate Willy Owens and learns that the prison's vicious attack dogs are used to catch and kill escaping prisoners.

Filmmaker Ken Russell poses the question: "What is a true English folk song, if there is such a thing?" After recieving an indifferent response from his dog, Russell journeys around the English countryside seeking for an answer. He encounters and interviews such famous artists as Donovan, Fairport Convention, Osibisa, Eliza Carthy, So What, Edward II and The Albion Band, among others.

Scientist Joe Hartman introduces self-proclaimed Middle Eastern psychic Uri Geller to America.

Four erotic short films, all with similar unexpected endings: 'The Dutch Master': a woman who enters a living painting; 'The Insatiable Mrs. Kirsch': a woman is lured by noises from a chamber; 'Vroom Vroom Vroooom': a motorcycle transforms into a woman; and 'Wet': a hot tub salesman seduced by a woman.

Enchanted by the idea of locating treasure buried by Captain Flint, Squire Trelawney, Dr Livesey and young Jim Hawkins charter a sailing voyage to a Caribbean island. Unfortunately, a large number of Flint's old pirate crew are aboard the ship, including the deviously vivacious Long Jane Silver.

A writer taking a rest in a country hotel is obsessed with a strange woman in the same hotel. The woman seems to observe him in provocative ways, but he does not dare to approach her. One day he follows her to her room and listens to strange “erotic” sounds from inside, and begins to have erotic thoughts.

A young girl named Alice travels through a century of Russian history, from Tsarism, through Socialism and Glasnost. Alice's original characters embody ideological conflicts crossing politics, art and cultural movements.

Utilising the music of eminent composer Arnold Bax, this biographical docudrama focuses on Bax's complex relationships with pianist Harriet Cohen and dancer Annie.

A biopic of Czech composer Martinu in two parts: the first part is a recurring dream; the second, a Freudian analysis of the dream.

France, 1897: Colonel Georges Picquart challenges the government when he discovers the obscure political maneuvers that leads to the imprisonment of the Jewish Captain Alfred Dreyfus after being convicted of espionage three years earlier.

This melodrama investigates the life of a sex worker, in a pseudo-documentary style.

In his hometown of Southampton, Ken Russell takes his young son and his aunts out to dinner, but the new traffic restrictions mean he can't get near the place. Traffic signs force him onto a sightseeing tour of town, then the ferry port looms ...

An exploration of composer Anton Bruckner's numeromania during a nervous breakdown and stay at a sanatorium.

An erotic anthology based on classic short stories, chronicling the complicated relations between the sexes: a salesman seduces a woman on a train; a romantic evening is interrupted by phone calls; and a couple vacationing in Spain discusses a pregnancy.

Born to a rich landowner in the waning days of the Victorian era, Ursula Brangwen grows into a beautiful young woman full of imagination and ambition. The free-spirited Ursula begins to feel trapped by her prim surroundings, but her life changes when she has an erotic experience with Winifred, a bisexual teacher. From then on, Ursula puts all of her passion and creativity into the pursuit of sexual fulfillment. But her insatiable quest becomes a source of anguish.

Moving with astonishing assurance through time and space, Russell recreates his life in a series of unconventional 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 filmmaker, beginning with an extraordinary interview with Huw Weldon for a job on Monitor.

Arrigo Boito's most known work is Il Mefestefele, first performed in 1868. Russell's modern interpretation presented by the Genoese Opera has Faust as an ageing hippy, who smokes marijuana and is tormented by his lost youth. Mephisto bets God that he can turn anyone to pagan life, even someone as innocent as Faust. It becomes 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.

When an archaeologist uncovers a strange skull in a foreign land, the residents of a nearby town begin to disappear, leading to further inexplicable occurrences.

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.

A feat that fully matches its title, an alphabetical trawl through both the history of British music and Russell's own likes and dislikes, the latter summed up by a scene in which he takes a phone call and listens for a bit before concluding that 'it's either an obscene call or the beginning of Michael Tippett's Fourth Symphony.' Gleefully exploiting an already contrived format, Russell uses alphabetical coincidence as an excuse to throw wildly disparate material together: Elgar is fused with Elton John, Holst with Heavy Metal and Punk with Purcell.

Ten short pieces directed by ten different directors, including Ken Russell, Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Altman, Bruce Beresford, and Nicolas Roeg. Each short uses an aria as soundtrack/sound, and is an interpretation of the particular aria.

Living on an estate on the shores of Lake Geneva, Lord Byron is visited by Percy and Mary Shelley. Together with Byron's lover Claire Clairmont, and aided by hallucinogenic substances, they devise an evening of ghoulish tales. However, when confronted by horrors, ostensibly of their own creation, it becomes difficult to tell apparition from reality.

In an epic tale of good versus evil, Faust sells his soul to the Devil and tries to save Marguerite from an eternity in Hell.

Fashion designer Joanna Crane leads a double life. By night she is China Blue, a prostitute who's attracted the attention of a sexually frustrated private detective, and a psychopathic priest in possession of a murderous sex toy.

