THE DEVILS (1971) 4K RESTORATION
Review by John Larkin
Ken Russell’s THE DEVILS may be the best example I have ever seen of a film finally receiving the framing, presentation and cultural moment it deserved, 55 years after its release.
There are restorations that allow us to see an old film more clearly, and then there are restorations that fundamentally alter our relationship with a film. The extraordinary new 4K restoration of Ken Russell’s THE DEVILS, presented to press tonight at the 64th New York Film Festival in the form of a newly struck 35mm print, belongs emphatically to the latter category. I cannot immediately think of another film that better demonstrates the power of restoration to resurrect, not simply preserve, a work of cinema.
Before the screening, the restoration was introduced as part of NYFF’s Revivals program, with the welcome announcement that we would be seeing the newly restored film projected from 35mm. It proved to be an enormously important distinction. The restoration allows David Watkin’s photography, Derek Jarman’s astonishing production design, Shirley Russell’s costumes and the film’s aggressive sonic landscape to emerge with tremendous richness and clarity, while the photochemical presentation preserves something equally essential: texture, grain and the almost indescribable sensation that what we are looking at belongs to another era, that this object has lived and breathed in another time before somehow arriving before us intact.
I had previously seen THE DEVILS through the BFI DVD released years ago and had always been impressed by the film. Yet seeing this restoration was almost like encountering a different work. The strange thought occurred to me while watching it that THE DEVILS had been waiting for this, that a film this visually audacious, politically furious and formally unusual had somehow needed to survive long enough for restoration technology, and perhaps the culture itself, to catch up with it.
Warner Bros.’ new restoration was created in 4K from the original camera negative and reconstructs what is being described as Russell’s definitive vision using the privately assembled 2004 edit. The soundtrack was likewise remastered from the original 35mm magnetic materials at 96kHz, supplemented by additional surviving elements. After a film history defined for more than half a century by mutilation, censorship and compromise, the technical particulars carry an unusual emotional weight because THE DEVILS is no longer being apologized for. It is being presented.
Few films have had to fight harder simply to exist. Russell’s adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun, drawing as well from John Whiting’s stage adaptation, became one of the great censorship battles of British cinema almost before anyone had seen it. The BBFC demanded cuts, Warner Bros. imposed additional cuts of its own, and the American release was subsequently shortened further.
The notorious “Rape of Christ” sequence became almost mythical among devotees of the film. For decades, THE DEVILS existed less as one definitive motion picture than as a collection of competing versions, missing sequences and whispered-about footage. Even Russell’s attempts to restore material could not result in the complete version receiving ordinary circulation, making the film’s survival feel almost as dramatic as the work itself.
That tortured history makes the experience of watching the film today all the more fascinating. What once inspired panic now feels remarkably lucid in its intentions. The obscenity is not merely there to shock because Russell is depicting a society in which religion, sexuality, politics and spectacle have become indistinguishable from one another, a culture in which repression produces hysteria and hysteria becomes a tool by which power can destroy its enemies.
At its center is Oliver Reed as Urbain Grandier, giving one of the great performances of his career. Reed had a physical presence that could overwhelm films, but Russell understands exactly how to use it. Grandier can be vain, hypocritical, lustful, arrogant and morally compromised, yet Reed gradually reveals the man’s enormous capacity for courage. There is no effort to transform Grandier into a conventional saint, and his heroism matters precisely because Russell has first allowed him to remain a man.
Vanessa Redgrave, meanwhile, is fearless as Sister Jeanne, creating a character simultaneously grotesque, tragic, hilarious, sexually tormented and frighteningly human. Her performance exists at an almost impossible pitch without losing its internal logic. Redgrave understands something central to Russell’s worldview, that repression does not eliminate desire but mutates it into something more volatile.
Then there is Murray Melvin as Father Mignon, whose presence has an almost supernatural quality. Melvin possessed one of those extraordinary faces that seemed to have wandered into the twentieth century from several hundred years earlier. With his elongated features, hollowed eyes and severe physicality, he does not look like an actor wearing a costume but like someone Russell somehow retrieved from the period itself.
Watching Melvin here inevitably recalls his later appearance as Reverend Samuel Runt in Stanley Kubrick’s BARRY LYNDON, another filmmaker who understood what Melvin’s face could accomplish inside a carefully constructed historical world. That Kubrick connection becomes even more tantalizing elsewhere, particularly when a funeral procession moves through Loudun accompanied by the ancient “Dies Irae” chant, the same medieval melody Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind would later transform for the opening of THE SHINING.
