It speaks volumes about establishment attitudes towards artistic exploration that the film director Ken Russell, who died in 2011 aged 84, was for many years treated in the British press as little more than an eccentric joke. This accompanied harsh treatment by the censors and studio heads: forty years after its release, one of Russell’s greatest films, The Devils (1971), is still commercially unavailable in the form it was made. <br />To his credit, Russell remained defiant in the face of this. He always maintained an independence of vision. His best work is informed by a choreographic visual imagination like the music that inspired much of it. Unlike his near peers Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson, Russell was elaborating a deliberately poetic visual aesthetic of psychological states.
