(Jerzy Kawalerowicz, Poland 1961, 100 min., 35mm nitrate)
Print source: Filmoteka Narodowa–Instytut Audiowizualny, Warsaw, Poland
The nuns of the Ursuline convent in Loudun were not the first to be possessed by demons, but they are among the most famous, largely because this particularly lurid affair climaxed in the trial, torture, and public burning of the French city’s own priest. First reported in 1632, the Loudon possessions are also among the best documented, though there is enough intriguing ambiguity to allow for multiple interpretations and a few significant works of art: Aldous Huxley’s history The Devils of Loudon (1952), Krzysztof Penderecki’s opera Die Teufel von Loudun (1968–1969), and, infamously, Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971), a motion picture so blasphemous it became one of the UK’s top grossing films of 1972.
Based on the 1943 novella by the Polish poet Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, and directed by Jerzy Kawalerowicz, an influential member of the Polish Film School, which also included Andrzej Wajda, the chillingly austere Mother Joan of the Angels is less grotesque but equally unsettling. Set some months after the execution of Father Garniec—the charred post still stands outside the convent walls—the film imagines what might have happened had the convent been located, not in France, where plague, nationalism, and sectarian violence contributed to the hysteria, but in an isolated Polish village where inner torments would determine the course of events. Into this stark landscape rides unworldly Father Suryn (Mieczysław Voit, who, during a striking tête-à-tête, also plays the village rabbi). Suryn has come to help exorcise the stubborn demons from the nuns who, in their crisp white habits, continue to madly titter, twirl, and fly about, as free as uncaged doves. Father Suryn’s special charge is Mother Joan (Lucyna Winnicka), the order’s unnervingly alluring abbess who claims to be possessed by no fewer than eight demons, and whose accusations of sorcery sent Suryn’s predecessor to the stake.
Originally filmed in Polish, this Soviet release version has been expertly dubbed into Russian. Though most of Western Europe and the United States had long since phased out nitrate film stock in favor of acetate safety film, the Soviet Union and some Central and Eastern European countries continued to use it well into the 1960s. Aside from a wide shrinkage rate of 0.8%–1.15% and several spots of decomposition, the print is in very good shape.
– Ken Fox