Russell's Work Research Articles

Russell's Theories of Events and Instants from the Perspective of Point-Free Ontologies in the Tradition of the Lvov-Warsaw School

We classify two of Bertrand Russell's theories of events within the point-free ontology. The first of such approaches was presented informally by Russell in ‘The World of Physics and the World of Sense’ (Lecture IV in Our Knowledge of the External World of 1914). Based on this theory, Russell sketched ways to construct instants as collections of events. This paper formalizes Russell's approach from 1914. We will also show that in such a reconstructed theory, we obtain all axioms of Russell's second theory from 1936 and all axioms of Thomason's theory of events from 1989. Russell's work certainly influenced the works of Stanisław Leśniewski, his student Alfred Tarski, and Czesław Lejewski – prominent members of the Lvov-Warsaw School (LWS). We see our work in the tradition of the research of Leśniewski and Tarski. Building on the technical tools developed in this environment and in the spirit of the traditional research of the LWS, we engage here, in particular, with two classic works by Russell on fundamental ontology.

A un Siglo de “El Análisis de la Mente” (1921) de Bertrand Russell

In 1921 The analysis of mind of the English philosopher Bertrand Russell was published, a volume that was conceived a few years after John B. Watson defined the new orientation known as behaviorism . In the book, Russell undertook a discussion of some of the central concepts proposed by Watson, putting them in relation to other topics of interest within his own philosophical and psychological approach, such as the problem of consciousness and the theory of desires. Russell's work provided important support for emerging behaviorism. A century after its publication, this article assesses its general importance both in the history of psychology and behaviorism. Likewise, the way in which Russell conceptualized the main aspects of behavioral theory is analyzed. The article has a theoretical and review character, based on a pertinent use of the primary sources related to the subject.

On Infinitesimals and Indefinitely Cut Wooden Sticks: A Chinese Debate on ‘Mathematical Logic’ and Russell’s Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy from 1925

In the years following Bertrand Russell's visit in China, fragments from his work on mathematical logic and the foundations of mathematics started to enter the Chinese intellectual world. While up until 1925 Chinese intellectuals like Zhang Shenfu, Zhang Dongsun and others mainly contributed to the dissemination of general notions from Russell's logicism, epistemology and mathematical philosophy, two aspiring Chinese mathematicians, Fu Zhongsun and Zhang Bangming, introduced to Chinese readers the first Chinese translation of Russell's Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy. One year after the second edition of the book was published in 1924, Chinese intellectuals started to respond to Russell's ‘mathematical logic’ and philosophy of mathematics, as contained in the work. Consequently, in 1925 the first public debate on this topic broke out in Chinese periodicals. This article aims at providing a summary of these 1925 discussions, from criticisms of Russell's work to a general debate on ‘infinitesimals’. Through close examination of the arguments and discursive strategies used in the debate, the article tries to highlight the state of Chinese discourse on mathematical logic during the time in question, while also shedding some light on the mechanisms and strategies in the undergoing process of the adoption of Western scientific ideas.

Acquaintance

AbstractTo be acquainted with something (in the philosophical sense of “acquainted” discussed here) is to be directly aware of it. The idea that we are acquainted with certain things we experience has been discussed throughout the history of Western Philosophy, but in the early 20th century it gained especially focused attention among analytic philosophers who drew their inspiration from Bertrand Russell's work on acquaintance. Since then, many philosophers—particularly those working on self‐knowledge or perception—have used the notion of acquaintance to explain various facts about human experience and knowledge. In this paper, I offer an overview of this work, with particular focus on the resurgent literature on acquaintance in contemporary analytic philosophy. After more fully explaining what acquaintance is (or is supposed to be), I describe some reasons for thinking that we are indeed acquainted with certain things we experience, and then I survey some of the facts about experience and knowledge that acquaintance may help explain.

