The man who made nuns lose their minds on screen finally gets his own close-up.
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 Bragg, Robert Powell and Roger Daltrey - recall a pioneering documentary-maker, talented photographer and fearless film director.
Direction
Eleanor Horne lets Russell's own footage do the talking.
Production
Archive gold: home movies, photos, and unguarded interviews.
Director
Eleanor Horne
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Russell's early 1960s documentaries for BBC's Monitor and Omnibus invented the 'docudrama' format, blending dramatic reenactments with fact so aggressively that historians still argue about them.
The Devils (1971) was banned and butchered in nearly every country; the 'Rape of Christ' sequence remained unseen for 40 years until a partial reconstruction emerged in 2012, the same year this documentary aired.
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