Boudica Bites Back

(1927-2011) was the enfant terrible of British cinema. While he was often called the "British Fellini," what distinguished him from the Italian director was that he exceeded the limits of good taste far more often. Blessed with an extraordinary "music-video" style, he spent much of his career portraying other artists, but his greatest achievement was his surprisingly subtle adaptation of an erotic classic by D. H. Lawrence. Self-taught, he entered the world of cinema as an excellent stills photographer. Earlier in life, he had been a dancer, a pilot in the RAF, and a sailor. His love of movement characterizes his incredible films in which wild camera movements and expressive editing accompanied by passages of classical music lead audiences into a world of the subjective sensibilities of some of the luminaries of 19th-century art, of nuns with unrequited feelings, scientists experimenting with narcotics, and prostitutes leading double lives.

One of the themes found in Russell’s camp films is always a reflection on human freedom, which he looks for usually either in sexual excess or in religion or in his treatment of these subjects, i.e., in his art. He was a pioneer of music videos (after all, he made the first videos aired on MTV), and he also worked in opera, but he remained faithful to the cinematic arts to the very end, which he practiced even in his back garden when he was very ill and the only thing he could operate was a VHS camera. There is no way to overestimate the impact that Russell had on his contemporaries and on creative filmmakers today, who are uninterested in coarse realism. Without a hint of irony, one could say that Russell was the Oscar Wilde of English cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, the king of excess, baroque, and irony, hiding within himself subversive wisdom. Film critic Mark Kermode, an admirer of Russell’s work, called his films "a testimony to the greatness of British cinema of the 1970s." However, Terry Gilliam summed up Russell’s work best, saying that "the films by the maker of The Devils are proof that the most important thing in cinema is imagination, especially unbridled imagination."

Piotr Kletowski