Viewed by the church as a recalcitrant agitator who thumbed his nose at ecclesial power, and notorious among local women as a libidinous bed-hopper, the French priest Urbain Grandier had few defenders when his army of enemies burned him alive.
By 1634, when the scandal-plagued pastor was publicly immolated in the French town of Loudun, Grandier had already been charged with “lewdness and sacrilege” and consequently stripped of his priestly duties for five years.
His troubles were legion. Grandier, in seeking to stop the destruction of Loudun, had challenged the authority of Cardinal Richelieu, the French cleric and powerbroker who served as French foreign secretary and later chief minister to King Louis XIII. Grandier had allegedly—and anonymously—committed libel against Louis XIII. He was also accused by Louis Trincant, the king’s prosecutor in Loudun, of impregnating his daughter. (Grandier’s sentence on this charge was later reversed.)
And finally, amid a growing campaign of retribution and a widespread panic about demonic influence infecting early modern Europe, Grandier was accused of witchcraft. The beleaguered priest was tortured and executed after authorities concluded that, through a pact with the devil, he had possessed a convent of Ursuline nuns.
A strange footnote in the annals of church history, the Loudun possessions—with their provocative mix of sex, religion, violence and authority—offered a natural subject for the British director Ken Russell. Known for his outrageous, highly stylized pictures that gleefully challenged British censors and expanded the boundaries of studio-backed films, Russell released “The Devils” in 1971.
Shamelessly graphic, frequently grotesque, thoroughly obscene and utterly depraved, “The Devils” is also an expertly crafted picture that, until now, has been nearly impossible to see in full. Russell, a Catholic convert, fashioned an indecent triumph, an Old Testament vision of wickedness, power and pleasure that pushed beyond the bounds of good taste. Propriety has no place in this story and, as Marcel Duchamp once said, “taste is the great enemy of art.”
After 55 years of censorship and an extraordinary restoration process undertaken by Warner Bros. Clockwork, “The Devils” is back in theaters this week—with a brand-new and hard-earned NC-17 rating. These rare, highly anticipated screenings mark the first time general audiences will see the film uncensored, with its most lurid footage edited back into the picture following a herculean effort by the British film critic Mark Kermode to hunt down the excised minutes. During the weekend of October 16, the film grossed more than $1.6 million and outsold both “The Social Reckoning” and “Digger.” No restoration I’ve ever seen comes close to the startlingly modern, pristine image achieved in this new 4K print.
Russell’s film, its completed version a kind of Holy Grail among cinéastes, ignited great controversy and prompted accusations of blasphemy for its transgressive content. (I will address the blasphemy claims later.) Sex, nudity and medieval torture abound as supposedly possessed nuns, driven by a mad lust for Grandier, surrender to hedonism and commit all manner of debauchery. “The Devils” is a coordinated assault on the senses, moral and otherwise.
Critics savaged the film on its original 1971 release as “a grand fiesta for sadists and perverts” while censors tore it apart, demanding severe cuts before it could be shown in cinemas. “For Ken Russell, these alterations were heartbreaking because the deleted material…encapsulated the thematic heart of the film,” said Kermode, who befriended Russell until the director’s death in 2011.
“The Devils” was far from the only controversial film released that year. The late ’60s and early ’70s, known as the New Hollywood era in American cinema, saw mainstream pictures test the limits of censors and the moviegoing public in regards to sex and violence on screen. In 1971, “A Clockwork Orange,” “Straw Dogs,” “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” and “Carnal Knowledge,” which Edith Bunker famously mistook for a religious film about cardinals, stunned audiences alongside “The Devils.” And just a year later, “Last Tango in Paris” caused new controversy.
Two years later, Warner Bros. would follow “The Devils” with another picture about possession—“The Exorcist.” It was a period of artistic provocation and creative risk-taking unmatched in film history. Only the pre-Code days of early Hollywood, before formal censorship, saw such boundary-pushing.
“The Devils” stars a career-best Oliver Reed as the persecuted Grandier and features a menacing, intensely physical performance from British screen royalty Vanessa Redgrave. The actress, who attended a recent screening of the film in London, is impish and cunning, vulnerable yet dangerous, as the Ursuline mother superior and Grandier accuser Sister Jeanne des Agnes.
With her icy glare and knowing smirk, her head framed by a wimple and unnaturally cocked to the side, she always looks at you askance. Her ruinous desire for the libertine pastor both torments and consoles her as she and her sisters descend into a sexual frenzy. “Destroy me, I love you,” says one sister to Grandier during Confession.
Reed, whose staggering screen presence and fearsome reputation seemed custom-made for Grandier, portrays the priest as an incorrigible narcissist and wayward lothario. Despite the absurdity of his circumstances in “The Devils,” Reed, who died in 1999, plays Grandier with a Shakespearean seriousness. The priest is hopelessly self-important while unjustly persecuted by his adversaries. So why not play him with the gravitas of Hamlet or Macbeth?
It is the corrupt marriage between church and state power, culminating in a gruesome execution, that forms the central theme of the film. Russell, in all his excess and absurdity, aims to critique excessive power and its abuse by secular and clerical authorities. He has made a scathing, amusing and often ridiculous film about a ridiculous historical episode.
The Loudun possessions were fertile ground for several artists before Russell, who adapted his film from the Aldous Huxley novel The Devils of Loudun, published in 1952. Nine years later, in 1961, the English dramatist John Whiting published his play “The Devils,” and that same year, the Polish film director Jerzy Kawalerowicz released “Mother Joan of the Angels.” In 1969, the composer Krzysztof Penderecki premiered his opera on the possessions; an excerpt is heard in “The Exorcist.”
Discussing the outlandish scenes and surrealist flourishes that define his films, Russell rejected realism as both unentertaining and unsurprising to an audience. “Realistic art is usually bad art,” said Russell in 1973. “To do something extraordinary, that the mind isn’t prepared for, you really cut through what I think is a gauze in front of people’s minds.”
Born in 1927, Russell rebelled against the mannered British dramas of the ’30 and ’40s and the kitchen-sink realism of the ’50s and ’60s to provoke and excite viewers with his maximalist, hallucinatory artistic style.
He is disinterested in restraint and largely allergic to suggestion. His colorful, gonzo visions achieve a dreamlike quality best exemplified by his many musical (or music-focused) films, including “Tommy,” “Lisztomania” and “The Boy Friend,” a family-friendly romp also released in 1971. A genre all to himself, Russell is an acquired taste, and one that is constantly inventive, boundless and thrilling. To Russell, boredom is the ultimate sin. He is innocent of that charge.
But is he guilty of blasphemy? Here is a term that has been used to denote everything from grave offenses against God to disrespect for religion in general. In its section discussing the First Commandment, the Catechism of the Catholic Church defines blasphemy as a grave sin that “consists in uttering against God … words of hatred, reproach or defiance; in speaking ill of God.” The Catechism also notes that blasphemy extends to the “misuse” of God’s name to cover-up or commit crimes, such as torture.
In this sense, it is certainly blasphemous what church authorities do to Grandier, invoking the judgment of God to torture and kill him, but the film itself is not necessarily blasphemous. Is it Russell’s intent to defame or insult God? It does not appear so. Rather, Russell concludes that the parasitic relationship between the church and the state, in its vicious witch hunt against Grandier, defames the priest through a power-hungry campaign of vengeance and grievance.
“The Devils” is best viewed not as a lowbrow shock piece about the power of blasphemy, but as a political polemic about the blasphemy of power.
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