Hell Takes the Form of State Repression in 1971’s “The Devils”
Ken Russell’s film designed by Derek Jarman, newly released in a 4K restoration, mirrors the horrors unfolding outside our windows.
Before Derek Jarman became known for his anachronistic, queer film adaptations of the lives of Saint Sebastian, Caravaggio, Edward II, and even the Passion of Jesus, the English artist and activist worked as a set designer. This facet of Jarman, who died from AIDS-related illnesses in 1994, has recently come to the fore with the hyped release of the 4K restoration of Ken Russell's scandalous 1971 horror film The Devils, screening at the IFC Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Nitehawk cinemas in New York in the coming weeks.
Adapted from Aldous Huxley's 1952 book The Devils of Loudun and John Whiting's 1961 play The Devils, the film is set in the castled town of Loudun, France, in 1634, in the aftermath of the Huguenot Rebellions against the French state's attempts to consolidate the power of the Crown and the Catholic Church. It opens with an image of a near-naked, genderqueer King Louis XIII performing on a half-shell on a theater stage à la Botticelli's “Venus” before shifting to Loudun, the site of a famous scandal wherein Ursuline nuns reportedly experienced bouts of demonic possession. The blame for this hysteria is strategically placed on a secular priest by the name of Urbain Grandier (played by a mustached Oliver Reed), who was subsequently tried and executed for his alleged crimes.
Grandier's entrapment by his enemies comes to comment on a larger evil that comes not from one poorly behaved individual but from the totalitarian powers that knock down the town's walls immediately following his burning at the stake.
"At the time that I made The Devils, I was a devout Catholic, and secure in my faith," Russell recalled in an interview in Sight and Sound in 1995, addressing the controversies surrounding the film's highly sexual depictions of nuns, priests, and even a fallen crucifix that becomes a sex object in a frenzied exorcism-cum-orgy.
“For myself, although I am not a political creature, I always viewed The Devils as my one political film. To me, it was about brainwashing, about the state taking over,” he added.
