Freaks

The film

A bearded woman gives birth to a child in the wooden wagon of a nomadic circus. It is a baby girl. The excitement is great, the "Freaks," her art and life companions, applaud. Phroso, clown, Browning's own alter ego says, "It's a girl," and then adds, "and she's already growing a beard." The child will never be seen, protected from a sheet that hides her from the room. The iconography is that of a new Nativity. That woman was Lady Olga Roderick, a.k.a. Jane Barnell, one of the most famous "Bearded Women," women with hypertrichosis or hirsutism, of the last century, a champion of the rights of what were still too often called "monsters."

This is one of the opening sequences of one of the most mysterious and controversial films in the History of Cinema, often classified, unfairly, as horror, considered one of the 'cursed' films par excellence. An expressionist masterpiece directed by Tod Browning, based on the short story "Spurs" by Clarence Robbins, "Freaks" appeared in American theaters in February 1932 triggering violent and controversial reactions from from audiences and critics. After its first days in theaters, the film was censored; in Britain it remained banned for 30 years, some scenes were amputated. The deleted material was destroyed, burned and could never be recovered, even when, forty years later, in 1962, presented at the Cannes Film Festival, the film was hailed as a masterpiece. Jean Gili in those years wrote "This is not a horror film, it is a love film," a frightening elegy, a dowsing song. to Tod Browning's contemporaries, on the other hand, blamed the revolutionary choice of calling for his film "freak" actors to to play some of the main roles, bodies that were considered non-conforming, unsuitable for the sensibilities of the movie theater audience, frightening.

Set in a circus, at a time when freak shows and music halls now seemed to be a fun from provincial waterfront, a stain on the collective consciousness that was meant to be bleached, "Freaks" follows the everyday life of a group of, so called, "freaks from freak show" circus workers: Cleopatra, a trapeze artist, one of the most beautiful women in the world, called the peacock or the sphinx of the air, mocks, aided from Hercules, the strongman, the love of Hans, a circus dwarf, his kindness, his attentions, marries him, tries to poison him but the revenge will be terrible. At the end of the film we will see her exposed body, freak to herself, mysteriously mutilated, almost genetically mutated into "Hen Woman."

The directing project

Browning's film begins in a Museum. Probably in the Barnum Museum, the great "American Museum of Monsters," a little-known, often deliberately overlooked ancestor of our very Western Science Museums. A group of furry visitors move among wax statues and look into tarped holes containing living creatures. It makes us from mirror. They are the monsters, Browning seems to tell us, spying on us, triangulating; indeed, it is you. from Here the director's work takes its first steps, accompanying the six young performers in a daring lip-sync, which decontextualizes, without betraying, the words of the script, building around them the hyper-realistic stereotype of a contemporary bourgeois drama, as sour as a Reza, as mean and wild as a Fassbinder, poised toward disintegration, toward the emergence of the abyss like the opening part of Lars Von Trier's "Melancholia."

It could not have been indifferent to me that this project was presented first in the spaces of Pelanda, a Former Slaughterhouse, and then, to Spoleto, between the vaults of a deconsecrated Church. It seemed necessary to me, then, to eviscerate the space, to hyper-exhibit it, not forgiving its history, forgetting it, but letting the walls return to bleed before our eyes, as in an alchemical operation. Thus stripped bare these two places reminded me of the Oude Kerk, the Old Church, in Amsterdam: its outer walls against which the red neon of the sex workers' shop windows is reflected, its structure innervated and complex, I went looking for the "bridal chamber" with its paper from nineteenth-century walls, to flowers, so out-of-space, out-of-time.

There could not have been a more fitting place, then, a more semantically correct island, to question together to Browning and to this lucid and, without contradiction, hallucinatory masterpiece of his, along with the rebuses of his endless, under-skin, under-tracked details-such as the from bathtub, almost a premonition, in which he will be found dead-about what Monster really is, what Bestiality; about the violence we have historically exercised on bodies considered "nonconforming," the bodies and identities we have pornographically exposed and at the same time denied, exploited, erased. To initiate an intimate, political, visionary journey that asks what is the concrete, healing, vital possibility of breaking down the distinction between real and imaginary bodies-as Browning does, in a twist of the tail, in the last sequences of his film, with the invention of his hen woman, presented on a par with other bodies, elevated to the status of a real body. To blow up the museums of our memory, using technology, to hack them from the inside, replacing subjects, scenarios, protagonists, allowing the future to redesign an alternative, inclusive, revolutionary past, creating a fantasy-history of events, art, sacred imagery.

What would our present be if our nativity scenes had not been inhabited from a Holy Family of Homines Sapientes but of Neanderthals? If Our Lady had been a bearded woman giving birth to a baby Jesus with a beard? What if instead of a donkey and an ox to warming the little one with her body, with her hot breath there had been a bear - a sacred animal for the peoples of Northern Europe colonized and subjugated by Christianity, a symbol of oral culture, for centuries chained, sexualized, ridiculed, like the bodies of freaks, in performances that did not stop even with the plague, even when all other theaters were closed to the public? What if Adam and Eve were two men? What would our art history look like, what would we look like, if the Griffoni polyptych depicted a "Freak" Saint Lucia? What if the detailed gestures of Baseball, Tod Browning's great passion, one of the quintessentially American and masculine sports, were contaminated, corrupted, in its internal structure by vogueing, also American, but a language of liberation, joy, reappropriation of bodies for trans communities? What if God, instead of being seen in the bright eye of the Sun, was, in a dizzying Dickinsonian memory, in an eclipse?

Federica Rosellini