Oceanic Fiction, W. Clark Russell, and Twain's Sequel to “Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses”

Abstract Twain's unfinished essay on William Clark Russell's Wreck of the Grosvenor (1877) was intended as a follow-up to “Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses.” In topic and content, Twain's Grosvenor essay recontextualizes how we read its famous predecessor. Unlike the Cooper essay—so often framed by textbooks as an American-centric statement on literary values—Twain's essay on Russell targets a still-living English writer and highly praises his compositions. Moreover, Russell wrote in a genre (the sea narrative) that, as oceanic studies scholars have suggested, decenters nationalism. Twain enjoyed Russell's naval fiction throughout his life, evinced by journal entries, letters, and an aborted burlesque of sea stories. Ultimately, Twain's genuine admiration for Russell's work made it hard for him muster the same comedic vitriol for British sea narratives that he did for Cooper's historical novels.

Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices by Catherine Russell (review)

Reviewed by: Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices by Catherine Russell Joshua Wiebe Catherine Russell. Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices. Duke University Press, 2018. 280 pages. $26.95 There are two constitutive problems at the heart of Catherine Russell's 2018 book. Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices. The first is a definitional one, motivating Russell to return again and again to declarative statements intended to articulate just what 'archiveology' is and how it functions. For Russell, "archiveology is above all a means of returning to the images of the past that were produced to entertain, or produced for more serious purposes of documentary recording, and reviewing them for new ways of making history come alive in new forms."1 She explains: "Etymologically, archiveology might mean the study of archives, but the Greek suffix '-ology' actually refers to someone who speaks in a certain manner. When applied to film practice, it refers to the use of the image archive as a language."2 "Archiveology names the process by which the image bank in its fundamental contingency and instability becomes a means by which history can speak back to the present."3 The second concern centers around the work of German philosopher Walter Benjamin, and the conceptual applicability his work on collecting, criticism, translation, memory, and aesthetics has for the extensive practices of archival/found footage filmmaking. Synthesizing the two interests, Russell contends that "archiveology as a cultural practice is a crucial point of convergence of many of Benjamin's central ideas," an argument which directly addresses film studies' thirty-year love affair with Benjamin.4 Drawing the neologism from a brief piece from 1991 by Joel Katz entitled "From Archive to Archiveology," Russell performs the very function she analyzes, re-purposing Katz's work to new, unpredictable ends. Conspicuously, the lineage of archiveology from Katz's essay is established through a single reference without direct quotation: Russell cites Katz in the first chapter and then he disappears. This mindful attention to the force of citational practices (demonstrated by omission, in this case) shows an affinity with Benjamin that goes beyond the instrumental. Russell's re-purposing of Katz's notion exemplifies her methodological attraction to Benjamin's style of citation. "Quotations in [Benjamin's] work are like wayside robbers who leap out, armed, and relieve the idle stroller of [their] conviction."5 We might think of Katz in Archiveology as another kind of thief, trussed up and disarmed, left by the side of the road having been relieved of his weapons. In the case of Katz, 'archiveology' was intended to introduce an approach "more archaeological than historiographic," reflexively interrogating the "archival film […] as representation of history within particular economic, social and cultural constructs, and not as pure History itself."6 Russell here pushes further, insisting that images "are constitutive of historical experience and not merely a representation of it."7 Where Katz confines archiveology to "those who attempt to interrogate the archive in its own terms," Russell regards it as the very language of the archive itself.8 Interrogation being only one mode of enunciation, Russell's expanded terminology (though not so inclusive as to become what Derrida proposes-- "archiviology, […] designat[ing] a general and interdisciplinary science of the archive"9) enables her [End Page 10] to more attentively work through a larger filmography with broadened concerns informed by the vast and contentious discourse surrounding the archive. The most obvious reference point for Russell's work is Benjamin's never-ending opus, The Arcades Project, which sought to introduce "the principle of montage into history" by way of an immense network of references and criticism.10 Already a privileged element in theories of the cinematic, Benjamin's montage is elevated to that exclusive filmic means by which "the work of art" is produced.11 Following Benjamin's conjoining a theory of the cinematic to a theory of history, Russell closes the circuit by returning to the cinematic with all the benefits of having been steeped in Benjamin's historical analysis. In the famous "Work of Art" essay, Benjamin states: The finished film is the exact antithesis of a work created at a single stroke. It is...

