6 Ken Russell at the BBC, Part 4: Song of Summer (1968)

The final film in the six-film box set of Ken Russell's work at the BBC in the 1960s is on the English composer Frederick Delius (1862-1934). Of all the films in the set, this is the closest in its narrative organization to a conventional feature and the most subdued in tone. It is also the only film of the six based not on an original screenplay but on an existing source, the book Delius As I Knew Him by Eric Fenby, who collaborated with Russell on the screenplay, and it is to this that Russell attributes his stylistic restraint: "Song of Summer was less fragmentary and kaleidoscopic than some of my work. But the book was a straightforward story [with] a beginning, a middle, and an end, and there didn't seem to be any point in jazzing it up." Although the least tricked up film in the set, it is ultimately the most satisfying, a moving work that offers Russell's most profound insights yet into the creative mind of the artist.

5 Ken Russell at the BBC, Part 3: Dante's Inferno (1967)

If you didn't know you were watching the beginning of Ken Russell's 1967 biography of the English Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rosetti (1828-1882), you might think you were watching a black-and-white Hammer horror film from the 1960s. The film opens in sensational Hammer fashion, with the nighttime exhumation of a grave. While eerie, melodramatic music on the soundtrack builds in intensity, torches wave over a coffin being raised from an open grave, the scene shot from overhead. The lid slides away from the coffin and we see an arm sweep away cobwebs from the shriveled remains of a woman in a burial shroud. The arm reaches into the coffin and lifts out a small moldy book, the camera moves in for a closer shot of the face, its skin sunken and stretched tight over the skull, and suddenly the title of the film appears: Dante's Inferno.

10 Ken Russell at the BBC, Part 2: Always on Sunday (1965) and Isadora (1966)

After his New Wave-influenced The Debussy Film, in which he presented the composer Claude Debussy's life as an intricate Chinese box of time, character, point of view, and narrative mode, Ken Russell next turned to the life of the French painter Henri Rousseau (1844-1910). In his film on Rousseau, Always on Sunday, Russell returns to the more conventional approach of his 1962 biography of the composer Edward Elgar. He uses a combination of impersonal voice-over narration (by Oliver Reed), first-person narration by Rousseau (the voice and accent of the actor playing Rousseau, James Lloyd, sound exactly like those of the English actor Jim Broadbent), passages from contemporary critics' reviews of Rousseau's work, music, and dramatized scenes—some factual, some imagined—to tell Rousseau's story.

8 Ken Russell at the BBC, Part 1: Elgar (1962) and The Debussy Film (1965)

In 2008 BBC Video released Ken Russell at the BBC, a three-disc DVD collection of six biographical documentaries Ken Russell made for the BBC between 1962 and 1968. For the next few weeks I'll be writing about these groundbreaking films.

When John Schlesinger left the BBC arts program Monitor in 1959 to pursue a career in feature films, Ken Russell was hired to replace him on the program as a director of documentaries. According to Russell, his task there was to make films that were "inviting, accessible, and entertaining." He made short documentary profiles of people as diverse as Spike Milligan, the creator and costar (along with Peter Sellers) of the BBC Radio comedy program The Goon Show, the playwright Shelagh Delaney (A Taste of Honey), and the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí. He stayed with Monitor and its successor series Omnibus for the next ten years, until he too left to make feature films. When Russell made his first documentary on a composer for Monitor, on Sergei Prokofiev in 1961, he asked the producer if he could hire an actor to re-create some scenes from Prokofiev's life. The producer was horrified at the idea of adding anything remotely fictional to a serious, high-toned documentary film but finally relented and allowed Russell one shot of an actor impersonating the composer, but only seen in reflection in a pond filled with floating leaves.