Ken Russell‘s “The Devils” begins with a title card that stresses that what we’re about to see is based on real, historical events — namely, that a priest named Urbain Grandier was blamed and burned at the stake as the culprit for the possession of a group of Ursuline nuns in the French town of Loudun in the 1630s. But the 1971 film looks unlike most movies made about Early Modern Europe (or indeed any part of the pre-modern world) before or since. In so doing, the visual design of “The Devils” achieves something that most period films don’t, either.
There’s no better way to explain it than to start with the man, aside from Ken Russell, who is most responsible. According to a story in Richard Crouse’s “Raising Hell: Ken Russell and the Unmaking of ‘The Devils,'” production designer (and experimental filmmaker in his own right) Derek Jarman showed up at Pinewood Studios in London knowing he needed to build a Capital-T Tower. The story of “The Devils” required large practical sets, not only so that the mighty walls of Loudun could eventually be torn down, but so that the clash among Grandier (Oliver Reed), the lovestruck Sister Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave), the Baron (Dudley Sutton), and the agents of Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue) would look as visually titanic as it is spiritually maddening. But what Pinewood had for Jarman were some moulds of 17th-century walls, designed to look like they were crumbling.
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Jarman pointed out, rightly, that in the 1630s, the walls wouldn’t have been crumbling at all.
This is one of many things those freaks the Victorians need to answer for: that when we think of the pre-modern world, we still think of it as Lord Byron and Mary Shelley saw it in the 19th Century — bare stone walls standing romantically stark against the green of a hillside, or as howling, cavernous hallways with lonely candles flickering beneath Gothic arches. It doesn’t matter whether it’s “The Last Duel” or “A Knight’s Tale,” “The Tudors” or “Wolf Hall,” almost no production designer out there seems to have heard of tapestries, frescoes, murals, painted plaster, or even limewash, all of which (especially rich) people in pre-modern societies had — and enjoyed.
This year’s “The Uprising” is a particularly bleak example of that Victorian lens through which we tend to view the past, with its mud-covered-peasants color palette. This is not because that’s true to the 14th century (plants make dyes, guys, and guess who would be growing them), but it is true to the idea that we want to have about the 14th century. Namely, that we’re better and cleaner and smarter, and we live in a much nicer, more civilized world than they did. “Catherine Called Birdy” is the 21st-century film I’ve seen that gets closest to the actual riot of colors which defined noble life in England during the time period, but even it can’t help but limit its large feasting chamber to mostly bare stone and fireplaces.
Jarman and Russell, however, had no interest in the kind of distancing effect and the almost teleological argument for progress that lurks behind portraying a bare stone, “period” version of Loudun. The gleaming white tiles of the exorcism and interrogation chambers, the futurist layout of Loudun itself with its vividly stark contrasts of black and white, the richness and layered quality of Grandier’s offices that makes the eventual smashing of his Late Medieval statuary such a violation? Just as much as Fritz Lang would’ve probably loved to have gotten his hands on them for “Metropolis,” they wouldn’t be out of place if you took a wrong turn in Guillermo Del Toro’s “Crimson Peak.”
Jarman’s sets exist out of time, and also kind of timelessly, putting us as viewers in a place where it is impossible not to experience the riotous desires and barbarous predations of the story as immediate. We’re not better than “The Devils.” It’s impossible to stand outside of the world that Jarman and his team built. The materials and the textures of the sets are simply too close to the material reality of our own experiences — also, there’s simply too much vomit.
This effect couldn’t be more intentional. In a 1997 “Sight and Sound” piece on “The Devils,” Jarman said that a sentence from Aldous Huxley’s nonfiction telling of the story, “The Devils of Loudun,” always stuck with him. “‘The exorcism of Sister Jeanne was equivalent to a rape in a public lavatory.’ The image of the public lavatory, the impersonality of it all, stayed in my mind. That’s why I went for while tiles for the convent,” Jarman said.
The production designer brought a deep understanding of the contradictions of the early modern period to his work, as evidenced in the clear visual contrasts between the ornate (but not sooty! Club ready!) court world of Louis XIII (Graham Armitage), the austerely white but potentially utopian Loudon, the (pun somewhat intended) drenched fantasy world Sister Jeanne inhabits, and the way that Grandier and Madeline (Gemma Jones) move between spaces.
These sets play with different shape languages and color choices, drawing parallels to the way that modern architecture imposes a sense of wealth or power. The hospital-asylum quality of the exorcism chamber is maybe where Jarman’s work is most pointedly contemporary, but there are touches he and Russell made throughout the film which make it impossible to passively absorb the story as neat historical fact.
The opportunistic weaponization of superstition and prejudice to exert control over towns, society’s sexual mores, and even our inner lives is no fantasy. What Jarman’s sets do is craft a backdrop so heightened and theatrical that it’s impossible not to see, and to feel, those forces at work.
The 4K Restoration of Ken Russell’s “The Devils” is now playing in theaters.