Over the last few months, I’ve been steadily working my way through some of director Ken Russell’s early work, particularly the episodes he made for the BBC series Monitor, a British arts program that ran from 1958 to 1965 and ...

So far in my Ken Russell column, I’ve covered a number of his early films for the BBC program Monitor — particularly his artist biographies like Elgar and The Debussy Film — and this later documentary, Always on Sunday (1965), ...

This week my Ken Russell series continues with a look at some of his short, music-themed episodes for the BBC’s Monitor series, which he contributed to from 1959 to 1965, during the early years of his career as a director. ...

“Pleasure is the law.” -Claude Debussy Though it was technically an episode made for the BBC’s Monitor program, a series primarily comprised of art documentaries, Ken Russell’s The Debussy Film (1965) is a feature length film, and though Russell had ...

Recently I began my Ken Russell retrospective with a look at Elgar (1962), one of the director’s early yet influential composer biographies, made as a lengthy episode of the BBC series Monitor. Russell was involved in the series from 1959 ...

Recently, I finished a lengthy series on Polish director Andrzej Zuławski and, though I definitely intended to take a few weeks off before deciding on another under-appreciated arthouse director to explore, Ken Russell just would not be denied. The idea ...