Denouement Renouement

Tag: psychosexual

  • Hooptober 12: The Devils (1971)

    Film #10 — 1/4 Films Based on Novels (or Books); 5/9 Decades

    Also filed under: A-One

    By C. Ramsay

    Though it might be cliché to quote Shakespeare’s “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here” as the truest sentiment this film embodies, there’s no closer description of the nearly two-hour frenzied descent into sacrilegious hedonism that it presents. Set in 1634 France and following Urbain Grandier, a priest who has temporarily inherited control of the fortified city of Loudun from its deceased Governor, as well as Sister Jeanne des Agnes of the city’s Ursuline convent, the film intertwines the country’s conflicting religious fanaticism with an outburst of mass sexual deviancy.

    Featured throughout are colossal but stark sets, their architecture illustrative of the people most commonly frequenting them—rounded and enveloping for Sister Jeanne, jagged and commanding for Father Grandier, all of it cavernous and empty. The streets of Loudon, the space of the masses, are where the excesses are found: an orgiastic cacophony of visual opulence that in detail is built of disease, rot, and poverty, swelling to consume all who wade through it. 

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  • Hooptober 12: La frusta e il corpo (The Whip and the Body) (1963)

    Film #6 — 1/1 Film Written by Ernesto Gastaldi

    By C. Ramsay

    A gothic, psychosexual melodrama that uses the story of a disowned nobleman suddenly returning to his family estate after years away as a backdrop to deeper explorations of the self. Bava seems to tie the inner workings of his characters, how they are moulded and what inspires their wants, to being inseparable from the physical environment as an influence. Using some truly stunning locations, the environment and how it moves in the frame is treated with equal interest to the characters present, showing a respect for the agency of the elements in impressing those wading through them. Gorgeous mood lighting is prominent and is also used in many ways as its own character, completely free of the constraints of natural lumination, often imposing rather than enlightening. Imposition is then laced through the film’s composition, with angular or tilted shots periodically breaking up the flow of a sequence. In these, both three-dimensional objects and their two-dimensional shadows end up blending to the point where it’s not always noticeable at first glance which is which, leading to a degree of unsettling abstractness to scenes which are otherwise understandable. Nature, lighting, and shadows all act as components of influence that aren’t always recognizable, notably when they aren’t physical, yet they function as complementary to, or extensions of, the supernatural elements persistent throughout the film.

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