INTRODUCTION

Critical scholarship surrounding Ken Russell’s work and career has tended to privilege his Romantic preoccupations and sensibilities. There has been considerably (and somewhat surprisingly) less critical discourse devoted solely to the looming presence of either the Gothic or Modernism, or their intersection in his work. Recently, however, Kevin M. Flanagan has bridged the gap between the Gothic and the Romantic by interrogating the adaptive nature and (modernist) intertextual relationship between Russell’s two major ‘Frankentexts’ Lisztomania (Goodtimes Enterprises, 1975) and Gothic (Virgin Vision, 1986). Flanagan observes that

He also notes that

Gothic, with its phantasmagorical, Henry Fuseli-inspired imagery, is perhaps the most direct example of Russell’s Gothic imagination at work and it provides a later juncture between his earlier Gothic and Romantic preoccupations – such as a concern with the female Gothic and its representations of internalised monsters and hysteria, as in Crimes of Passion (New World Pictures, 1984), The Music Lovers (United Artists, 1970) and Isadora Duncan, the Biggest Dancer in the World (BBC, 1966) – and points the way forward to the final ‘Garagiste’ work, the films of his later (homemade) ‘Gorsewood Productions’.

Russell’s position as a modernist has also been overlooked, especially as his career frequently intersects with the cultural history of Modernism with adaptations of D. H. Lawrence (Women in Love [United Artists, 1969], The Rainbow [Vestron, 1989], Lady Chatterley’s Lover [BBC, 1993]); filmic and televisual studies of modernist figures like the composer Béla Bartók (see below), and unrealised plans to make films about the lives of Bloomsbury authors Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey.