A Fundraiser for NEW ENGLAND CENTER for CIRCUS ARTS! Celebrate Friday the 13th with a surprising silent featuring live pipe organ music performed on our historic Estey! Tod Browning’s THE UNKNOWN (1927) shocks and awes with Lon Chaney’s towering performance as an armless knife thrower whose obsession with his beautiful circus assistant (Joan Crawford) drives him to unspeakable extremes.
The Unknown, (1927, 68 mins). The most celebrated and exquisitely perverse and fascinating of the many collaborations between Tod Browning and the legendary “Man of a Thousand Faces” Lon Chaney. THE UNKNOWN shocks and awes through Chaney’s towering performance as carnival knife thrower “Alonzo the Armless” who throws knives with his feet in a daring act featuring the alluring Nanon Zanzi, played by Joan Crawford in her first major role. Offering romance, macabre obsession, and surrealist horror while steering clear of exploitative tropes, the film’s strange power remains potent nearly 100 years later. It’s also an early watershed moment for disability representation in horror cinema. Director Tod Browning spent many years working in the circus before bringing his experiences to Hollywood, and all of his films from the 1920s and 30s reveal authentic engagement with his characters, many of whom were real performers under a canvas tent before they made their celluloid debut. Offering verite glimpses of that world, The Unknown was later overshadowed by Browning’s more controversial masterpiece Freaks (1931). Known since its rediscovery in the 1960s only in a shortened print found in the Cinematheque Francaise, The Unknown has now been restored to essentially its full length by the George Eastman Museum, with the missing shots and sequences—approximately 10 minutes of material—restored from a Czech export print in the collection of the National Film Archive in Prague. While they don’t alter the narrative, the newfound scenes add nuance, background, and context, enriching what is already one of the most bizarre silent films to come out of Hollywood.
About the Live Musical Score Performed on our Historic Estey:
Jeff Rapsis is currently executive director of the Aviation Museum of New Hampshire, an educational non-profit based at Manchester-Boston Regional Airport. He is a writer/editor, educator, composer, and performer who specializes in creating live musical scores for silent film screenings. Rapsis has accompanied silent film programs in venues throughout New England since 2007. His technique is to create a set of original music in advance for each film, and then improvise a score based on this material as the screening takes place. Outside New England, he has accompanied films at the New York Public Library’s “Meet the Musicmakers” series and the Kansas Silent Film Festival. Rapsis has also provided original music for several silent film DVD releases by Looser Than Loose Vintage Entertainment of Manchester, N.H., and scored the independent feature film Dangerous Crosswinds (2005). Jeff has previously performed seven live film scores at Epsilon Spires for F.W. Murnau’s masterpieces “Sunrise” and “The Last Laugh”, Buster Keaton’s “Our Hospitality”, “It!” starring Clara Bow, Victor Sjöström’s “The Phantom Carriage””, The aerial adventure “Wings,”and Josef von Sternberg’s “The Last Command.”
Epsilon Spires is hosting this event as a special fundraiser for our friends at NECCA (New England Center for Circus Arts!)
NECCA is the leading non-profit circus arts training center in the nation, right here in Brattleboro. Founded in 2007 by twin trapeze artists and teachers, Elsie Smith and Serenity Smith Forchion and housed in world class custom built Trapezium, NECCA trains America’s next generation of circus artists, launching the careers of over 220 graduates who have gone on to perform professionally for Ringling, Cirque du Soleil, 7 Fingers of the Hand and more. Locally, NECCA gives back to the community by serving over 2,000 students annually and giving $136K in community benefits like performances to 3,000 audience members and programming, along with $25K in direct financial aid to students. Recognized by the Smithsonian Folklife curators, Circus Arts focus on the intersection of sport and creativity, involving physical movement, strength, endurance in combination with creativity and imagination. NECCA is everyone’s home for the circus, no matter your background or physical ability. NECCA thanks our friends at Epsilon Spires for hosting this fundraiser, one of many to come to help NECCA raise $200,000 by the end of the year. If you’d like to know more and donate, you can visit circusschool.org
MORE ABOUT THE FILM:
“The Man With 1000 Faces” Although his parents were deaf, Leonidas Chaney (1883-1930) became an actor and also owner of a theatre company, one of the most versatile and powerful actors of silent cinema, renowned for his characterizations of tortured, often grotesque and afflicted, characters and for his groundbreaking artistry with makeup.
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 often-banned, career-tarnishing Freaks, which was 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 his 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.
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