![]() Sister Jeanne was a poor soul whose body was positively bursting at the seams with devils, but she overcame them to become touched by the divine, leaving her prone to religious ecstasies and holy possessions by an angel of God. Each believed themselves to be either a blessed saint or a damned demoniac, depending on when, over the course of their strange and tortured lives, you asked. These two people at the heart of the crimes against Grandier, in Huxley’s telling, fed each other’s delusions through earnestly held faith in the teachings of the Church and faith that they themselves were special. Leviathan … occupied the center of the Prioress’s forehead Beherit was lodged in her stomach Balaam under the second rib on the right side Iscaaron under the last rib on the left.įather Surin, in particular, worked with Sister Jeanne for years. Huxley summarizes the exorcists’ mapping of Sister Jeanne’s devils: He focuses specifically on long, sympathetic, and nuanced character studies of Father Surin and Sister Jeanne, far from the melodramatic figures that Russell’s film offers.Īccording to Huxley, the exorcists went on trying to dispel numerous, named devils who were thought to have possessed specific parts of the bodies of these nuns. ![]() But it’s only about two-thirds of the way through Huxley’s treatment, which goes on to detail what happens to the exorcists and the nuns. That’s roughly where Russell’s film ends. These political, religious, and social forces culminate in the horrific torture and execution of Grandier by burning at the stake. One of them, Father Surin, is a charismatic zealot who whips the nuns and the entire town into a frenzy of outrage and heretical hearsay-that is, heresy that was also hearsay. Jeanne accuses a philandering and arrogant Jesuit priest, Urban Grandier, of having summoned devils to ravish and possess her and the entire convent. The film is an adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s 1952 nonfiction book, The Devils of Loudun, which tells the story of Sister Jeanne, the mother superior of a convent in the village of Loudun in 17th-century France. In the process, they drove an entire convent of nuns to commit shocking levels of sacrilege and forced them to undergo misogynistic tortures disguised as exorcisms, all for the sake of petty vengeance and the consolidation of political power. The Devils and its source material, which I’ll get to in a moment, tell of one particularly horrific event, in which the Church carried out the torture and execution of an innocent man in the name of God. Their so-called “witchfinders,” as we wrote then, “manifested the devil wherever they went and in so doing, became him.” Leveraging this power, the Church murdered countless innocents, mostly women, in the name of God. And waaaaay back in our post on Häxan, we talked about the historical reality of Medieval Europe, in which the Church repeated accusations of witchcraft over and over until the people believed them. We’ve explored some of these ideas earlier in this series with our Dissection of We Summon the Darkness, in which we talked about audiences’ rejection of the film for portraying a Christian organization that stages fake Satanic ritual sacrifices and suicides to scare people into the arms of the church. Those depictions have inspired accusations that the film is anti-religious, anti-Catholic, and downright blasphemous. Critics, for the most part, have responded most aggressively to the scenes rooted in the actual events on which the film is based. ![]() In fact, the parts of The Devils that inspire the most inflamed responses from critics are not those invented by Russell for dramatic effect-with the possible exception of the film’s most controversial scene, but I’ll get to that later. And even though Russell takes many, many liberties with his source material, it’s still surprisingly close to the horrific history it portrays. Much of that discomfort, though, comes from the understanding that it’s based on real events. The result has been clouded by censorship for decades, but if you manage to watch the (mostly) uncut version, you’ll find that the film, even for the non-religious, is deeply uncomfortable viewing. ![]() It reflects the realities of a historical episode that, after nearly three-hundred years, feels no less outrageous and bizarre. The film offers a social critique of the Church and human history, exploring themes of power, faith, charisma, mass delusion, and mob mentality through psychosexual religious imagery and some serious body horror. Not just controversial for its time, Russell’s masterpiece remains shocking to this day in its depictions of cruelty, orgiastic sexuality, the evils of the 17th-century Catholic Church, and blasphemous imagery. Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971) has been called the most controversial film in Hollywood history.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |