Why are filmmakers so interested in nuns? They’ve been exploring the subject for more than a century, which might seem odd, given that real-life dramas in convents are mostly confined to quarrels about the washing-up. But celluloid nuns are a different matter.

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As early as 1922, in the Swedish silent movie Häxen, a nun reaches for a spiked leather belt before leading her sisters in a demonic dance. That’s the beginning of one stereotype, the nun as sadomasochistic hysteric, which reached its apogee in Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971). Meanwhile, films such as Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (1947), set in a Himalayan convent, and The Nun’s Story (1959), starring Audrey Hepburn as a missionary........

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