Russell's Life, Legacy and Work [review of Peter Stone, ed., <em>Bertrand Russell's Life and Legacy</em>

Russell's Life, Legacy and Work [review of Peter Stone, ed., <em>Bertrand Russell's Life and Legacy</em>

Across the Continent: The Union Pacific Photographs of Andrew J. Russell by Daniel Davis

Reviewed by: Across the Continent: The Union Pacific Photographs of Andrew J. Russell by Daniel Davis Emily J. Rau Daniel Davis, Across the Continent: The Union Pacific Photographs of Andrew J. Russell. Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 2018. 208 pp. Paper, $24.95; e-book, $20.00. At the Golden Spike Ceremony at Promontory Summit on 10 May 1869, Union Pacific photographer A. J. Russell took the iconic photograph "East and West Shaking Hands at Laying Last Rail" of Grenville Dodge and Samuel Skerry Montague, the chief engineers of the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific Railroads, shaking hands. However, as Daniel Davis traces in this study of Russell and his photographs, this famous image was quickly and repeatedly misattributed until the 1960s, when William Pattison uncovered the collection of Russell's wet-plate negatives at the New York Geographical Society. In Across the Continent, Davis expands on Pattison's work on Russell's photography and biography to provide a more complete recovery of Russell's entire life and career. Lacking extant diaries or much correspondence, Davis draws largely on primary sources surrounding Russell's life, material including newspaper accounts of Russell's work, diaries of his contemporaries, Russell's few published writings, and, most significantly, Russell's photographs. [End Page 333] Davis recounts: "I realized that my research about Russell would only get me so far. I needed to see the places that Russell saw and stand in the places where he stood" (5). To that end, Davis traveled along the original transcontinental railroad route, attempting to recreate as many of Russell's photographs as possible in order to gain as true a sense as he could of what Russell may have experienced, felt, and seen. He communicates his emerging awareness of Russell as a man and an artist not only through his narrative of Russell's life and the historical events he witnessed and photographed, but also through a wide selection of Russell's photographs. Across the Continent includes as well a complete catalog of Russell's Union Pacific, Civil War, and other collected photographs, the first single catalog of all of Russell's known work. Across the Continent's eight chapters trace Russell's life and career chronologically, from his painting moving panoramas, through his time as a Union Army photographer, and culminating in his railroad photography as the official photographer of the Union Pacific Railroad. The book also includes a description of the fate of those photographs. Russell enjoyed working in a collaborative environment, and Davis reflects this preference by interspersing Russell's story with brief biographies of his contemporaries and collaborators, such as photographers Alfred A. Hart and C. R. Savage, Union Army General Herman Haupt, Union Pacific clerk Oliver C. Smith, and surveyors F. V. Hayden and Clarence King. Russell was "part of a group of photographers who visually introduced the West to the East in the 1860s and 1870s," photographing the space of the American West in a fleeting moment when the national interest was turned westward (10). In his photographs, Russell portrayed the towns and settlements along the rails, the scenery a traveler would see through the window of the railcar, and the features of the railroad itself as beautiful. Davis positions both himself and Russell as "vicarious traveler [s]" in the West rather than its conquerors, describing and documenting the space and all of its occupants, including Native Americans, Mormons, Chinese laborers, Civil War veterans, and women (93). Davis's work calls for more intense study of the various laborers who built the transcontinental [End Page 334] railroads. Most studies of the trans-Continental railroads focus on railroad executives and corporate and political players. Although many of the people in Russell's photographs remain anonymous, Davis uses Russell's photographs as illustrations to describe how the photographer focused more on the human aspects of the transcontinental railroad than the construction itself, featuring laborers and residents of railroad towns: "His West is fundamentally a landscape that he understood through human needs. In the end, people built the railroad, and those people are all over his photographs, even if many of them remain anonymous" (10). Davis's text is addressed to...

