Primer is The A.V. Club‘s ongoing series of beginners’ guides to pop culture’s most notable subjects: filmmakers, music styles, literary genres, and whatever else interests us—and hopefully you.
Ken Russell’s storied career as a director lasted over 50 years, from the early 1960s through the mid-2000s, spanning TV, film, and eventually the stage, always with his own unapologetically idiosyncratic style. Born in 1927, Ken Russell lived until 2011 and, in that time, made over 80 features, shorts, and music videos, indexing a stunning menagerie of changing times and art forms. He lived to see the silent film at its apex and the birth of the talkies. He saw vaudeville, burlesque, and pantomime before rock ‘n’ roll and commercial American fare eclipsed them after WWII. He rejoiced in the swinging ’60s and the sexual revolution. He witnessed new depressions and repressions under Margaret Thatcher’s austere government. He saw film go digital. At 79, he was even briefly on Big Brother.
Such experiences gave him a thick repertoire of ideas and images to draw from, and he used them all—sometimes in the same film, sometimes in the same scene. Watching Ken Russell’s films is exhausting in the way looking after your drunken grandpa is exhausting. They can be exuberant, with a manic sense of wonder, free-associating about days of yore and yon, and then suddenly, they’ll take a dramatic dive into real or imagined horror before springing back into a playful mood. And we love him for it. To mark the Cannes debut of a new, uncensored restoration of Ken Russell’s infamous 1971 heresy spectacle, The Devils, here’s a primer to ease you into the deeper works of this great ponderer of perversity.
Ken Russell 101: Sights And Sounds
Visuals are just the tip of the pleasure in a Ken Russell film. Most folks are introduced to him through either Tommy or Altered States, and for good reason. They contain some of cinema’s most kaleidoscopic pop visuals. Who can forget Elton John’s gigantic shoes or the seven-eyed beast-head Jesus? But these visuals serve more than just aesthetic purposes. They bolster his critique with panache. His staggering late-career TV movie Alice In Russialand uses extravagant Wonderland costumes and sets to cast Stalinist Russia as The Red Queen’s Court, because subtlety is for cowards. Never afraid to call a Nazi a Nazi, Russell’s smelting of German fascist ideology and iconography onto the composer Richard Wagner in Lisztomania uses anachronism to show that fascist culture has pretexts and that the past can become corrupted by its use in the future.
If Russell’s films are consistently “out there,” it’s because he worked with a consistent group of collaborators who understood and supported his style. One of the best things about cleaning up The Devils is that it allows the bright white expressionist sets by Derek Jarman, patron saint of New Queer Cinema, to truly shine. Both films that Jarman made with Russell, The Devils and Savage Messiah, about sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, have strikingly minimalist sets. Still, while Messiah has a grittier quality to it (save for a fantastic scene in a nightclub), the sleek, bleached-stone production design in The Devils makes the inside of the convent feel more and more like an asylum as madness takes hold of the nuns, especially in contrast to the filthy and fallen world outside its walls.
Against this impressive backdrop, we have Shirley Russell’s iconic black-and-white nun’s habits, so famous that they made it into Space Jam: A New Legacy. The first of Russell’s four wife-collaborators, Shirley is responsible for some of the most outrageous costumes in the Russell oeuvre. Capable of exceptional historical detail, she recreated the breathtaking garments of silent film for Valentino and the clothing of Tsarist Russia in The Music Lovers, and heightened the traditional ’20s look to give The Boy Friend its mod sensibility. When not playing with period costumes, she designed wildly contemporary looks, like Roger Daltrey’s loincloth and Ann-Margret’s silver jumpsuit that gets covered in beans.
But outside the clothing, to enjoy Russell is to enjoy Dick Bush. His cinematography for Tommy, Lair Of The White Worm, Crimes Of Passion, and several of Russell’s earlier BBC ventures cements him as the best articulator of Russell’s eye. He draws out the bold colors and shadows of China Blue’s rented room in Crimes Of Passion, emphasizing the vibrant shadow-self she embraces there. Equally at home outside, it’s Bush’s camera that gives Tommy its sunny, optimistic aesthetic. It’s a similar but more natural openness that he brings to Mahler, Russell’s biopic about the late-Romantic composer who really loved nature.
It was a film about another composer, Edward Elgar, that first brought Ken Russell some notice in 1962. Merging dramatizations with informational entertainment, Elgar became one of the first TV docudramas and set Russell on a path that would run through his work. Always trying to match his visual storytelling to the music and biography of his subject, Russell’s composer films range from the visually exuberant and surreal, like Lisztomania and The Mystery Of Dr Martinu, to more standard period biopics like The Music Lovers, a shockingly straight film about Tchaikovsky’s queerness. He was always searching for inventive ways to bring audiences and music together, with little regard for the narrative prophylactics that critics usually insisted upon.
