Ken Russell is dead. A phantasmagoria of imagery crowds in with that sad news. Oliver Reed and Alan Bates — two young gods — wrestling naked in a ritual of Lawrentian Blutbrüderschaft, membra virilia dangling freer than had ever been seen outside the blotchy prints of criminal porn. Pudenda muliebria also got a good showing in Women in Love, and even more so in The Music Lovers, with Glenda Jackson in that mad-sex rattling-train scene, Tchaikovsky thundering in the background. SS atrocities to a soundtrack by Mahler. Imaginatively vile things done to nuns with bellows in The Devils (I walked out of that film in 1971).
All those images are, of course, fast fading to sepia. My memory, over the decades, may