W. Ritchie Russell, A.B. Baker, and Fred Plum: Pioneers of ventilatory management in poliomyelitis.

Historically, neurologists were not involved in the day-to-day management of critically ill patients with bulbar poliomyelitis, but some were. The major contributions of 3 neurologists-W. Ritchie Russell, A.B. Baker, and Fred Plum-in the respiratory management of poliomyelitis have not been recognized. Russell's work was instrumental in identifying multiple types of poliomyelitis defined by their respiratory needs, and he advised treatment that varied from simple postural drainage to use of respirators. He participated in the development of the Radcliffe respiratory pump. Baker recognized the essential involvement of the vagal nerve in respiratory distress, but also observed that involvement of vital centers without cranial nerve involvement would lead to irregular and shallow respiration in some patients and in others with marked dysautonomic features. A similar finding of central involvement of respiration was noted by Plum, who also stressed the importance of hypercapnia. Plum emphasized measurements of vital capacity and techniques to minimize trauma with suctioning after tracheostomy. These 3 neurologists understood the importance of airway and ventilator management, which is currently one of the many pillars of neurocritical care.

‘Blurring the lines between fact and fiction’: Ken Russell, the BBC and ‘Television Biography’

Working for the BBC arts programmes Monitor and Omnibus during the 1960s, Ken Russell was responsible for a series of biographical films based on the lives of painters and composers. Tracing the development of Russell's work from Prokofiev (1961) and Elgar (1962) through to Bela Bartok (1964) and The Debussy Film (1965), the article examines how Russell's incorporation of elements of drama into the arts documentary generated arguments, both within the BBC and beyond, about the legitimacy of mixing ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ in such works. These debates focused, in particular, on the use of ‘dramatic reconstruction’ and subjective ‘interpretation’ and the ‘fairness’ of the films’ treatment of the artists and composers with which they dealt. As a result of its unusually explicit representations of sex and violence, Russell's film about the composer Richard Strauss, Dance of the Seven Veils (1970), took these arguments to a new level. Through an examination of the responses that the film generated, the article concludes that, due to the degree to which the programme departed from BBC norms of documentary practice and the related values of ‘impartiality’ and ‘good taste’, it became a work that tested the very limits of what the BBC then considered it possible to transmit.

Russell's Principles of Mathematics and the Revolution in Marburg Neo-Kantianism

Bertrand Russell's Principles of Mathematics offered a sustained criticism of Hermann Cohen's foundations of neo-Kantianism, evoking a radical rethinking of the basis of Marburg thought by Cohen's student, Ernst Cassirer. Russell's criticisms were directed at the understanding of the concepts of the differential calculus, which grounded the objectivity of scientific thought in Cohen's effort to resurrect the Kantian transcendental project. On the basis of Russell's criticisms, Cassirer abandoned Cohen's foundations and instead drew on the general relational form, borrowed from Russell's work in mathematical logic, to serve as the a priori source of objectivity. However, Cassirer's reliance on Russell's thought was limited, for he rejected Russell's Logicism, the principal philosophical thesis of his Principles. Instead, Cassirer specified that the serial relation, as defined by the Formalist mathematicians, was the source of objectivity of the advanced mathematical sciences. The result was a structuralist...

