Ken Russell. In Memoriam

The news are all over the web (The Telegraph, The Guardian, BBC News ...), the film director Ken Russell (1927-2011) has died. Eternally controversial, enfant terrible, fiercely independent he will be remembered for films like Women in Love, The Billion Dollar Brain, The Devils, Lisztomania, Altered States or the opera rock Tommy.

Picture Source:
Ken Russell as Heathcliff in 'Brontë Story' shot near Haworth in Yorkshire, 1957
Photograph by Shirley Kingdon © TopFoto

But the Brontës also play a part in his story. At the very beginning and at the end of his career. Before becoming a director, in the late 50s, he was a photographer:

Russell was a struggling photographer and started to make picture stories- series of photo's that told a story. Often his wife Shirley starred and did the costumes. It wasn't long before he tried films with second hand equipment and produced amateur shorts. (...)
The photographer Russell made picture stories, photo sequences that together told a story. It was his substitute for film making until he could afford a movie camera. They appeared in Picture Post and other magazines.  The most famous image is of his wife Shirley [Ann Kingdon] playing the role of Charlotte Brontë. This was made during their honeymoon. (Iain Fisher in The Savage Messiah)

Ken Russell remembered these photographs in a 2007 interview in The Arts Desk :

During that, on my honeymoon, my wife and I went to Haworth, the Brontë village and stayed at the Red Bull (sic) where the brother used to get drunk and stoned. There are a couple of my wife in one of her Victorian costumes as Emily Brontë. While I was up there me and my wife did a whole series.

In 2006, when his film career was reduced to amateur and home recordings, he was invited to film the Radical Brontës Festival final party: A Brontë Burlesque. Quoting from the aforementioned interview:

I was asked to go to the Brontë festival in Haworth. I thought, that sounds fun, I’d rather like to be involved in that. so I suggested to the authorities that I make a short ten-minute film of an aspect of the event. I suddenly came up with the idea that Charlotte Brontë was a bit of a schizo in so far as she called Jane Eyre an autobiography, and in some respects it was, and so I devised a little entertainment to be shot on the lawn of the vicarage with some locals playing the roles. There was a couple of characters from Jane Eyre, and also her brothers and sisters. So I wrote a scenario, a ballet, which I mostly choreographed myself, called Charlotte Brontë enters the Big Brother House. I had her continually called to the Diary Room. It was a challenge because my children said, "You’re mad, you can’t do it." My daughter who is 40 hid behind the sofa and just used to peep over the top, until she saw it was all right.

Charlotte Brontë enters the Big Brother house was to be premiered on YouTube, but as far as we know it never was available there. Or anywhere. The best account of its shooting can be read in Ken Russell: re-viewing England's last mannerist, edited by Kevin M. Flanagan. It seems that the film was completed and edited. Ken Russell conceived the choreography; his wife, Lisi Trible, played both Charlotte and Jane Eyre and the whole thing was co-directed by Ken Russell and Michael Bradsell.