Movies: Ken Russell

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. Mephist...

Always On Sunday is a bio-pic on Le (Henri) Douanier Rousseau, a French naive painter....

The life of Austrian composer Anton Bruckner and his numeromania....

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)...

DON’T SHOOT THE COMPOSER is far from an ordinary profile of Georges Delerue. It also serves as a calling card for Ken Russell, whose work would define the 1970s as Delerue’s did in the 1960s. It begins with a sly work of pastiche, parodying the conve...

South Bank Show documentary concerning the life and music of Ralph Vaughn Williams....

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"...

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 e...

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 'radical Brontë' ballet for young people....

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

The last five years of Frederick Delius's life through the eyes of a young composer and aide, Eric Fenby....

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

A short directed by Ken Russell....

A man trapped in purgatory must come face to face with his own demons....

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 Satur...

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 Brag...

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....

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...

Short documentary about Shelagh Delaney and her hometown Salford....