Aldous Huxley compared the exorcism of Prioress Joan of the Angels to “rape in a public toilet”. It’s this horrific description that director Ken Russell shared with production designer Derek Jarman before they began telling this story. Russell wanted to capture the spirit of Huxley’s non-fiction book, The Devils of Loudunabout the 17th-century incident in which a convent of nuns claimed possession, displaying wild and obscene behavior, leading to the conviction for witchcraft and execution of priest Urbain Grandier. For this 1971 adaptation, The DevilsJarman took the mission literally. Large white tiles cover every square inch of the Loudun Ursuline Convent in the film, from the floor to the walls to the vaulted ceiling. Tiles and iron bars. It’s a magnificent setting, photographed by cinematographer David Watkin in wide-screen anamorphic grandeur, and immerses the audience in the stifled, cloistered lives of the nuns. Its austerity is both fascinating and infuriating. It’s the perfect location for a possession case – or several – and a likely site for clinically staged abuse.
This was not the first time I had seen the scene in question, which is somehow more and less disturbing than Huxley’s six words suggest. I first looked The Devils 15 or 20 years ago, on a pirated copy. It was a film whose reputation preceded it, and I was a young man, barely out of high school, titillated by its scandalous story. Even before its initial release, The Devils was heavily reduced to appease British censors. It was further reduced for its American release. Although it grossed respectable sums at the British box office, the lavish Warner Bros. production. was critically panned (Roger Ebert’s sarcastic review is a classic in the throwback genre) and essentially buried thereafter, appearing on a few VHS releases in the ’80s, but never on DVD or Blu-ray. In the early 2000s, British film critic Mark Kermode rediscovered the censored footage, helping Russell put together a director’s cut that was screened only once, from a DigiBeta tape.
The copy I watched years ago was an earlier cut, probably the original theatrical version minus the more controversial scenes, but that whole thing prepared me for an outrageous movie, and an outrageous movie is just what I got. The exorcism of Sister Joan – taking place in the white tiled toilets of a convent, assaulted by priests wielding giant syringes to perform forced enemas – was sensational, as was the rest of the film’s colorful madness. Widespread nudity, violence, actors gesticulating wildly, saying things like, “They say they can stand up to the Church, but they can’t stand up to that bitch.” » A film for the sick. I loved it, of course, but I don’t think I took it very seriously.
Kermode is the man largely responsible for The Devils recovery project, and rallied to the film’s cause long before it became popular to sing its praises. There’s a reason he was the one who dug up the footage that Russell told him was long gone and probably destroyed. The bulk of this footage consists of a single sequence, the film’s most infamous, often referred to as “The Rape of Christ.” Although viewable in heavily defaced form traded by online bootleggers, Warner Bros.’ recent 4K restoration of Russell’s director’s cut. Clockwork is the first time almost everyone gets to see this scene, and this movie, in all its debauched glory. In this scene, the nuns were paraded around, manipulated by politically motivated priests to perform obscene orgies in a church, culminating with an extremely graphic desecration of Jesus on a demolished crucifix. With blasphemous content, the scene is a revelation.
“For Ken, it was also the heart of the film, the point where the two key narratives intersect,” Kermode told me. “One is the debasement of Christianity and the rituals of the Church for underhanded political purposes. The other is Grandier’s own journey to faith.” As he pointed out, the sequence in question is much more than just the rape of Christ. All this vulgarity is interspersed with a scene of Grandier on a quiet road by a lake, taking communion. It’s a startling juxtaposition of, as Kermode puts it, “spiritual enrichment and performative debasement,” and one that belies the idea that Russell’s goal was simple depravity. “This sequence is the intersection of these two themes, and when you remove it from the film, you effectively remove its political and religious heart.” This was no small feat for Russell, who maintained well into old age: “I am a devout Catholic. Always have been, always will be.”
