A new 4K restoration of Ken Russell's The Devils, assembled from the original camera negative and presented uncut, premiered in the Cannes Classics section this year. After more than half a century circulating only in censored and damaged forms, the film finally screened the way Russell meant it to be seen.
The history is genuinely strange. The Devils came out in 1971, with Oliver Reed as a seventeenth-century priest burned at the stake for witchcraft and Vanessa Redgrave as the mother superior who accuses him. Russell adapted it from Aldous Huxley and a stage play by John Whiting, and made something lurid, blasphemous and seriously angry about religious hysteria and the state using the church to destroy an inconvenient man. Censors and distributors started cutting it during and right after production, and the version that reached audiences was already wounded. Home video made it worse over the years: bad scans, wrong aspect ratios, missing minutes. The complete film became a kind of rumour, known by reputation long before most people could actually watch it.
The new restoration runs 114 minutes and references an edit Russell privately assembled in 2004. Warner Bros. is releasing it through a new specialty label, with a US theatrical run planned for October and an international rollout to follow. The Cannes screening was held in the presence of Russell's biographer Mark Kermode and the director's widow, Elisabeth Russell.
Why it matters
A restoration like this is closer to an argument than a cleaning job. With a film that exists in several mutilated versions and no single obvious master, someone has to decide which cut is the real one. Building this restoration around Russell's own 2004 edit is a claim: this, not the theatrical compromise or the video butchery, is the film.
There's a lazy counterargument that the censored cuts are "part of the history" and worth preserving as the work. They're worth archiving, but they're documents of what was done to the film, not the film itself. The value of this restoration is that it refuses to let the wound stand in for the body. For a movie available only in damaged forms for fifty-five years, that isn't nostalgia. It's a correction, and the best film news out of this year's festival that has nothing to do with the competition.
The Devils reaches cinemas in October.
About this film