Two of his most inventive music films, ABC Of British Music and The Planets, edit images into a stream-of-consciousness montage, mixing disparate places and times, collapsing the boundaries between audience, narrative, image, and sound. ABC Of British Music is classic British humor and nationalism, with juxtaposed images that sensationalize the screen while cataloging the best of British musical exports. Considerably hornier than Koyaanisqatsi, which inspired it, Planets uses Gustav Holst’s famous arrangements, which honor each celestial body, to tell a story of history and culture.
No other director in film history has been as committed to filming the lives of composers. His exceptional BBC program The Debussy Film is about a young actor losing himself in his performance as composer Claude Debussy, and it represents what Russell wants his audiences to feel in his biopics. By animating the vivid inner lives of famous composers such as Mahler, Liszt, Delius, and Tchaikovsky, and lesser-known artists like Arnold Bax, Anton Bruckner, and Bohuslav Martinů, Russell invites us to identify with the passion in their music. By giving visual context to a wordless medium, he provides us with a scaffolding so that we might become better appreciators.
Intermediate Studies: Lore And Movement
Yet, Ken Russell liked the lower arts just as much. The Britain he was born into was in the shadow of eclipsing modernism and globalization in the wake of WWI. It was a country mid-transition from a traditional local culture to the capitalist behemoth it would become by the 1960s (which would ironically bring about “folk arts revival”). Seeing the magical curiosities of these ancient customs must have made a profound impression, because they appear throughout his films. Like Edward Jessup (William Hurt) in Altered States, Russell was always looking at folk traditions for routes to the sublime.
In his filmography, you’ll see maypoles and hobby horses; you’ll hear shanties, pub tunes, ballads, folktales, and nursery rhymes. Films like Gothic and Lair Of The White Worm celebrate the troubling power of the occult that lurks underneath supposedly civilized modernity. Gothic shows the terrifying and inspiring power of ancient myths and symbols as they slowly intrude from the unconscious into the fateful night in 1816 Switzerland that would give birth to the modern vampire story and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Lair Of The White Worm is typical folk horror that trembles at the thought of the past not being suppressed at all, but alive, hungry, and dead sexy. As to be expected with Russell, the lurking power of folklore comes with a tremendously erotic sensibility. It tempts the moderns to reject their social trappings and embrace a “primitive” past that was wild and porous. Folklore is fecund. Floppy-haired lads, beware!
Russell was also something of an amateur ethnomusicologist. His sober documentary In Search Of The English Folksong is textbook anthropology, tracing labyrinthine trends across England and never arriving at a declarative answer. Instead, it’s about the journey, the artists we meet, the old songs we hear, and the collective culture we can pass on. His earlier doc, The Light Fantastic, about different kinds of dance, is similarly ethnographic, watching him work out how to position the camera amongst movement. As his career progressed, dance—connecting music with visual space—would come to play an important role in his storytelling. The human body in motion becomes a conductor, setting the tempo for the editor, directing our attention, and gesturing towards a larger meaning beyond words.
When Women In Love‘s Gudrun (Glenda Jackson) charms a herd of Highland cows, the camera stretches with her and gets dizzy, revealing her inner spirit yearning for freedom. The same goes for Ann-Margret’s wild watusi in Tommy, when Nora’s body can no longer contain her mania. Dr. Polidori (Timothy Spall) dances with an automaton in Gothic to show how horror is overtaking his mind. On the other end of free sensuality, when the silent film actor Rudolph Valentino (Rudolf Nureyev) dances with a male partner, it reveals and conceals his queerness at the same time. Dance is saying without saying.
Night School: Bodies And Blasphemy
It’s no secret that Ken Russell had a fondness for one particular body part in motion. If there was even a slight reason why it might be appropriate, Russell was going to free the nipple. Breasts are his connection to home, nature, creation, comfort, and other such Freudian clichés. For Russell, they bounce, shimmy—even bite, as in Russell’s contribution to Joe Dante’s anthology film Trapped Ashes. The infatuation has led some to question whether Russell even liked women or merely objectified them. The answer is a mix of both. If anything, Russell teeters towards being too paternalistic. Women’s bodies are objects in his films; objects of beauty, the things that have inspired art for centuries. They are, however, never without a complex psychology and an argument against their oppression and repression. His three adaptations of D.H. Lawrence novels, Women In Love, The Rainbow, and Lady Chatterley, are openly predicated on such independence.
Both Crimes Of Passion and Whore confidently portray sex work as work; behind the objectification is a woman laboring and putting on a performance. In Crimes Of Passion, Kathleen Turner’s China Blue engages in sex work to escape the humdrum normality of working for capitalist industry. Since China Blue is her character’s alter ego, she can be anyone or anything to anybody. It’s clear Turner gets a kick out of China’s thrills because she throws her whole power into China’s fantasy world, gleefully becoming every character that China plays for the men. Her sense of play and enjoyment is her critique of misogyny and patriarchy. She may have clients who abuse and mistreat her, but we never lose her sense of control.
