“THE DEVILS” 1971 | M/16 | 1h51’ [UK] | KEN RUSSELL Cinema Screenings
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#### Conversas com Cinema© PROSA
## Ciclo KEN RUSSELL
[KEN RUSSELL” Cinema Screenings]
(Curadoria de Alexandre Braga)
“THE DEVILS” 1971 | M/16 | 1h51’ [UK] (Os Demónios - PT)
De Ken Russell
Sexta Dia 06/11 às 19h30 [Friday 11/06 at 7:30pm]
Na França do século XVII, o padre Urbain Grandier enfrenta o poderoso Cardeal Richelieu ao defender a cidade de Loudun. Quando uma freira consumida pela repressão sexual o acusa de feitiçaria, desencadeia-se uma perseguição onde o fanatismo religioso e o poder político se confundem.
In 17th-century France, Father Urbain Grandier's protection of the city of Loudun from the corrupt Cardinal Richelieu is undermined by a sexually repressed nun's accusation of witchcraft.
Spoken in English | Subtitled in Portuguese
Mais info e reservas:
More info and reservations:
https://prosacultural.org/cinema/kenrussell
Some filmmakers seek to understand the world through what we can see. Others seem driven by the need to make visible what remains hidden: desire, faith, fear, memory, and the obscure territories of consciousness. Ken Russell belongs to this second tradition. Provocative, extravagant, and profoundly irreverent, he developed a cinematic language in which the image does not merely represent reality but seeks to penetrate it, as though beneath the surface of things there existed a deeper, unsettling, and sometimes unbearable dimension.
In Russell's cinema, the body becomes the privileged site of this revelation. It is where tensions between the sacred and the profane, reason and instinct, repression and desire are inscribed. His aesthetic, frequently associated with the grotesque, the baroque, and transgression, does not merely seek to provoke the spectator: it confronts us with everything that culture, religion, and consciousness itself have learned to conceal. Excess thus becomes a form of knowledge, and the cinematic image an experience that challenges the limits of perception.
In The Devils (1971), inspired by historical events in seventeenth-century France, Russell plunges into a world where religion, sexuality, and political power intertwine with devastating consequences. The persecution of Father Urbain Grandier reveals a society that transforms its repressed desires into demonic manifestations and uses faith as an instrument of domination. Yet beyond the violence and controversy that surrounded the film, a profoundly human question emerges: what happens when we cease to recognise our own ghosts and begin projecting them onto others?
Nine years later, in Altered States (1980), Russell shifts this unease from the collective sphere to the depths of individual consciousness. Through the experiments of a scientist determined to explore the limits of human perception, the film becomes a dizzying journey into the origins of existence. Somewhere between science, mysticism, and hallucination, the search for a primordial truth leads us into a territory where identity, the body, and the very notion of humanity seem to dissolve. If, in The Devils, the invisible is invoked to justify the exercise of power, in Altered States, it becomes the object of a radical quest for self-knowledge.
Separated by almost a decade, these two films reveal an extraordinary coherence within Ken Russell's cinematic universe: the conviction that what we cannot see may be precisely what constitutes us most profoundly.
In this edition of CONVERSAS COM CINEMA©, PROSA invites you to discover a filmmaker who turned transgression into a language and cinema into an instrument for exploring the most unsettling territories of human experience. For perhaps this is one of the most extraordinary possibilities of the cinematic image: not merely to show us the world we know, but to allow us to glimpse what, within us and beyond us, remains invisible.
(Curatorship by Alexandre Braga)
All Cinema PROSA films will be shown on an illuminated pixel (65’’ QLED screen) in a room with a maximum capacity of 24 spectators.
Come and have a glass of wine or a non-alcoholic drink in the cinema room with us!