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Freaks

Freaks

Tod Browning

  • 1932
  • USA
  • Drama / Horror
  • 1h04mn
  • Original version with French subtitles
  • Black and white
Five years after The Unknown, Tod Browning explores the world of circus freaks, a troop of performers including amputees, siamese twins, hermaphrodites, strongmen, and other phenomena. Hans,a dwarf recently engaged to Frieda - also a dwarf - is infatuated by Cleopatra, the tall beautiful attractive trapeze artist who toys with his affection under Frieda’s dismayed eyes. But victory may not belong to those who flaunt their arrogant normality…
Freaks paints a parade of human monstrosity, where the real circus, a horror show, is represented through perverse manipulation and humiliation seen as a game. Between poignant darkness and the art of revenge, this absolute masterpiece instills an infinite sadness in this struggle among monsters.

Noémie Merlant

I saw Freaks before my first film as an actress. L'orpheline avec en plus un bras en moins (The Orphan Girl Without an Arm) by Jacques Richard. I was 19. There was some magic and some circus and the director suggested I watch Freaks. I was totally fascinated. One of the greatest love stories, one of the most moving “I love you’s”.

A delirious world and imagery: the black and white, the strange voices, the circus world and those disabled deformed people, poetically filmed with a rare horizontal point of view, after all the monsters and freaks are maybe - surely - us: the able, the curious, the selfish.

These ”monsters”, used to living among themselves, see the arrival of a “normal” woman, not from their world, they take her in but will soon realize their mistake. At first curious and compassionate, they gradually change their point of view. This film is about physical appearance and the beauty of the soul, true love, the fear of difference and prejudice, as obstacles to equality and fraternity.

It’s an ode to the right to be different, speaking of desire, love, intimacy. Strangeness and strangers can frighten, but they shouldn’t; we must learn to accept them and live together. The film's atmosphere is gripping by its beauty and originality, I've never seen anything like it elsewhere.

Screenings

07/09 • 17h45 • Screen 100
Screening presented by Noémie Merlant

Credits

  • With : Wallace Ford, Leila Hyams, Olga Baclanova, Roscoe Ates, Henry Victor...
  • Screenplay : Al Boasberg, Willis Goldbeck, Leon Gordon, Edgar Allan Woolf
  • Photography : Merritt B. Gerstad
  • Editing : Basil Wrangell
  • Music by : Gavin Barns
  • Production : Tod Browning, Irving Thalberg