Ken Russell at the BBC

Before he made his breakthrough feature films (Women in Love, Tommy, The Devils), perennial enfant terrible Ken Russell made a series of inventive biopics of composers and artists for the BBC series Monitor and Omnibus. The half-dozen films included here (dated 1962-68) are Russell’s surreal, fast-moving portraits of fierce individuals whose work he clearly loves, the three best being his flashy yet sincere life of Isadora Duncan and two powerful films starring Oliver Reed, The Debussy Film and Dante’s Inferno (about poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti). Taken as a whole, the set shows ’60s TV arts programming at its most compelling, introducing viewers to classical music, painting, poetry and dance in a superbly quirky, thoroughly involving manner.

Shelf Talk: These pristinely restored films show the intellectual—but still blissfully deranged—side of the swinging ’60s in England. As such, they will be snapped up by ’60s devotees, Anglophiles and classical buffs who are broadminded enough to embrace Russell’s lovingly irreverent retellings of the lives of the Masters.