Loudun Possessed and the Visualization of Religious Violence

The article is concerned with the interpretation of the history of demoniac possession in the city ofLoudunin visual culture (cinema). In the XVII century, Jeanne de Angers, the abbess of the Ursuline monastery in the city ofLoudun, accused the local priest Urbein Grandier that he sent demons and obsession upon the abode. Father Grandier was executed by burning, Jeanne de Angers got rid of the possession of 7 demons a few years later. But the very fact of a woman’s victory over a man attracts not only the attention of researchers, but also writers, artists and musicians. Grandier was accounted to be a victim, and Jeanne de Angers was demonized. In the middle of the XX century two movies about the Loudun possessed were produced in which the problem of violence, demoniac possession and sacrifi got new sounding through interpretation of concepts “evil”, “love”, “loneliness”. Both characters were declared as victims, not just one of them – Jeanne de Angers or the Father Urbein Grandier. The thirst for love and the struggle against loneliness oppose the prohibition to feel and act outside the established doctrinal boundaries. Forcibly suppressed, but so natural desire, fi becomes lust, and then transforms into violence. Religion, on the other hand, pushes them out into the sphere of personal choice. This article makes an attempt to trace the changes in the representation of violence in the history of the Loudun possessed in artistic culture: from pure violence directed against the devil and his accomplice-priest through the separation of “grains from chaff (nuns are evil, and the priest is victim) to the idea of “church system that generates a situation is evil, and its members (although they make terrible mistakes) are victims”. This transformation of representation coincided with a visual revolution, and we can assume that this is due to a separation from the narrativisation of the plot to attraction the observer (viewer) to its performativity. Evil and sacred become ambivalent, and violence, although condemned, but also poetized at the same time.

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