Tuesday, June 25, 2024 at 7:30pm
The Cult of Valentino
361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
Presented by Alissa Bennett
Beyond the Rocks, Sam Wood, 1922, digital projection, 76 mins
“Is it a crime to love a dead stranger?” So begins the first volume of Alissa Bennett’s new zine Fourth Horseman. Its subject is the original matinee idol, Rudolph Valentino, and the fandom he inspired. To illustrate the allure of The Great Lover, Light Industry will host a screening of the romantic melodrama Beyond the Rocks, in which he starred opposite Gloria Swanson. Long thought lost, the film is distinguished by this pairing, bringing together two of the silent cinema’s most iconic performers. Prior to the movie, Bennett will offer a sample of the prodigious research that led to Fourth Horseman, a publication that will no doubt cement her reputation as one of our leading heartthrob-ologists.
“When Valentino died of peritonitis in August of 1926 at the age of 31,” she writes, “he was the world’s most famous screen actor, so beloved by his fans that a number of them took their own lives following speculation that his demise was imminent. These deaths were both an echo of the spate of 18th-century suicides that followed the publication of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (the phenomenon of the copycat suicide has come to be known as The Werther Effect), and a forecast of those that would notably come after K--- C-----’s self-inflicted shotgun blast to the head. I suppose I have come to understand that Valentino’s life represents the beginning of something, some strange loop of recognition that has not stopped haunting culture since its inception, the glimmering specter of a public that lavishes love on the persona, but cannot bear to accommodate the person.”
Copies of Fourth Horseman will be available for sale at the event.
Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.