The Devils
The year is 1634. In France, Cardinal Richelieu and King Louis XIII have broken the last bastions of Protestant resistance. In the city of Loudun, a defiant priest named Urban Grandier, a freethinker who rejects the dogma of Catholic faith, opposes the royal order to tear down the city walls. In order to remove the troublemaker, the authorities look for a way to defame him, which is provided by Sister Jeanne, who has unrequited feelings for Grandier. She accuses the priest of witchcraft. Russell’s bravest film, both intellectually and in terms of the production (production design by Derek Jarman), is a dissertation on the instrumentalization of religion. The film’s plot was inspired by real events, which served as the subject of a book by Aldous Huxley (which The Devils is based on). Russell focuses primarily on the figure of Father Grandier, who encompasses all of his own obsessions with faith and human freedom. The drama is expressed through a kaleidoscope of images that are as grotesque as they are terrifying, that, in their intensity, reveal the suffering of the characters.
Piotr Kletowski
awards
IFF Venice 1971 - Best Foreign Film; Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists 1972 - Best Foreign Director; National Board of Review, USA 1972 - Best Director
Ken Russell
(1927-2011) was the enfant terrible of British cinema. While he was often called the "British Fellini," what distinguished him from the Italian director was that he exceeded the limits of good taste far more often. Blessed with an extraordinary "music-video" style, he spent much of his career portraying other artists, but his greatest achievement was his surprisingly subtle adaptation of an erotic classic by D. H. Lawrence. Self-taught, he entered the world of cinema as an excellent stills photographer. Earlier in life, he had been a dancer, a pilot in the RAF, and a sailor. His love of movement characterizes his incredible films in which wild camera movements and expressive editing accompanied by passages of classical music lead audiences into a world of the subjective sensibilities of some of the luminaries of 19th-century art, of nuns with unrequited feelings, scientists experimenting with narcotics, and prostitutes leading double lives.
One of the themes found in Russell’s camp films is always a reflection on human freedom, which he looks for usually either in sexual excess or in religion or in his treatment of these subjects, i.e., in his art. He was a pioneer of music videos (after all, he made the first videos aired on MTV), and he also worked in opera, but he remained faithful to the cinematic arts to the very end, which he practiced even in his back garden when he was very ill and the only thing he could operate was a VHS camera. There is no way to overestimate the impact that Russell had on his contemporaries and on creative filmmakers today, who are uninterested in coarse realism. Without a hint of irony, one could say that Russell was the Oscar Wilde of English cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, the king of excess, baroque, and irony, hiding within himself subversive wisdom. Film critic Mark Kermode, an admirer of Russell’s work, called his films "a testimony to the greatness of British cinema of the 1970s." However, Terry Gilliam summed up Russell’s work best, saying that "the films by the maker of The Devils are proof that the most important thing in cinema is imagination, especially unbridled imagination."
Piotr Kletowski
Selected filmography
1967 Mózg za miliard dolarów / Billion Dollar Brain
1969 Zakochane kobiety / Women in Love
1970 Kochankowie muzyki / The Music Lovers
1972 Dziki mesjasz / Savage Messiah
1974 Mahler
1977 Valentino
1980 Odmienne stany świadomości / Altered States
1984 Zbrodnie namiętności / Crimes of Passion
1986 Gotyk / Gothic