Movies

Ken Russell directed a short document of German actress (and widow of famed composer Kurt Weill) Lotte Lenya performing many of Weill's best known...

Far from an ordinary profile of Georges Delerue; it also serves as a calling card for Russell, whose work would define the 1970s as Delerue’s...

Documentary covering the career of French composer Georges Delerue, famous for film scores for such films as Platoon, Contempt, Shoot the Piano...

The Preservation Man is about useless objects but here they're part of the artist Bruce Lacey's collection of random junk that is incorporated into...

Poet John Betjeman is shown visiting locations including Vauxhall Park, Aldersgate Street station, Camden Town and Hatfield, where he recites a...

A biopic of Czech composer Martinu in two parts: the first part is a recurring dream; the second, a Freudian analysis of the dream.

Russell's composer biopics were usually labours of love. However, this was the opposite: Russell regarded the music of Richard Strauss 'bombastic,...

A short musical directed by Ken Russell.

Ken Russell's silent film treatment of the 19th century comic novel by the Brothers Grossmith - George and Weedon. Starring Bryan Pringle, Avril...

An actor is playing Claude Debussy in a film about the composer's life, and finds himself identifying with his subject very closely.

A feat that fully matches its title, an alphabetical trawl through both the history of British music and Russell's own likes and dislikes, the latter...

Also known as Guitar Craze and the more evocative Hound Dogs and Bach Addicts, this Monitor item (Ken Russell's third for the pioneering BBC arts...

Arrigo Boito's most known work is Il Mefestefele, first performed in 1868. Russell's modern interpretation presented by the Genoese Opera has Faust...

Moving with astonishing assurance through time and space, Russell recreates his life in a series of unconventional interconnected episodes –...

One of the most conceptually original of all the films that Ken Russell made for Monitor, this imagines an expedition of alien archaeologists...

An exploration of composer Anton Bruckner's numeromania during a nervous breakdown and stay at a sanatorium.

On-set footage of the film The Devils (1971) with commentary by editor Mike Bradsell

A 'radical Brontë' ballet for young people.

An illustration of various mechanical instruments, from the musical-box to 1950s electronica.

A plucky young Jewish boy traverses the globe on a quest to warm the Führer's heart with the gift of a cuddly feline. (The result of a challenge...