Whore takes a slightly different approach. Billed as the “serious” response to Pretty Woman‘s romantic sensationalism of sex work, the movie follows sex worker Liz (Theresa Russell) as she goes about her day, recalling past loves and horrors in a Brechtian manner straight to the camera. Her monologuing tells us her true thoughts, so that we are better aware of when she’s putting on an act for a john or her pimp. We become privy to and tied up in her exhaustion. The film is not without its own sensationalism, in its explicit depiction of how often women sex workers experience violence, but only to emphasize that the real problem is men.
Himself preyed upon at a young age, Ken Russell had a keen sense of how leering men can be. He’s also conscious that both perverts and film audiences enjoy the act of watching, which he uses to harden his point: Perversity is pleasure and politics in one. His films about men are engorged with critiques of masculinity. But instead of playing with gender in complex ways, using wigs and articulate language as he does with women, Russell prefers to play with the penis. There are more willies tucked in his films than there are hidden Mickeys at Disneyland. Sometimes they’re in the architecture or on a plate; sometimes they’re represented metaphorically; sometimes, like in Lisztomania, Roger Daltrey is riding a literal penis cannon. The penis is a symbol of power in Russell’s movies, but once naked and exposed, masculinity is rendered ridiculous and excessive, obsessed with only one thing. The men in Russell’s movies are almost all dick and drive. The ones with brains are tortured because their dicks don’t work or aren’t used as often as they should be. If the penis is absolute power, then it corrupts absolutely.
But the filmmaker may enjoy a naked institution even more than he enjoys a naked body. For him, emperors have no clothes. That’s what makes charged films like The Devils, Crimes Of Passion, Tommy, Lisztomania, The Music Lovers, and even the otherwise dry Prisoner Of Honor into something greater than themselves. These films explicitly critique religious institutions for their hypocrisy—especially The Devils. When Sister Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave) charges the lecherous priest Father Urbain (Russell’s longtime collaborator Oliver Reed), with possessing her convent, a fierce power struggle breaks out among women, men, the church, and the state as it all inexorably progresses towards fiery ruin.
The Devils’ righteously legible criticism of authority and its explicit sexuality within a religious context made both political and religious figures very upset. With a scene called “the rape of Christ,” no one can say Russell was shocked that they were. But they were so carceral in their punishments that audiences are only just now getting the filmmaker’s true vision released without any meddling. It’s refreshing to remember there was a time when a film could get made and censored by nearly every institution that saw it, as opposed to the censorship happening before anything is filmed. Thanks to his experience with The Devils, Russell became one of cinema’s biggest advocates against censorship.
This meant, to him, that perversion and subversion became playfully serious business. His low-budget Treasure Island is a burlesque of the big-budget TV adventure film with an intentionally stagy set and a hammy, mock amateur performance style, especially from Russell’s third wife, Hetty Baynes, who plays Long Jane Silver with a winking air of Marilyn Monroe. Films like The Boy Friend allowed Russell to encourage his actors to go one step beyond naturalism. “Understatement never won a war,” he’s known to have said.
This is all why Salome’s Last Dance may be the most Ken Russell film. He takes Oscar Wilde’s life and script for the Biblical Salome story, then sets them on a makeshift stage in a brothel. What follows is a condensed version of the play, led by a roaring Glenda Jackson in eyeshadow up to her eyebrows, and she’s nowhere near the most painted performer. Michael Buchanan did the production design fresh off his run on Hellraiser, so there’s a wonderfully Gothic romanticism to how the film presents the late 19th century. Michael Jeffery’s costumes are camp and to die for. There are boobs, dance numbers, and plenty of dong, all alongside serious commentary on Victorian repressions. And what better ending for a play than someone getting a little head?
Watching Oscar Wilde watch the brothel workers put on his play, the viewer realizes that a Russell movie is similar: Like watching friends get together to make a movie. Towards the end of his life, that’s just what happened. As studios corporatized, they were less willing to take chances on artists like Russell, who was both controversial and not always profitable, a lethal combination. So, he raised the money himself and made movies his way.
Your response to films like The Fall Of The Louse Of Usher and Ein Kitten Für Hitler will vary depending on how much miniDV and iMovie aesthetic they can take. Still, it’s inspiring to see a director in his late seventies using limited resources and unlimited creativity to make provocative films. Later films like Charlotte Bronte Enters The Big Brother House show a man who cannot help but create—it seems like a compulsion, still filled, crudely with the themes that fascinated him all his life. Though Russell’s immense output may be dominated by his flashy and sometimes lurid popular features, even when he didn’t have those budgets, his entire body of work—including his shorts and inventive TV specials—demonstrates that with a perverse sense of play, it’s not the size that matters but how you use it.
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