The Devils

Revisiting Ken Russell’s controversial masterpiece

“They say Ken Russell has gone too far.”

In our current age of On Demand, Netflix, Amazon Home Delivery, and the Criterion Collection it’s hard to believe that the cinema was once somewhat of an exclusive club. Not an exclusive club like those you find in private education that consist of young men running riot with their father’s money, or even those mysterious 5-star lounges that supposedly lurk in the unexplored and spacious back-caverns of airports, but exclusive clubs in the sense that witnessing the extraordinary and weird images of the most revolutionary visual auteurs could only be seen at great effort in picturehouses that seemed to solely accommodate cultured city-dwellers. These cinemas were secret clubhouses where the most creative-minded of society could share these revolutions in audiovisual experience. But nowadays, in the age of widespread multiplexes — and the age where films often don’t even see the inside of a cinema but are warped directly into our cerebral cortexes by the power of fiberoptic streaming — this idea seems outlandish and antiquated.

It is this context that — once again — sets Ken Russell’s retina-scorching, darkly camp, and borderline blasphemous masterpiece, The Devils, apart. In 1971, the legendary British director opened up a can of worms. A can of worms so putrid to some that even to this day, the full, pure, unadulterated, and uncut version of the film cannot be bought, rented or streamed. The film itself is devilish, relishing in its frightening and shocking imagery, proud of how outrageously out there it wants to be. Numerous publications at the time of release were aghast at the film, comments ranging from saying it had “all the taste and restraint of a three-day gang bang”, to retitling it “Goebbels in drag.”

It is perhaps the so-called “Rape of Christ” scene that lies at “the very heart of the film” — Ken Russell’s own words — that inspired The Devils’s misalignment with sadism and perversion. The few-minute sequence of naked nuns defiling an idol of Christ in orgasmic frenzy was removed from the film, and though it has been placed back in some editions of the film, albeit it in poorly developed low-quality image like a square peg forced back into a circular hole, Russell’s original, unfettered vision is hard to come by.

Not only does the scene lie at the very heart of the film’s narrative, it is in fact the very heart of the film’s concept, working as a central metaphor and a microcosmic embodiment of the film’s shocking political statement. The Devils is easily Russell’s most political film, depicting the unholy marriage of church and state — a point that is made with genuine burning anger — through a story that the opening moments of the film claim “is based upon historical fact.” The story goes: in 17th Century France, in an effort to gain further power, Cardinal Richelieu hopes to convince King Louis XIII that destroying the fortification of cities throughout France will prevent Protestant uprisings. The film centres around one such city, Loudon, who has recently come under the control of Father Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed) after the death of its governor. Thus, through a depraved and conspiring inquisition led by Father Pierre Barre (Michael Gothard), a professional witch-hunter, and aided by the torturous manipulation of the sexually repressed and hunchbacked nun, Sister Jeanne des Anges (Vanessa Redgrave), the church attempts to bring down Grandier in the hope that his stronghold will fall with him. It is a tale that explores the corruption of religion. Like the idol of Christ, religious doctrine has been raped for personal gain.

And it is the city of Loudon that becomes the expressionistic stage where the crimes and corruption of history are played out. Filmmaker Derek Jarman — then just an artist, as it wasn’t until after The Devils that he turned his creative eye towards the big screen — was given the task to design the grand sets that form the biblical backdrop to the film’s dark narrative. They are anachronistic in their neo-futurist style, and this was Russell’s intention, hoping to evoke a contemporary feeling for a modern audience, and in turn, breaking down the temporal boundaries that separate this story from our own present. In turn, Russell not only uncovers the psyche of the past, but transposes it onto our own modern sensibilities. Perhaps in loading his film with untamed and overwrought imagery and themes, Russell knew that this act of cinematic heresy would lead to subsequent censorship cases, and in turn, only go to enhance the point that the film’s content was expressing.