MOTHER JOAN OF THE ANGELS (1961) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Jerzy Kawalerowicz
Mieczyslaw Voit, Lucyna Winnicka, Anna Ciepielewska,
Maria Chwalibóg, Stanislaw Jasiukiewicz, Jerzy Kazmarek
This one's in Latin and Polish and I watched it late at night without subtitles, so I couldn't tell you everything that's going on. There's an itinerant priest who turns up in a remote rural community somewhere in, like, the 17th century. He looks unhappy, and the first thing he does after saying his prayers is, he hangs his whip on the wall, but only after kissing it first, so he can flog himself later. Like I said, he looks like an unhappy man. There's also a cloister of nuns close-by, and the nuns appear to be demonically possessed. And a tavern where the local peasants hang out and drink. And that's the setup, pretty much. It's strikingly filmed in black and white, with lots of point-of-view shots where characters look directly into the camera. And there's a scene where the priest and a rabbi confront each other face-to-face, and the rabbi's played by the same actor who plays the priest. And the nuns' choreography, in those flowing white habits, is really nice. It's based on some of the same events that inspired Ken Russell's "The Devils" and Aldous Huxley's book "The Devils of Loudon", and it reminded me a little of Peter Brook's "Marat/Sade", with all that weird craziness going on. Maybe the next time I watch it, it'll have subtitles. Or maybe I'll just watch it with the sound off and play some Gregorian chant.