Seeing a work again is an exciting proposition. Times change, people change, and so art changes along with it. In the case of The Devilsthe film has literally changed since its initial release, and that also reflects the changing times. When Kermode helped put together the director’s cut in 2004, he and Russell hoped for a proper restoration and release. But at the height of the Bush era, Warner Bros. wasn’t going to tempt fate Last temptation-style by releasing a work that is offensive to religious sensibilities. 2004 was also the year of The Passion of Christ. He sat down.
What changed with Warner’s bigwigs is anyone’s guess, but Kermode credits Clockwork president Christian Parkes and VP of marketing and creative Spencer Collantes, both from the bustling indie distributor Neon, for The Devils get his late push. “From what I understand, once they presented it, they had nothing but support,” Kermode said. “It’s wild!” The Devils is Clockwork’s first release and a clear mission statement for the shingle, which, even now under Skydance, apparently still has a mandate to handle equally cool new productions and re-releases of underserved classics.
Thus, young, trendy executives have finally thawed the hearts of companies. That makes sense. These days, when a film is buried, it’s more likely for a tax write-off or because it criticizes a billionaire in business with the studio – keep an eye out for whether the Alex Gibney film Musk is still streaming on HBO Max after Elon Musk invested $1 billion in Skydance. The titans of Silicon Valley are now our deities, so blaspheming God isn’t really a concern. It is precisely in this modern political reality that the director’s film The Devils has arrived, finally complete and finally ready to be appreciated for its “political and religious heart”.
Watching the restoration at the Toronto International Film Festival, I was first struck by the visual splendor of the film. It still looked good, but don’t let anyone fool you about the revealing power of a good 4K scrub. Finally seeing the vibrant colors and incredible detail of Jarman’s sets, Watkin’s cinematography, Shirley Russell’s costumes, and the actors’ faces, all projected large, is worth the price of a ticket alone. I was transported. “He wanted to make a film that would give the audience a sensory overload, dazzle them with the modernity of the city and the contemporary nature of the story,” Kermode said of Russell’s direction. “Everything about this film is avant-garde.” Its modernity remains captivating 55 years later, lending what might otherwise be seemingly alien events from a bygone era a relentless immediacy. It’s a film about the 17th century, but it’s also a film about 1971, and it’s also about our times.
The history of the Loudun holdings, as told by Aldous Huxley in his book, is a story of demagoguery and distorted realities. “By paying so much attention to the devil and treating witchcraft as the most heinous crime, theologians and inquisitors actually spread the beliefs and promoted the practices they worked so hard to suppress,” he writes. Published in 1952, Huxley’s book was historical, but its concerns were entirely based in the present:
“By the beginning of the 18th century, witchcraft had ceased to be a serious social problem. It died out, among other reasons, because almost no one now cared to suppress it. The less persecuted it was, the less propaganda it received. Attention had shifted from the supernatural to the natural. From about 1700 to the present, all persecutions in the West have been secular and, one might say, humanistic. For us, radical evil has ceased to be something metaphysical and has become political or economic and that radical Evil is now incarnated, not in sorcerers and magicians (because we like to consider ourselves positivists), but in the representatives of a hated class or nation. The springs of action and the rationalizations have undergone a certain change but the motivated hatreds and the justified ferocities are all too familiar.
Huxley’s political perspective was the spirit that animated Russell’s output. This is why he clung to descriptions such as “rape in a public toilet”. The very modernity of the book’s interpretation of Loudun’s descent into collective hysteria defines the film’s aesthetic and moral approach. Reenacting and restoring the film to this moment in history only further clarifies its moral power. It is not blasphemous, but deeply engaged with the idea of a spiritual life co-opted by politics for nefarious purposes. Urbain Grandier, played by an ever-sexier Oliver Reed, begins the film as a priest disillusioned by the dogmas of the Church. Not a Protestant, he nevertheless justifies his frequent fornication as holy in itself, in contravention of an authority that he cannot bring himself to respect. His commitment is to God, not necessarily to the Pope, and certainly not to the corrupt Cardinal Richelieu.
The positions Grandier takes early on, however, are fundamentally narcissistic, and his actions are those of a rogue libertine abusing his position to woo women – and boy, does he ever woo the women of…
Gn entert
