VARIOUS ARTISTS - KEN RUSSELL - THE MUSIC LOVER: MUSIC & IMAGES: THE ART OF BRITAIN'S GREATEST FILMMAKER

Anthology of music from the films of director Ken Russell; the enfant terrible of British cinema. Drawn from his groundbreaking films of the 60s and 70s including the enormously popular - Elgar - Portrait Of A Composer. Russell's work is uncompromising and controversial. He directed Tommy for The Who in characteristic bravura style, while the much-banned Devils upset the establishment - 50 years on, the director's cut is still considered too blasphemous for public consumption. Inspired by Orson Welles, admired by Michael Powell, Ken Russell set British cinema aflame in the 1960s and 70s with his superbly crafted, often highly controversial dramatised documentaries on the lives of classical music composers. Gravitating to film via the excellent British Monitor and Omnibus art television programmes, his subjects included Elgar, Debussy and Delius, Strauss, Tchaikovsky, Mahler and Liszt. Russell pulled no punches in putting their indulgences and personal demons up on the screen beside their genius. Until then, the immortals had been sacrosanct. Ken's filmmaking was uncompromising, passionate and instinctive, revealing a gift for pairing music with images; resulting in such indelible scenes as the nude male wrestlers in Women In Love. Ken Russell's audacity was much admired. For some, he was regarded as nothing less than the saviour of British cinema, while others saw him as an outlandish "reckless eclectic", out to shock. His incendiary tour-de-force, The Devils, sharply divided audiences but is regarded by his disciples to be one of the top ten films of all time.

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