Ken Russell: The Wild Man of British Cinema

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 14:00:00 +0000

British cinema has always prized restraint, good manners and the well-made understatement, which is precisely why Ken Russell terrified it. For half a century he made films of operatic excess — feverish, sensual, blasphemous, drenched in music and lit like a fever dream — and he did it in a national industry that wanted him to calm down. He never did. Russell is the great maximalist of British film, a director who believed that if a thing was worth showing it was worth showing at full volume, and the results range from the sublime to the ridiculous, often inside the same reel. He remains the wildest talent the country ever produced, and the most divisive.

The Devils - vo.rs

Ken Russell: The Wild Man of British Cinema