From Serra to Sancho: Music and Pageantry in the California Missions by Craig H. Russell (review)

Reviewed by: From Serra to Sancho: Music and Pageantry in the California Missions by Craig H. Russell Robert R. Grimes S.J. From Serra to Sancho: Music and Pageantry in the California Missions. By Craig H. Russell. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 480 pp. $65.00. In a 1970s liturgical magazine an article appeared entitled "Pocahontas Never Sang Gregorian Chant," never considering the fact that she was baptized in the Church of England. Over many years of research on American Catholic church music the title has amused me as I have come across example after example of Native American Catholics employing chant, from the Mohawk and Passamaquoddy tribes of the Northeast to the missions of California. Although there have been important studies of the music of the Franciscan missions of California before, Craig Russell has produced what must be called a library of materials concerning musical life in and around the missions. The work is extensively documented. For example, chapter one contains thirty-five pages of text followed by twenty pages of footnotes. In addition, Oxford University Press maintains on their website an extensive array of additional documentation and resources collected by the author. In spite of this, the author says that he chose to write "a human narrative" rather than an encyclopedia. He has, in my opinion, actually succeeded at both. The title of this book refers to two Franciscan missionaries, Blessed Junipero Serra, the friar who founded and oversaw the Catholic missions in what is today the state of California, and Juan Bautista Sancho, in the author's estimation one of the most important musicians working in the early nineteenth century missions. The Franciscans took over the missions in Baja California after King [End Page 75] Carlos III of Spain ordered the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1768. These missions were soon handed over to the Dominicans while the Franciscans headed north to Alta California. Serra worked in the missions from the foundation of San Diego in 1769 until his death in 1784 at the Carmel Mission. Sancho arrived in Mexico from Europe in 1803 and worked in the Mission of San Antonio de Padua from shortly thereafter until his death in 1830. It is entirely possible that no one reader would be interested in every aspect of Russell's work. Conversely most everyone would find something of interest within its vast range. The introduction is a fine overview of the historiography of the California missions and would be a useful reading in American history and American Catholic Studies courses. Music theorists would find the second chapter of particular interest with its discussion of notation and modes. Historical musicologists will be fascinated by the presence of orchestral masses in early European classical style and the extensive manuscript research the author presents. Ethnomusicologists will find the discussion of dance and pageantry enlightening as well as the discussion of Native American music in the missions. Performers and choir directors will benefit from the performing editions of a number of mission-related works contained on the website. Historians will benefit from seeing life in the California missions in a new light and continuing this research with the many original documents and photographs included in both the book and website. In a work of this impressive scope it is inevitable that some errors can be found, particularly in the case of Catholic theology and practice. For example, the author speaks of a mass setting used on Good Friday (311), a day when no mass in permitted in Catholic worship. In another place the author uses "adoration" and "veneration" interchangeably in regard to the Blessed Mother (303-304) when only the latter is allowed. These are, however, small errors in a generally magnificent piece of scholarship. Average readers should not be dissuaded from reading From Serra to Sancho. They might well want to skip over some of the more technical sections of the volume, but should not overlook the photographic section of the website. Readers will encounter scenes ranging from the comic (a friar in a shed celebrating mass atop a clavichord while he accompanied himself) to the sublime (Native American orchestras at mass). Most of all, they will find the author...

Origins of Modern Ideas on Love and Loss: Contrasting Forerunners of Attachment Theory

In this article we examine some origins of John Bowlby's attachment theory, a highly influential scientific approach to love and loss in contemporary society. Although some potential influences have been well-documented, others have either received no recognition or have failed to have an impact. We focus specifically on three of Bowlby's predecessors, exploring how these were differentially influential on his work. The first of these, Charles Darwin, was amply endorsed by Bowlby, both in terms of the adaptive background to his theory and more specifically in relation to Darwin's study of the emotions associated with grief. The second, Alexander Shand, was recognized as important but is cited little and omitted from the central issue of the resolution of grief. The third, Bertrand Russell, formulated ideas on attachment and separation before Bowlby, and possibly contributed to the intellectual forces that influenced him too. To our knowledge, Russell's work was not cited by Bowlby, despite the fact that it contained the seeds of many of Bowlby's ideas on attachment. It remains unclear whether this was because he had not read Russell or through omission; there is no definitive evidence either way. Tracing these historical origins illustrates how theory development involves a process of integration and selection, how even radical theories are rooted in previous scholarship, and how it can take decades for inspiring ideas to develop into full-blown, well-tested, theories.

