Pub Date : 2019-06-25DOI: 10.5040/9781350054493.0008
D. Arnold
This chapter evaluates the themes prevalent in Ken Russell's The Devils (1973). A key message in The Devils, which creeps up on the audience rather subtly, given Russell's rather unjust reputation as a sledgehammer of a director, concerns the misery and destruction which can result when politics and religion jump into bed together. As the film's final, spectacular shot reveals the ruins of the magnificent city walls shown near the start of the film, the scale of the horror of what has occurred really resonates; these bookends chillingly convey the film's main point. It was Cardinal Richelieu's desire to build a new, centralised (and Protestant-free) France in which, as he puts it to Louis XIII in the opening scene, ‘Church and State are one’, which has led to the destroyed walls of Loudun at the end, and it is clear to see who has blood on their hands. Russell said The Devils was his only political film, and one can just about taste his revulsion at the unholy marriage that has occurred between Church and State; the film presents a compelling argument for the separation of the two entities, which eventually came to pass in France in 1905.
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Josann Cutajar, R. Baldacchino, B. Murphy, Marceline Naudi
This chapter focuses on the representation of gender and sexuality in Ken Russell's The Devils (1973). In terms of gender and sexuality, The Devils possess, at its core, a very traditional outlook that is quite a good fit with the philosophies of many of those responsible for the film's critical opprobrium. The protagonist, Grandier, is a red-blooded male and apparently a heartthrob for the majority of Loudun's female population. As he is being tortured in the film's latter stages, Grandier confesses, ‘I have been a man. I have loved women’, clearly seeing the two things as being concordant. This statement also serves to further emasculate Louis XIII. More problematically, there are numerous female characters in The Devils, and the bulk of them are defined through their relationships to/with the louche Grandier—most are in love/lust with the priest and/or driven hysterical by him. Regardless of where they stand on the Grandier spectrum, one thing all these women have in common is that they are infantilised through their relationships with/to the priest. Whether fantasising about Grandier-as-Christ or giving in to her onanistic urges in clear view of one of her equally sex-starved charges, Jeanne is a hysteric whose happiness completely depends on the feelings of a man she's never even met.
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This chapter assesses the censorship travails of Ken Russell's The Devils (1973) and the various versions of the film which have appeared on both big and small screens. The Devils is a film which, in the main, has not been well looked after since it debuted in cinemas in 1971. For the most part, the various versions of the film which exist are inextricably linked to its censorship history. The film has spent much of its life being squeezed on both sides, as both internal and external censorship have played their part in altering Russell's vision. This was not the first time a film had had its wings clipped by both Warner Bros. and the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), as a similar fate had previously befallen Performance (1970). Trying to compare various releases really is an onerous task, as running time—even when frame rate is taken into account—is no reliable guide, given that cuts can be made via substitution and transfers can happen at wonky speeds, plus there are the vagaries of distributor logos and so on. However, one can run through the film's main incarnations on the big screen, and also look at some of the home-video options that are out there.
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Pub Date : 2019-06-25DOI: 10.3828/liverpool/9781911325758.003.0009
D. Arnold
This chapter highlights the legacy and influence of Ken Russell's The Devils (1973). The Devils is a film which concurrently exists both within and without of horror. The presence of a timeless, universal message should not be seen as a sign that Russell is merely using the genre as a vehicle on which to relay loftier concerns, but rather proof that some of the best horror films have an exceptionally long reach. It is not so much a film which works on different levels, but rather one in which the political and the personal, the fine detail and the broad canvas, the earth-shattering and the life-changing all collude and shift around in the same space, ready mixed for viewer consumption. The audience does not have to process the film in terms of layers, or separate the literal from the analogous, as with The Devils Russell created a work which affords the viewer that rarest of opportunities: to simultaneously think and feel.
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Pub Date : 2019-06-25DOI: 10.3828/liverpool/9781911325758.003.0005
D. Arnold
This chapter investigates the genre of Ken Russell's The Devils (1973). Nowadays, it is common to see The Devils lumped in with horror programming, and while identifying the film as belonging to the genre is by no means inaccurate, there is a lot more to say about the film when it comes to classifying it. In many ways, The Devils possibly ends up as a horror film (as opposed to being designed as one), and the more extreme, graphic elements of the film crowd out the other aspects, at least from the general viewer's perspective. But the film very much remains, in essence, as it begins—a historical drama, not being eclipsed by, but rather dovetailing neatly with, its horror elements, which are something of a natural by-product. As such, the largely unnoticed sophistication of the film marked an evolution in screen horror. Rather than setting out to make a horror film or trying to box the film in in terms of genre, Russell simply set about telling his story here, and the genre latterly assigned to The Devils appears to be due to its title as much as its content.
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This chapter examines Ken Russell's The Devils (1973) in terms of authorship and adaptation. The Devils is often viewed, quite understandably, as being pure Ken Russell, but the influence of the two acknowledged sources on his screenplay should not be overlooked. A common view is that much of the historical information in the film was gleaned from Aldous Huxley's 1952 book The Devils of Loudun, and the dialogue was influenced by (or lifted from) John Whiting's 1961 play The Devils. Both of the film's credited sources allow for interesting correlations with Russell's film, but what is often passed over is that Whiting's play was based on Huxley's book—therefore the film is based on both a book and a play that was based on that same book, meaning Russell adapts Huxley both directly and indirectly. With this in mind, a straightforward bifurcation of The Devils' screenplay is not really possible.
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Pub Date : 2010-02-25DOI: 10.1002/9781444324198.CH8
J. Arnold
This chapter focuses on the representation of gender and sexuality in Ken Russell's The Devils (1973). In terms of gender and sexuality, The Devils possess, at its core, a very traditional outlook that is quite a good fit with the philosophies of many of those responsible for the film's critical opprobrium. The protagonist, Grandier, is a red-blooded male and apparently a heartthrob for the majority of Loudun's female population. As he is being tortured in the film's latter stages, Grandier confesses, ‘I have been a man. I have loved women’, clearly seeing the two things as being concordant. This statement also serves to further emasculate Louis XIII. More problematically, there are numerous female characters in The Devils, and the bulk of them are defined through their relationships to/with the louche Grandier—most are in love/lust with the priest and/or driven hysterical by him. Regardless of where they stand on the Grandier spectrum, one thing all these women have in common is that they are infantilised through their relationships with/to the priest. Whether fantasising about Grandier-as-Christ or giving in to her onanistic urges in clear view of one of her equally sex-starved charges, Jeanne is a hysteric whose happiness completely depends on the feelings of a man she's never even met.
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