This approach allowed the researchers to trace certain tales, such as The Smith and the Devil, which tells the story of a blacksmith who makes a deal with the devil in exchange for unmatched smithing prowess, back thousands of years all the way to the Proto-Indo-European people.
Mr. West chose to make the film after staying there in 2009 while shooting his acclaimed "The House of the Devil," which also includes scenes from Torrington.
As far as Silvagni knows, they never collaborated, but "they both wanted to break the rules, and Yohji likes to say that 'perfection is the devil,' which I think is true for Rei.
Thousands have died making pilgrimages to Mecca in the past twenty years, mainly in the ritual called the Stoning of the Devil, which occurs near the Jamarat Bridge; in 2006, three hundred and sixty pilgrims were killed there.
(Claud Cockburn, under a pseudonym, also wrote novels, including "Beat the Devil," which was made into a film with Humphrey Bogart and which his son used as the title of his column in The Nation).
For "The Tragedy of the Devil," which is Mr. Eotvos's seventh full-length opera, the source material also looked promising: Imre Madach's mid-19th-century dramatic poem "The Tragedy of Man," a cornerstone of Hungarian literature.
