The Devils (dir. Ken Russell, 1971)
There was a series of supposed demonic possessions at a Ursuline convent in Loudun, France in 1634. The church performed public exorcism, engaged in torture, and found guilty a local priest named Urbain Grandier for witchcraft. He was burned at the stake for this crime. The prevailing historical opinion is that this was a case of mass hysteria that conveniently allowed the political and religious establishment to remove a troublesome actor in Grandier. In 1952, Aldous Huxley wrote a nonfiction account titled The Devils of Loudun, which subsequently was adapted into a 1960 play by John Whiting and finally into the notorious Ken Russell film The Devils.
The reason why The Devils is remembered is due to its X rating, which it received after the cuts mandated by both British and American censors. It is full of graphic depictions of sex, torture, violence, and sacrilegious imagery. Even the version I watched was not the uncut version that contains its most infamous scenes. All this gives the film a reputation as a salacious, even taboo which does it a great disservice, because this is not some exploitation movie made on the cheap, but a serious work of art.
The Devils is as much a political film as it is a religious horror film. It depicts the church and monarchy under Cardinal Richelieu and Louis XIII as corrupt institutions interested only in power, while depicting Loudun with its mixed Catholic and Huguenot Protestant population as if not a progressive place, at least a step in the right direction. The convent where so much of the film takes place is explicitly described as a place where wealthy and noble family’s placed their marriageable daughters. The methods used by the inquisition are needlessly cruel, ineffective, and only used as a pretext to do whatever they want.
This situation is complicated by the characters who are multidimensional, which in a Ken Russell film translates to irrepressibly horny. Grandier (Oliver Reed) flagrantly ignores his vow of celibacy, impregnating one woman and marrying another in a secret ceremony that he officiates himself. He’s a classic tragic figure whose pride and egomania become his downfall. The hunchbacked abbess Jeanne des Anges (Vanessa Redgrave) is deeply repressed, her sexual obsession with Grandier bleeding into religious devotion in imagined reveries that were no doubt frowned upon when the film was released. You feel sympathy for her because she’s trapped in this system, but she is also the one responsible for the hysteria interpreted by the authorities as possession. This is in contrast to Louis XIII, who we see hunt Huguenot prisoners in bird costumes while being depicted in such a camp fashion that I think it might be a hate crime, or Father Barre whose religious mania is frighteningly sincere.
The film can also be seen as a critique of contemporary institutions. The set design by Derek Jarman often feels anachronistic. Loudun is distressingly modern looking with its smooth white walls. Churches and prisons look like facilities you could visit at the time of the film’s release. Father Barre, of all characters, with his wire rim glasses and shoulder length blond hair looks like he could be from 1971. The Devils was released in the era of R. D. Laing’s critiques of psychiatric treatment, and it’s easy to see parallels with the torture used by the inquisition [1]. I suspect that Russell decided to use the story of the Loudun possessions as a lens to look at institutional abuse in the modern era, while continuing his pet project of depicting sex in cinema that began with his D.H. Lawrence adaption of Women in Love. I also suspect that he thought he could get away with way more material because of the critical acclaim he received for that film, although how he thought a scene where Jeanne uses the charred femur of Grandier in an “unorthodox fashion” is beyond me.
[1] I want to stress I think Ken Russell believes that. I do not. Schizophrenia is a real illness, and I will happily take my SSRI.
October 19, 2018
oliveresque 