Video Bazaar invites you to the Garden Cinema to experience Victor Sjöström's 1924 silent psychological tragedy, He Who Gets Slapped, accompanied by a specially comissioned live score from London experimental duo, Squall.
He Who Gets Slapped is the story of a scientist, played by the great Lon Chaney Sr., whose happiness is destroyed by a friend who steals not only his wife, but also the results of his life’s research. The scientist turns bitter and, in desperation, joins a circus as a clown whose popular act is based on being repeatedly slapped. The clown, now known only as “He”, is slapped whenever he attempts to speak and, with each slap, relives his personal and professional humiliation.
A key work of late silent-era psychological melodrama, He Who Gets Slapped transforms circus spectacle into a bleak allegory of humiliation, performance, and self-destruction. Sjöström’s style and expressionism-influenced direction emphasises ritualised cruelty and the clown’s public degradation as both punishment and desperate refuge.
Presenting a new score to the film is Squall, a project formed of Marika Tyler-Clark and Agathe Max, both multi-instrumentalists working primarily with strings played through a range of electronic devices. Through close, imaginative dialogue, they build compositions of layered improvisations and prepared sequences, drawing on genres from futuristic folk to electronic dance. For He Who Gets Slapped they will be performing a new arrangement featuring violin, viola, sampler, synthesizers & various objects.
This screening is presented by the cult film club, Video Bazaar, who are proud to present this rarely screened film and are dedicated to bringing the weird, the obscure and forgotten classics to London audiences.
