Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Devils
1971 · Ken Russell · The Devils on Sightlines
The walls of Loudun are tiled. Gleaming white brick, floor to ceiling, and the first thing it calls to mind is not 1634 but a hospital corridor, a public lavatory, somewhere with drains. Derek Jarman, young and designing only his second film, gave Ken Russell a seventeenth century that looks like an institution built yesterday for washing things down. Most period films work to sink you into the past. This one keeps handing you the present, and the effect isn't cool distance. It's dread. You look at that tile and understand that whatever happens in this city can be hosed off the surfaces afterwards.
Hold onto the tile. It's the whole film in one design decision, and it's the cleanest way into a Deleuze concept most viewers have never needed before.
Deleuze noticed that between two familiar kinds of cinema — the close-up that holds a feeling, and the adventure film where a man reads a situation and acts on it — there's a third kind he called the impulse-image. Its subject is drives. Appetite, compulsion, hungers running ahead of anyone's intentions; Zola at the movies, with Stroheim and Buñuel as its masters. Its signature move is to double the world. There's the derived milieu, the actual social setting with its charters and titles: Loudun, a walled city with the right to govern itself, a priest with a parish, a cardinal with a policy. And showing through it, like damp through plaster, the originary world, a savage place containing no persons at all, only drives and the objects they fasten on. Russell's invention is to put both in the same shot. Jarman's tile is the originary world made architecture — hygiene as the fantasy of a civilization that knows precisely how filthy it is about to get. It also strips the space of its period function. Those white fields stop behaving like a setting for action and start behaving like an operating theatre, anywhere, any century.
Which is why Sister Jeanne isn't quite a villain. An erotic obsession curdles into possession hysteria: in the impulse-image, what a character does registers as a symptom, an act legible only as the outward sign of a drive with no language of its own. Jeanne's desire cannot be spoken in 1634. No sentence is available to her for it. So it arrives in the only costume the century issues — demons, writhing, the vocabulary of hell. Redgrave plays her as someone being spoken through. The film never lets you settle whether that's a liar or a symptom, and the refusal is the point.
Then the convent goes up. When the Ursulines break, Russell stops filming individuals. The mass frenzy, the sequence that got the film cut for decades, is staged as one writhing organism: many bodies, a single appetite. Deleuze's term for a crowd filmed as one feeling rather than many people is the dividual. Not a metaphor for mob psychology, a compositional fact. You cannot find a protagonist in that frame.
And it's a performance. This is what the scandal obscured. Russell had learned from Marat/Sade that collective madness works on film as choreography — Artaud's theatre of cruelty, rehearsed and staged for a house. The exorcisms here are public events. Deleuze's name for an image like that is the attraction-image: action lifted out of the plot and presented as spectacle, a figure to be watched rather than a deed that changes anything. What Russell adds is the gest, a posture that exposes the social relation holding it up. Watch what the nuns' bodies are arranged to demonstrate, and for whom. The possession doesn't need to be real. It needs to be visible to the state.
You could object that this is simply a political film about church and state, and you'd be right; beneath the delirium it's coldly lucid about how power weaponizes faith. But the lens explains the thing that offends people, which is why a lucid political film had to be obscene. The politics run on appetite. Richelieu wants the walls down, Jeanne wants Grandier, the exorcist wants a crowd; not one of them needs to believe anything. The machinery Dreyer laid out in Day of Wrath — accusation, torture, confession — doesn't discover a truth in Loudun. It manufactures one, and the manufactured version becomes the fact with legal force. Deleuze calls this the powers of the false: not lying, but falsity made productive, truth made rather than found. Cinema is usually the art that promises the opposite, the camera as witness, the historical film as sober record. Russell dismantles that promise inside the genre most dependent on it.
The faces carry two inheritances at once. Grandier under torture and at the stake is shot in the register Dreyer invented for Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc: the reflecting face, a contour holding one quality, beatific suffering with nothing behind it to decode. Jeanne's face is the other kind, the intensive one, where small movements build toward a threshold and you watch a want assembling itself. Russell rhymes them. The martyr and the obsessive get the same lens, which is a harder claim than anything in the film's dialogue. Häxan had already found that possession photographs best as grotesque quasi-documentary spectacle; Russell keeps the tableau and removes the alibi of instruction.
What this does to narrative is quietly radical. Grandier performs every function of a hero in a large-form plot — a situation presses, a man stands against it — and none of it works, because the film's engine was never his choices. It's the slope. The impulse-image runs on entropy, an irreversible degradation, and everything here descends: the body comes apart, the walls come down, the city ends as rubble. The story isn't resolved. It runs out.
Ask what the film seeded and you hit the wound. Its ancestors are easy to name. A decade before, Mother Joan of the Angels had filmed the identical Loudun case in austere high-contrast restraint, and Russell's baroque excess is a direct answer to it, one chapter of the discourse arguing with another. Black Narcissus gave him the cloister boiling over in hothouse color. But its descendants inherited from a film they mostly couldn't see. X-rated on both sides of the Atlantic, condemned, cut, the 'Rape of Christ' gone for decades, and Warner Bros. still has never given the uncut version a proper release. The suppression became part of the meaning, which is the grimmest confirmation the film could have asked for: an institution looked at a work about institutions manufacturing acceptable truth, and manufactured one.
Watch it again and watch the tile. Notice who is performing, and who the performance is for. Then try to decide who in Loudun is actually possessed — and notice that the film has arranged things so you can't.
Concepts in play
- impulse-image — A world run by appetite rather than decision: the prioress's erotic obsession, Grandier the sensualist priest, Richelieu's hunger for the walls — drives erupting beneath the social surface of a chartered city
- derived-milieu — Loudun as a self-governing walled city with a parish, a mayor and a cardinal's policy — the concrete social setting that the film reveals as a surface
- originary-world — Jarman's gleaming white-tiled city, 'part fortress, part asylum bathroom,' making the past a horrific modern machine — the savage drive-world showing through the period setting
- any-space-whatever (emptiness) — The white-tiled anachronistic sets stop functioning as a seventeenth-century setting and become blank fields — a placeless institutional white that hosts the action without belonging to any century
- symptom — Sister Jeanne's possession as the outward sign of a desire with no available language: an erotic obsession that curdles into possession hysteria
- dividual — The convent's mass frenzy in the 'Rape of Christ' sequence, the writhing-hysteria tableau amplified from Häxan, staged as one collective body rather than individuated nuns
- attraction-image — The exorcisms staged as public choreographed spectacle on the Marat/Sade model — Artaudian theatre of cruelty performed as crowd spectacle rather than acted as plot
- the-gest — The possessed nuns' postures arranged as a demonstration for church and state — the bodily attitude exposing the political relation that requires it to be seen
- powers of the false — Grandier's show trial and the Day of Wrath machinery of accusation and confession under torture: the pretext the state needs is manufactured, then carries the force of truth
- reflexive vs intensive face — Oliver Reed's Grandier shot in the beatific-suffering close-up register borrowed from The Passion of Joan of Arc, set against Vanessa Redgrave's Jeanne as a face of accumulating desire
- line of slope (entropy) — The irreversible descent from proud worldly priest to torture and burning, ending with the demolition of the self-governing city's walls