Saturday | November 2, 2019 7:00 pm

The Elephant Man

Introduction by Alex Ross Perry
Screening on Film

Directed by David Lynch.
With Anthony Hopkins, John Hurt, Anne Bancroft.
US, 1980, 35mm, black & white, 123 min.
Print source: HFA

This is one of my top ten favorite films of all time. The further away I get from accepting that this film is part of my DNA and the more times I find myself connecting to various permutations of the “sad lonely monster” story (The Phantom of the Opera, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Beauty and the Beast [sidenote: why is the source material for all of these French?]) the more I realize that my innate emotional connection to every version of this story can be traced back to the heartbreaking tale of John/Joseph Merrick and how deeply it spoke to me as a teenager when I first saw this movie. This is, in my opinion, perhaps the most ostentatiously beautiful and emotional film ever made. It conquers every classical Hollywood melodrama, musical, tragedy and love story. I always think about what Lynch’s career would have been like if he’d been able to operate in this mode ever again, but considering that this is his second film, after only Eraserhead, the individual achievement is monumental enough. – ARP

The Elephant Man introduction by Haden Guest and Alex Ross Perry. Read transcript

Audio transcription

Screening of a double feature of The Elephant Man and Patty Hearst with introduction by Haden Guest and Alex Ross Perry. Saturday 2 November 2019.

Haden Guest 0:01

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Harvard Film Archive. My name is Haden Guest. I'm the Archive’s director, and I'm so glad to see this great audience for a really wonderful film. Tonight’s two films, The Elephant Man and Patty Hearst, were selected by a very special guest, Alex Ross Perry, who will be here tomorrow night and Monday night to screen two films of his own. Alex Ross Perry is an extraordinary filmmaker. I'm really thrilled that he's here and that we've been able to celebrate his work by screening his films starting earlier last month. But Alex is also a true cinephile, and we asked him to select a number of films. Some of you saw some of his earlier selections, such as a rare Herschel Gordon Lewis film, and there's more to come including Jerry Lewis’s The Family Jewels. Tonight we're going to be seeing a beautiful 35 millimeter black and white print, a true black and white print, so this is a printed on black and white stock as opposed to color stock, this original release print from 1980 of The Elephant Man. So this is a really very special occasion. The same is true I should add for the Paul Schrader film Patty Hearst. We have a beautiful print from the HFA collection. Alex is here though to say a few words about the film, and so I ask you to please join me in welcoming him, but before you do so, please turn off any cell phones, any electronic device that you have. Please refrain from using them. And now with no further ado, please join me in welcoming Alex Ross Perry.

[APPLAUSE]

Alex Ross Perry 1:49

Thank you. Thank you, Haden, for saying that and for having me here this weekend and for hosting the series. And thank you, everybody, for coming to this or anything else you have been at or may soon be at while I'm here. I don't have much to say about this film. I just selected it because I'll never miss an opportunity to watch it. And then to get to screen an original release print of it under my own choosing is too good to pass up. But has anyone here not seen this movie before? That's a lot of people that have not seen The Elephant Man. It's always fascinating. This, to me, is undeniable. But has anyone here, who has not seen The Elephant Man, not seen Eraserhead? So very, very few people. So what I find really interesting about this is, you know now in 2019, in modern days there's so much you hear in the media, the young filmmakers who've made one movie who get these Hollywood blockbuster opportunities, and it's so confusing. What did they do? They made one Sundance movie, and now they're making a 100 million dollar movie. This, to me, is the first time that ever happened. This is his follow up to Eraserhead, and no independent filmmaker now who gets to make a superhero movie has ever made a stranger leap in their career trajectory than a midnight movie that was cobbled together over six years to a period piece produced by Mel Brooks, an Oscar contender film, then Dune, then Blue Velvet. And I do feel like that trajectory of his career is sort of lost and mysterious, because then it's Wild at Heart, and then Twin Peaks, the TV show. That's 80 to 90, right? There's nothing I'm forgetting. Now David Lynch is just kind of part of the DNA of film culture, and I think at the end of the 80s, he would have seemed like a very curious, marginal, but nevertheless, a very firmly mainstream figure. And that kind of starts with this, and then it kind of ends when he makes The Straight Story for Disney in 1999. It's just a fascinating trajectory to think about. This came out, I guess, three years after Eraserhead, so Eraserhead was probably still playing as like a midnight staple by 1980. Yeah, nothing I can say will make the film better. You'll appreciate it so much more if we can just watch it, but it's truly, I think, my favorite film of his. Maybe you know, for my money, the most achingly beautiful and sad movie ever made. And it’s just incredible, everything about it. I love this movie. It's an honor to get to pick it from the archive. Thank you all for coming. Hopefully, I'll see you at some other screenings. Thanks again.

[APPLAUSE]

[PAUSE FOR SCREENING]

Screening of Patty Hearst with introduction by Haden Guest and Alex Ross Perry. Saturday 2 November 2019.

Haden Guest 4:40

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Haden Guest. I'm director of the Harvard Film Archive. I want to thank you all for coming. The introduction tonight will not be given by myself but by Alex Ross Perry, the filmmaker who will be joining us tomorrow night and Monday night with two films of his own. He's here to introduce a film that he selected from the HFA collection. We're seeing a really beautiful 35 millimeter print, an original release print, of a film by Paul Schrader, that's all too little known. I’m going to ask everybody to please turn off any cell phones, any electronic devices that you have. And now with no further ado, please join me in welcoming Alex Ross Perry.

Alex Ross Perry 5:24

Thank you, Haden, for having me. And thank you everybody for coming. I was very upfront about this in the little blurb I wrote for the calendar, but I have not seen this movie, so I really don't have anything. I have nothing to say about it. But I've always wanted to see it, and it’s, I think, the only Paul Schrader movie I have not seen, and I've just waited for years for someone to screen it and it never happened. So now that someone is me. I'm very excited to finally see it. He speaks very dubiously of it, and he's kind of absurdly candid about his successes and failures. This movie comes just a few years after Mishima, which he maintains is his greatest achievement as a director and the movie he made that was closest to what he wanted it to be. He kind of feels like after that he lost the thread for a while. Although in the mid to late 80s, he made a number of films I really like, and then into the early 90s, Comfort of Strangers and Light Sleeper, which kind of bookend this movie. When I asked him about it, because for about two or three years, I was making a short documentary about him that will be on the Criterion Channel streaming in I think January or February. Whenever I asked him about this, he said, “maybe it would have been a good miniseries.” So, he perhaps thinks this movie is too short. But then the other interesting thing was like a year or two ago, they were going to make another Patty Hearst movie, and then it was cancelled because of her objections or family objections. So I don't know if we'll ever get another one because they were casting the movie, and it was meant to start shooting in like two or three months. Then there was some lawsuit threatened, and the whole movie was called off. We might never get another one, so we should really appreciate the one that we have. So yeah, I don't know. Has anyone seen this movie? Very, very few people, right? So, it must be great if people are willing to come watch it a second time. No, I'm really excited to just watch a movie I haven't seen, a print from the archive’s collection. Thank you for allowing me to select it. Thank you all for coming, and hopefully I'll see you at some of the other screenings.