Tag Archives: Documentary

Mike Diana is the focus of a new documentary, Boiled Angels: The Trial of Mike Diana (2018), directed by the legendary Frank Henenlotter. The film details the 1994 Florida obscenity charge that landed Mike in jail as the only visual ...

Within the first five minutes of Bill Morrison’s latest exploration into tactile film history, these words are displayed on the screen: “Film was born of an explosive.” This sounds beautifully metaphorical, but it is in fact just a straightforward statement ...

The past couple of months, I’ve had serial killers on the brain—particularly cinematic serial killers—which isn’t all that unusual of an occurrence for me, but this time around is particularly because I’m writing a book on Fritz Lang’s seminal M ...

While porn has often gotten a bad rap from feminists over the years, a few women have worked tirelessly to change perceptions of female desire — and how that desire plays into art and performance. Key examples include porn and sex-positive ...

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 ...

Not many people have heard of the death rock band Kettle Cadaver, but it is a name you won’t ever forget if you have. Rock stars are no strangers to controversial antics which go against the grain of social norms, ...

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), ...

“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 ...