{"id":660098,"date":"2026-10-20T06:46:14","date_gmt":"2026-10-20T06:46:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/660098\/"},"modified":"2026-10-20T06:46:14","modified_gmt":"2026-10-20T06:46:14","slug":"why-the-devils-sets-are-so-unusual","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/660098\/","title":{"rendered":"Why ‘The Devils’ Sets Are So Unusual"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ken Russell<\/a>\u2018s \u201cThe Devils\u201d<\/a> begins with a title card that stresses that what we\u2019re about to see is based on real, historical events \u2014 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<\/a> 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 \u201cThe Devils<\/a>\u201d achieves something that most period films don\u2019t, either.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no better way to explain it than to start with the man, aside from Ken Russell<\/a>, who is most responsible. According to a story in Richard Crouse\u2019s \u201cRaising Hell: Ken Russell and the Unmaking of \u2018The Devils,’\u201d production designer (and experimental filmmaker in his own right) Derek Jarman<\/a> showed up at Pinewood Studios in London knowing he needed to build a Capital-T Tower. The story of \u201cThe Devils\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\"SENSE<\/a> \"(from<\/a> <\/p>\n

Jarman pointed out, rightly, that in the 1630s, the walls wouldn\u2019t have been crumbling at all. <\/p>\n

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 \u2014 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\u2019t matter whether it\u2019s \u201cThe Last Duel\u201d or \u201cA Knight\u2019s Tale,\u201d \u201cThe Tudors\u201d or \u201cWolf Hall,\u201d almost no production designer out there seems to have heard of tapestries, frescoes, murals, painted plaster, or even limewash<\/a>, all of which (especially rich) people in pre-modern societies had \u2014 and enjoyed.<\/p>\n

This year\u2019s \u201cThe Uprising\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019re better and cleaner and smarter, and we live in a much nicer, more civilized world than they did. \u201cCatherine Called Birdy<\/a>\u201d is the 21st-century film I\u2019ve seen that gets closest to the actual riot of colors which defined noble life in England during the time period, but even it can\u2019t help but limit its large feasting chamber to mostly bare stone and fireplaces.<\/p>\n

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, \u201cperiod\u201d 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\u2019s offices that makes the eventual smashing of his Late Medieval statuary such a violation? Just as much as Fritz Lang would\u2019ve probably loved to have gotten his hands on them for \u201cMetropolis,\u201d they wouldn\u2019t be out of place if you took a wrong turn in Guillermo Del Toro\u2019s \u201cCrimson Peak.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jarman\u2019s 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\u2019re not better than \u201cThe Devils.\u201d It\u2019s 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 \u2014 also, there\u2019s simply too much vomit.<\/p>\n

This effect couldn\u2019t be more intentional. In a 1997 \u201cSight and Sound\u201d piece on \u201cThe Devils,\u201d Jarman said that a sentence from Aldous Huxley\u2019s nonfiction telling of the story, \u201cThe Devils of Loudun,\u201d always stuck with him. \u201c\u2018The exorcism of Sister Jeanne was equivalent to a rape in a public lavatory.\u2019 The image of the public lavatory, the impersonality of it all, stayed in my mind. That\u2019s why I went for while tiles for the convent,\u201d Jarman said.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The opportunistic weaponization of superstition and prejudice to exert control over towns, society\u2019s sexual mores, and even our inner lives is no fantasy. What Jarman\u2019s sets do is craft a backdrop so heightened and theatrical that it\u2019s impossible not to see, and to feel, those forces at work.<\/p>\n

The 4K Restoration of Ken Russell\u2019s \u201cThe Devils\u201d is now playing in theaters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ken Russell\u2018s \u201cThe Devils\u201d begins with a title card that stresses that what we\u2019re about to see is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":660099,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[93,1043,61,60,138760,270,279457,30447],"class_list":["post-660098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-ken-russell","tag-movies","tag-the-devils","tag-top-of-the-line"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=660098"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660098\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/660099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=660098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=660098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=660098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}