Ken Russell's engrossing examination of the great 20th-century composer tells Williams' story through the eyes of his widow, Ursula, with personal remberances from those who knew him.

Based on the famous Gustav Holst musical suite, Ken Russell's musical delight takes viewers on a magnificent journey of the planets of the Solar System.

A research scientist explores the boundaries and frontiers of human consciousness. Using sensory deprivation and hallucinogenic mixtures from Native American shamans, he explores these altered states of cognizance and finds that memory, time, and reality itself are states of mind.

The untimely death of silent screen star Rudolph Valentino prompts the many women in his past to reminisce about his troubled rise to superstardom.

In the 19th century, Romantic composer/pianist Franz Liszt tries to end his hedonistic ways but keeps getting sucked back in by his seductive fellow composer Richard Wagner.

After a series of traumatic childhood events, a psychosomatically deaf, dumb and blind boy becomes a master pinball player and the object of a religious cult.

Famed composer Gustav Mahler reflects on the tragedies of his life and failing marriage while traveling by train.

In the Paris of the 1910s, brash young sculptor Henri Gaudier begins a creative partnership with an older writer, Sophie Brzeska. Though the couple is 20 years apart in age, Gaudier finds that his untamed work is complemented by the older woman's cultural refinement. He then moves to London with Brzeska, where he falls in with a group of avant-garde artists. There, Gaudier encounters yet another artistic muse in passionate suffragette Gosh Boyle.

When the leading lady of a low-budget musical revue sprains her ankle, the assistant stage manager is forced to understudy and perform in her place.

In 1634 France, charismatic Father Urbain Grandier becomes the target of a sexually obsessed nun’s witchcraft accusations, which corrupt church and state officials are all too happy to exploit.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Composer, conductor and teacher Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky struggles against his homosexual tendencies by marrying, but unfortunately, he chooses wacky nymphomaniac Nina, whom he is unable to satisfy.

Russell's composer biopics were usually labours of love. However, this was the opposite: Russell regarded the music of Richard Strauss 'bombastic, sham and hollow', and despised the composer for claiming to be apolitical while cosying up to the Nazi regime. Strauss is depicted in a variety of grotesquely caricatured situations: attacked by nuns after adopting Nietzsche's philosophy, duels with jealous husbands, literally batters his critics into submission with his music, and glorifies the women in his life and fantasies.

Growing up in the sheltered confines of a 1920s 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.

An immensely moving story of sacrifice, idealism and musical genius which charts 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?

Far from an ordinary profile of Georges Delerue; it also serves as a calling card for Russell, whose work would define the 1970s as Delerue’s did in the 1960s. Opening with a sly work of pastiche, parodying the conventions of French noir, it goes on to encompass slapstick, verité scenes of the Delerue family and a harrowing montage of the Vietnam War.

The outrageous life of the American dancer of the 1920s, Isadora Duncan, whom Ken Russell described as "part genius and part charlatan".

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.

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.

A portrait of the life and work of the great Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, exploring both his music and his passionate interest in his country's folklore.

A deck-chair attendant at a British resort promotes a film festival featuring a French sexpot.

An astonishing documentary of the life of classical composer Sir Edward Elgar. This partly dramatised account is remarkable for its sensitive portrayal of the rise of a young musician from an underprivileged background to international fame.

Explores the worldview of A.W. Chesher, who has a special interest in painting steam traction engines.

The Preservation Man is about useless objects but here they're part of the artist Bruce Lacey's collection of random junk that is incorporated into his art with 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 a quarter of an hour in Lacey's amiable company.

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.

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.

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.

Mrs Wilhelmina Sterling shows her vast collection of pre-Raphaelite paintings, pottery and other artefacts at her home in Battersea.

Ken Russell directed a short document of German actress (and widow of famed composer Kurt Weill) Lotte Lenya performing many of Weill's best known compositions for BBC TV series "Monitor."

Subtitled 'Portrait of a Soviet Composer', this is the second of Ken Russell's composer biopics.

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)

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.

Short documentary about Shelagh Delaney and her hometown Salford.

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.

In 1960, Ken Russell visited Bedlington Colliery, Northumberland to make one of his first documentary films, following life in the mining community.

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).

A double portrait of the painters Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun, seen at work in their Suffolk studio while discussing their paintings.

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.

An illustration of various mechanical instruments, from the musical-box to 1950s electronica.

A portrait of the English composer Gordon Jacob.

Poet John Betjeman is shown visiting locations including Vauxhall Park, Aldersgate Street station, Camden Town and Hatfield, where he recites a handful of his poems.

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.

About modern day pilgrims to Lourdes, France, and Our Lady of Lourdes, that brings out the religious hysteria and the commercialism of the alleged healings. The sanctuary is visited by millions each year, and Lourdes has become one of the prominent pilgrimage sites of the world.

A parable made in the manner of an old silent comedy about artistry and illusion.

A romance between a clumsy knight and a damsel in distress.