Peirce and the specification of borderline vagueness

Scholarship on borderline vagueness pinpoints Russell's 1923 essay titled “Vagueness” as the starting point for rigorous analysis. The importance of Russell's work over and above discussions of indeterminacy in antiquity and in the modern period is that Russell isolated borderline vagueness from indeterminacies that do not threaten classical logic. This paper argues that historical propriety concerning the analysis of borderline vagueness belongs to Peirce since he was the first to show that borderline vagueness is distinct from other forms of indeterminacy (e.g., generality, unspecificity, and uninformativeness) and that the application of vague predicates to borderline cases involves an intrinsic uncertainty.

ROBERT JOHN RUSSELL VERSUS THE NEW ATHEISTS

Abstract.This essay compares Robert John Russell's work in his recent book Cosmology from Alpha to Omega: The Creative Mutual Interaction of Theology and Science (2008) to that of the authors known collectively as “the new atheists.” I treat the latter as recent contributors to the modern tradition of scientific naturalism. This tradition makes claims to legitimacy on the basis of its close relations to the natural sciences. The purpose of this essay is to show up the poverty of the naturalist tradition's scientific credentials by contrasting it with Russell's careful account of positive relations between science and Christian theology.

IS PHYSICS FUNDAMENTAL? ROBERT RUSSELL ON DIVINE ACTION

Abstract.Robert Russell's theological work has been a helpful stimulus to the task of understanding the meaning of divine action and providence in the age of science. He relates God's direct action “fundamentally” to the hidden domain of quantum events, and his theology of nature deserves careful attention. It is questionable, however, whether the term fundamental as applied to quantum events by physical science may be taken over by theology without more careful qualification than Russell offers.

Russell, His Paradoxes, and Cantor's Theorem: Part I

AbstractIn these articles, I describe Cantor's power‐class theorem, as well as a number of logical and philosophical paradoxes that stem from it, many of which were discovered or considered (implicitly or explicitly) in Bertrand Russell's work. These include Russell's paradox of the class of all classes not members of themselves, as well as others involving properties, propositions, descriptive senses, class‐intensions, and equivalence classes of coextensional properties. Part I focuses on Cantor's theorem, its proof, how it can be used to manufacture paradoxes, Frege's diagnosis of the core difficulty, and several broad categories of strategies for offering solutions to these paradoxes.

Russell, His Paradoxes, and Cantor's Theorem: Part II

AbstractSequel to Part I. In these articles, I describe Cantor's power‐class theorem, as well as a number of logical and philosophical paradoxes that stem from it, many of which were discovered or considered (implicitly or explicitly) in Bertrand Russell's work. These include Russell's paradox of the class of all classes not members of themselves, as well as others involving properties, propositions, descriptive senses, class‐intensions and equivalence classes of coextensional properties. Part II addresses Russell's own various attempts to solve these paradoxes, including strategies that he considered and rejected (limitation of size, the zigzag theory, etc.), as well as his own final views whereupon many purported entities that, if reified, lead to these contradictions, must not be genuine entities, but ‘logical fictions’ or ‘logical constructions’ instead.

Historical dictionary of Bertrand Russell's philosophy

Academic philosopher, logician, public intellectual, educator, political activist, and freethinker, Bertrand Russell was and remains a colossus. No other single philosopher in the last 200 years can be said to have created so much and influenced so many. His Principia Mathematica, written with A. N. Whitehead, ranks as one of the greatest books on logic since Aristotle. His philosophical work on language, meaning, logic, mind, and metaphysics formed the basis of 20th-century philosophy. Russell was active in numerous political movements of liberation and peace, and his popular writings, including the best-selling History of Western Philosophy, won the Nobel prize in literature in 1950. Historical Dictionary of Bertrand Russell's Philosophy offers a comprehensive, current guide to the many facets of Russell's work. Through its chronology, introductory essay, bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on concepts, people, works, and technical terms, Russell's impact on philosophy and related fields is made accessible to the reader in this must-have reference.

