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Film at Lincoln Center announces Unspeakable: The Films of Tod Browning, a retrospective of the pioneering filmmaker’s career consisting of 17 films presented almost entirely on 35mm, running from March 17 through 26.
Tod Browning (1880–1962) ranks among the most original and enigmatic filmmakers of his time. Born Charles Albert Browning, Jr., son of a middle-class family, he ran away from his Kentucky home at age 16 to join the circus, where he took jobs as a barker, a contortionist, a clown, and a somnambulist buried alive in a box with its own ventilation system. Following a stint in vaudeville and adopting the moniker Tod (German for “death”), Browning eventually found a home in cinema as an actor until a life-altering car accident placed him behind the camera. He went on to direct a series of underworld melodramas, including nine films starring Priscilla Dean (Outside the Law and Drifting), before making some of the most bizarre and eerily atmospheric films of the silent era with Lon Chaney (in a 10-film collaboration including The Unknown, widely considered Browning’s masterpiece). Chaney’s death in 1930 coincided with the director’s transition to sound, notably with his genre-defining version of Dracula starring Bela Lugosi and his transgressive, career-tarnishing Freaks, later reappraised by Andrew Sarris as “one of the most compassionate films ever made.” Browning has been described as one of cinema’s thorniest humanists as well as “the first diabolist of the cinema,” whose influence can be seen in the work of David Lynch, John Waters, Guillermo del Toro, and David Cronenberg. Though Browning’s films retain complex moral ambiguities, a glance at this transgressive body of work reveals a visionary with an eye for stylization and memorable performances from Hollywood stars and non-professional actors. His groundbreaking achievements in horror and underworld melodramas were typified by incisive manifestations of beauty, alongside lifelong personal obsessions with the sideshow milieu, criminality and retribution, and psychosexual innuendo.
The series will almost entirely be comprised of 35mm screenings of Browning’s films, including the beloved Dracula, considered the director’s only true horror film and an understated and elegantly stylized masterpiece of the uncanny; Freaks, a transgressive, unnerving work pitched somewhere between daringly compassionate and—despite its infamous “one of us” chant—charged with the very horrors it denounces; The Unholy Three, an unsettling melodrama that stars Lon Chaney as a ventriloquist and follows a trio of swindlers and former sideshow castmates who impersonate a respectable family of shopkeepers; and the rarely screened Dollar Down, a partially lost morality tale pertaining to a different kind of horror: that of a middle-class family living beyond their means and falling prey to moneylenders. The series will also feature a new restoration of The Unknown—a Freudian pile-up of repressed desires, castration anxiety, and Oedipal subtext, and widely considered Browning’s crowning achievement—including approximately 10 minutes of previously lost shots and sequences.
Select screenings of Browning’s silent films will feature live piano accompaniment by Donald Sosin, one of the foremost silent film composers in the world, with 49 years of performing at major film festivals and archives, joined by Joanna Seaton for Outside the Law (1920).
Tickets go on sale on Thursday, February 23 at noon, with early access for FLC Members beginning Wednesday, February 22 at noon. Tickets are $15 for the General Public; $12 for Students, Seniors, and Persons with Disabilities; and $10 for FLC Members. See more and save with a 3+ Film Package (discount automatically applied in cart). Limited $79 All-Access Passes and $39 Student All-Access Passes also available.
― POLIZISTEN VERSINKEN IM SCHLAMM (forksclovetofu), Thursday, 16 February 2023 16:34 (one year ago) link
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