Derek Jarman built the past as abstraction, not archaeology

Ken Russell's 'The Devils' (1971) does something to the past that most period films do not attempt: it makes you feel the weight of ideology rather than the texture of upholstery. Derek Jarman's sets — stark, deliberately artificial, geometrically aggressive — do not look like seventeenth-century France because they are not meant to. They look like what belief feels like when it becomes lethal.

The prevailing reading treats this as Russell's innovation, a filmmaker's visual invention. It misses the genealogy. Jarman was not inventing. He was inheriting a principle that Edward Gordon Craig had spent forty years establishing in theater: that historical accuracy in period work could mean psychological or symbolic truth rather than archaeological reconstruction. By the time Jarman was sketching the Archbishop's palace as a series of brutal white planes and vertiginous staircases, that permission was old enough to be invisible.

Soviet Constructivism had already moved this principle into cinema. Eisenstein and his successors had proved that abstraction could carry historical weight. That a deliberately artificial set could authenticate an era through its emotional and ideological truth rather than through period-correct fabric samples. But those were Soviet films, made in a different political and aesthetic context. Post-war British audiences had begun accepting abstraction as intellectual rather than cheap, but the permission still needed domestic proof.

Russell gave them 'The Devils.' The sets became the argument. Jarman understood that a baroque church felt baroque not because of gilded wood but because of power arranged in space. The distance between supplicant and priest, the visual domination of vertical lines, the deliberate discomfort of scale. He abstracted the era into its organizing principles and built those instead. When audiences saw those concrete planes and empty galleries, they were not watching a simulacrum of history. They were watching the skeleton of it, stripped of decoration until only the structure of control remained.

This matters beyond appreciating one film's achievement because it reveals something about how meaning actually attaches to historical narrative. The naturalistic period film assumes fidelity to surfaces creates presence. The Jarman approach assumes presence comes from structure. From understanding what an era was organized around and making that visible through form rather than artifact. It is a principle that operates in your own work whenever you choose what to leave out, whenever you decide that less material detail creates more clarity about the actual mechanism beneath.