The Devils of Loudun (1969)

The Devils of Loudun was filmed a month after the opera's première, with much the same cast. Although the atmosphere is suffocating, claustrophobic, and almost completely lacking in daylight, not once does one feel that the action is taking place on an operatic stage. (It seems that we are in hell already.) Stage director Konrad Swinarski attempted to give the opera a period feel, and to make it as realistic as possible, and those attributes have been retained by Hess, down to the brutal scenes in which Father Grandier is tortured. The viewer is spared little. Hess, however, imaginatively uses visual effects to make a dramatic point – for example, the superimposition of the hunchbacked Prioress Jeanne's lascivious fantasies about Grandier over a full-screen image of her face.