A circus' beautiful trapeze artist agrees to marry the leader of side-show performers, but his deformed friends discover she is only marrying him for his inheritance.
11 Dec Freaks (1932)
Elephant Men
These older gems have to be watched with eyes on two levels.
The first concerns the experience within the narrative. Projects that worked well in this regard when new often fade. Those that continue to work as the context changes get called “classics” as if that were a special honour. This doesn’t work well for me and I presume it didn’t for most in its day.
In that day, I suppose it to be much like today’s “9 Songs” with which I saw this. The strangeness of what we see so overwhelms the story that we cannot get engaged in the story itself, quite apart from the wooden acting.
But the other level… on that level this is so delicious that I’ve put this on my list of films that every cineliterate person must experience. That’s the level where someone originates some cinematic notion which sticks to the ribbon of what follows and changes it. Watching something like that carries with it everything you have seen that was subsequently made using or adopting or reacting against or decidedly avoiding that notion.
Tod Browning was the first I think to take physical outcasts and display their reality as though it were fiction. Before and after, we had lessor adventures in class, race, sex, gayness, colonialists and so on. But this is so profound that even today it stands apart.
Lynch’s first real feature deliberately quotes this. Many filmmakers have since entered the space of deviated reality imported unchanged as fiction.
What makes this particularly sweet is that Browning himself entered film through the circus. He literally ran away and became “one of them.” So in this, we have both his personal past folded in and the echo of thousands of films afterward.
Posted in 2005
Ted’s Evaluation — 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.
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