Hearing it here creates an eerie bridge between Russell and Kubrick, two directors fascinated by institutions, ritual, madness, violence and the grotesque behavior people are capable of once enclosed inside systems larger than themselves. Yet Russell could never be mistaken for Kubrick. Kubrick observes madness with terrifying control, while Russell frequently seems to dance with it.
There is a playfulness to Russell, an irreverence and almost carnivalesque instinct that makes his cinema uniquely his own. Yet what struck me again seeing THE DEVILS tonight is that, compared with some of Russell’s later and more flamboyantly excessive work, the filmmaking itself is surprisingly disciplined. The subject matter is so unhinged that Russell does not need to manufacture insanity around it. He gives the madness architecture, structure and visual purpose.
Derek Jarman’s production design remains one of the film’s supreme achievements. Loudun is not presented as the dirty, brown medieval world that decades of historical cinema have trained audiences to expect. Instead, Jarman constructs blinding white spaces, geometric, modernist and almost futuristic walls and chambers that turn the city into something halfway between a cathedral and a laboratory.
Against those surfaces Russell stages flesh, blood, black robes, religious iconography and political theater. In this restoration, the visual contrasts are overwhelming. There is beauty here, but also humor, repulsion, absurdity, eroticism, cruelty and horror, and at times several of those qualities occupy the same frame.
That is ultimately what separates THE DEVILS from films that merely seek notoriety through transgression. Russell’s shocks are not interruptions of the movie. They are the language of the movie. The sexual hysteria, the grotesque exorcisms, the political manipulation, the mockery of sacred imagery and the violence inflicted upon Grandier all accumulate into a vision of civilization tearing away its own veneer.
The restoration makes that vision newly visceral. Colors that once seemed muted or compromised now possess tremendous density. The whites of Jarman’s sets become almost oppressive, while reds explode against them. Faces have renewed dimension, and the elaborate costumes no longer simply register as period decoration but become part of Russell’s larger visual strategy.
The restored soundtrack has startling physicality as well, allowing Peter Maxwell Davies’ abrasive score and the film’s period music to collide as forcefully as Russell’s images do. This is restoration not as cosmetic enhancement, but as interpretation, a recovery of intention that makes the film’s artistic logic easier to perceive without softening anything that made it dangerous in the first place.
The temptation with 4K restoration is to imagine that every film should become razor sharp, pristine and clinically clean. THE DEVILS demonstrates the fallacy of that approach. What makes this presentation so extraordinary is the relationship between renewed information and retained texture. We are allowed to see more without losing the sense that we are watching something photographed on film 55 years ago.
That balance is extraordinarily difficult to achieve, and watching a new 35mm print derived from a meticulous 4K restoration may in fact be the ideal meeting point between those worlds. Modern restoration science recovers what time and duplication have obscured, and then returns those recovered images to the medium in which they were originally meant to live. For two hours tonight, THE DEVILS felt alive rather than merely preserved.
Perhaps there is a final justice in that. A film that spent decades being cut apart, withheld, compromised and treated as something dangerous has survived long enough to reach an era in which audiences can finally approach it on its own terms. The scandal has become history, but the film itself remains dangerous because its view of power, repression and public hysteria has not aged into irrelevance.
Fifty-five years after its initial release, THE DEVILS has finally gotten its due. Of everything I have seen at this year’s New York Film Festival, it is the must-see event, and I would go considerably further than that. This is one of the essential repertory-film experiences of the year.
The newly restored 35mm print receives its NYFF64 public premiere at Film at Lincoln Center on Saturday, September 26 at 9:00 PM, followed by a Q&A with longtime THE DEVILS champion Mark Kermode. Film at Lincoln Center will then bring the restoration back for a theatrical engagement in October through Warner Bros. Clockwork. If you have the opportunity to see it projected in 35mm, do not miss it.
A UHD release has not yet been officially detailed, but considering the extraordinary amount of work Warner Bros. has invested in this restoration, one can only hope that a Warner Bros. Clockwork 4K disc is forthcoming. If and when that happens, THE DEVILS will immediately become an essential addition to any serious film collection, but until then, the theatrical presentation is the way to experience what this astounding restoration has accomplished.
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