Ken Russell: Musical Mythmaker

This semiannual column presents reviews of significant video releases of interest to the field of music and to music libraries, as well as occasionally briefly noting other interesting titles. All genres of music in all video formats will be covered, with a preference given to those in DVD. All Web sites accessed 28 May 2009. No film director has made as many films about classical music as Britain's Ken Russell. After joining BBC's arts program Monitor in 1959, replacing John Schlesinger, who left to make feature films, Russell went on to make groundbreaking, often controversial short films about composers and other musical topics, as well as art and literary topics, before launching a long and even more controversial career in feature films, which includes Women in Love (1969), The Devils (1971), Altered States (1980), Crimes of Passion (1984), and Gothic (1986). A true auteur he also writes or co-writes most of his films. The DVD release of four early music-related films as part of the six-film Ken Russell at the BBC (BBC Video 3000017038 [2008]; DVD) provides an opportunity to witness the development of this distinctive artist. Considering these early efforts more than forty years after they were first televised also sheds new light upon Russell's subsequent work. Filmmakers, especially in Hollywood, have always been fascinated by the romance of classical music composers. But until Russell came along, these biopics were too worshipful, often whitewashing their subjects, as with such examples as The Great Waltz (1938), with Fernand Gravey as Johann Strauss; A Song to Remember (1945), with Cornel Wilde as Frederic Chopin and Merle Oberon as George Sand; Song of Love (1947), with Paul Henreid and Katharine Hepburn as Robert and Clara Schumann, and Robert Walker as Johannes Brahms; and Song without End (1960), with Dirk Bogarde as Franz Liszt. Anyone familiar with the subjects, these performers, and the lavish production values of the time can imagine almost blow-by-blow accounts of the films without seeing them, though Wilde actually looks more like Beethoven. Some European efforts, as with Abel Gance's Un grand amour de Beethoven (1937), while romanticized, were at least less predictable. Taking slow steps at first and tackling subjects about whom he had passionate interests, Russell broke away from this reverential, gauzy approach with a vengeance, offering warts-and-all portraits, though some have complained he has provided too many warts. In Composers in the Movies: Studies in Musical Biography, John C. Tibbetts does not exaggerate when he claims that Russell made the first adult musical biopics. (1) According to Joseph Horowitz, only Stanley Kubrick, among major contemporary filmmakers, treats music with something like the respect and understanding Russell accords it. (2) Russell's contributions are significant because over the past half century he has given thousands of viewers their first exposure to Debussy, Delius, Elgar, Liszt, Mahler, Tchaikovsky, and others. It is also interesting to contemplate the similarities between his treatments of these composers and his occasional forays into popular music. The BBC hired Russell on the basis of three amateur films he made while working as a photojournalist--one of which used a score by Benjamin Britten. His first significant BBC film about a musician was the forty-five-minute Prokofiev: Portrait of a Soviet Composer (1961). Other music-related television films, ranging from fifteen minutes to an hour, not included in Ken Russell at the BBC are Variations on a Mechanical Theme (1959), about musical instruments; Guitar Craze (1959), about folk musician Davy Graham; Gordon Jacob (1959); Marie Rambert Remembers (1960), about the ballet star; The Miners' Picnic (1960), about brass bands; Cranko at Work (1960), about choreographer John Cranko; The Light Fantastic (1960), a look at dance in England; Lotte Lenya Sings Kurt Weill (1962); Bartok (1964); Don't Shoot the Composer (1966), about film composer Georges Delerue; The Dance of the Seven Veils (1970), about Richard Strauss; The Planets (1983), a look at the solar system inspired by Gustav Hoist; Portrait of a Composer: Ralph Vaughan Williams (1986); Ken Russell's ABC of British Music (1988); Mephistopheles (1989), the Arrigo Boito work by the Geneose Opera; The Strange Affliction of Anton Bruckner (1990); The Secret Life of Arnold Bax (1992), with Russell himself as the composer; The Mystery of Dr. …