Why Ken Russell's provocative films suddenly became profitable

Ken Russell's The Devils, a 1971 baroque apocalypse about sex and theocracy that was banned outright in several countries, has just extended its theatrical run following a restoration release — which sounds like a straightforward commercial win until you ask what actually changed. The film didn't become less transgressive. Audiences didn't suddenly develop tolerance for its extremities. What shifted was the story we tell about why those extremities matter.

The rehabilitation of controversial auteurs works the same way every time. Brian De Palma spent the 1980s and 1990s dismissed as a sleaze merchant, his formal brilliance buried under accusations of misogyny. Then Criterion released his films in pristine digital transfers. Museums staged retrospectives. Film scholars published books arguing his compositions were Hitchcockian, his violence formally sophisticated rather than gratuitous. The re-framing complete, his work became academically respectable, and respectable work attracts investment, distribution, theatrical runs. The Devils gets the same treatment now: restored prints, institutional blessing, audience permission to engage rather than simply condemn.

Here's what nobody mentions about this cycle. It works almost exclusively for men, and almost exclusively for men whose transgression reads as intellectual rather than emotional. Russell's baroque excess, De Palma's icy formalism — these register as complexity. When Lucile Hadžihalilović or Virginie Despentes make films with identical intensity and identical refusal to look away from uncomfortable material, they don't get retrospectives and Criterion editions. They get smaller festivals, smaller releases, the permanent status of "challenging" rather than "important." The institutional machinery that could reposition their work as formally sophisticated instead leaves it abandoned as merely provocative.

The Devils' second run isn't a victory for artistic freedom or belated recognition. It's a vindication of a specific kind of formal authority. The kind available almost exclusively to men working in certain registers, in certain countries, at certain moments in cinema history. Russell gets his restoration. The film gets its second life. And somewhere else, a woman making equally rigorous, equally transgressive work is still waiting for permission from the gatekeepers to call her provocation something else.