1,721,130 research outputs found
Ken Russell: Musical Mythmaker
Get PDFIconoclastic English film director Ken Russell (1927-2011) made more films about music and musical figures than any other filmmaker. His theatrical films and BBC films from 1959 to 2002 are examined
Les diables de Ken Russell
No full textMarchand Jacqueline. Les diables de Ken Russell. In: Raison présente, n°21, Janvier – Février – Mars 1972. L'impasse de la culture. pp. 115-116
Monitor : the creation of the television arts documentary
Get PDFMonitor (BBC, 1958–65), a series which showcased the arts and their creators and was presented by Huw Wheldon, is now remembered as the flagship of late 1950s and early 1960s arts documentary television broadcasting.
In Arts TV: A History of Arts Television in Britain, John Walker describes Monitor as ‘a crucially important early series’ (1993: 45), arguing that ‘no one could deny its ground-breaking achievements’ (ibid.: 49). John Wyver, in Vision On: Film, Television and the Arts in Britain, called
Monitor ‘among the BBC’s most celebrated contributions to “good broadcasting’’ ’ (2007: 27). In the edited collection Experimental British Television, Jamie Sexton refers to Monitor as the ‘BBC’s critically acclaimed arts series’ (Mulvey and Sexton 2007: 90), while Kay Dickinson, in the same collection, refers to it as a ‘well respected fortnightly Sunday arts magazine programme’, pointing out that this was where Ken Russell first made his name (ibid.: 70). Indeed the series is now most admired for Russell’s innovative composer biographies, the highlight of which is generally accepted to be his film on Elgar (BBC, 11 November 1962). Indeed, this film was chosen to mark the hundredth edition of the programme
Teddy Girls by Ken Russell
No full textTeddy Girls brings together, for the first time in one publication, images taken by Ken Russell of this scarcely documented subculture. Taken around London in January 1955 and published in the Picture Post on June 4th that year, these photographs are a testament to the supremely stylish young women depicted. The style of the Teddy Girls, like that of the Teddy Boys, grew out of a trend for Edwardian influenced fashion in post-World War II London. However, these women should be seen as more than a feminine facsimile of their male counterparts and Russell’s images document the ingenuity and complexity of their sartorial choices. As well as recording the style of the Teddy Girls, these images also provide a snapshot of London in 1955, a city in flux, still rebuilding itself after the damage inflicted by war. An essay by the fashion historian, Mairi MacKenzie, considers the cultural history and context within which these women lived and the photos were taken
Altered states, altered spaces : architecture, space and landscape in the film and television of Stanley Kubrick and Ken Russell
Get PDFAltered States, Altered Spaces: Architecture, Landscape and Space in the work of Stanley Kubrick and Ken Russell.
Stanley Kubrick and Ken Russell, at first, seem like unlikely bedfellows for a critical comparison: the combined Baroque, Mannerist, frequently excessive and romantic nature of Russell’s screen standing in apparent contrast to the structure, order, organisation, Brutalism and spatial complexity of Kubrick’s.
In an online blogpost1 (2007) Russell biographer Paul Sutton suggests that there is an intimate cross-fertilisation between Kubrick’s major works from 1962 and the bio-documentaries and arts films Ken Russell made for the BBC between 1958 and 1966. Drawing on a range of archived material, my essay will expand the breadth of this argument by including a wider range of film and television texts by both, suggesting less that Kubrick ‘borrowed’ from Russell (as Sutton does) but that their work shares a set of key spatial, architectural and visually linguistic concerns. As well as highlighting a shared set of imagery, I will present their oeuvres as an extended cinematic conversation which lasted from the late 1950s through to the late 1990s. I will, for example, draw a close analysis of both Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Russell’s Altered States (1980): two films which enter into debate over the polysemic nature of space, offering similar images of spatial expansion and ( Beckettian) corporeal restriction. The essay will consider the work of Powell and Pressburger as a model for the work of Kubrick and Russell and the composition of their screens.
The essay will make critical comment (with recourse to archived imagery) and observe the shared use of Brutalist architecture and set design in Russell’s The Devils (1971) and Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1972)
Other than Sutton’s brief blogpost, there has been little to no critical attention paid to Stanley Kubrick and Ken Russell as contemporary auteurs with shared spatial concerns apposite to the cultural climate of the era. This essay aims to redress this by drawing on a range of key, archived, material at the University of the Arts, the BBC and the BFI
Harmony and discord within the English ‘counter-culture’, 1965-1975, with particular reference to the ‘rock operas’ Hair, Godspell, Tommy and Jesus Christ Superstar
No full textPhDThis thesis considers the discrete, historically-specific theatrical and musical sub-genre of ‘Rock Opera’ as a lens through which to examine the cultural, political and social changes that are widely assumed to have characterised ‘The Sixties’ in Britain. The musical and dramatic texts, creation and production of Hair (1967), Tommy (1969), Godspell (1971), Jesus Christ Superstar (1970) and other neglected ‘Rock Operas’ of the period are analysed. Their great popularity with ‘mainstream’ audiences is considered and contrasted with the overwhelmingly negative and often internally contradictory reaction towards them from the English ‘counter-culture’. This examination offers new insights into both the ‘counter-culture’ and the ‘mainstream’ against which it claimed to define and differentiate itself.
The four ‘Rock Operas’, two of which are based upon Christian scriptures, are considered as narratives of spiritual quest. The relationship between the often controversial quests for re-defined forms of faith and the apparently precipitous ‘secularization’ and ‘de-Christianization’ of British society during the 1960s and 1970s is considered.
The thesis therefore analyses the ‘Rock Operas’ as significant, enlightening prisms through which to view many of the profound societal debates – over ‘faith’ and ‘belief’ in the widest senses, sexuality, the Vietnam war, generational conflict, drugs and ‘spiritual enlightenment’, and race – which were, to some considerable extent, elevated onto the national, political agenda by the activities of the broadly-defined ‘counter-culture’. It considers subsequent representations of the ‘counter-culture’ as the root of a contested but enduring popular legacy of ‘The Sixties' as a period of profound cultural change
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Imagining the Past: Ken Russell, Biography and the Art of Making History, Brussels, BE, 19–20 March 2014
Get PDFHeld alongside the Offscreen Film Festival (whose central theme, coincidentally enough, was British Cult Cinema), the Imagining the Past conference looked at visual discourses of history and biography, using the wild and varied career of filmmaker Ken Russell (1927–2011) as a primary test case. While the conference was only two full days, the Offscreen festival gave Russell’s films a major two-week retrospective, including rare screenings of The Devils (in the longest available cut, incorporating the British “X” certificate version and the “Rape of Christ” footage unearthed and restored in 2002) and a theatrical showing of his two Clouds of Glory films, William and Dorothy and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, hour-long exercises about the Lake Poets and their circle made for Granada Television in 1978
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