Alloy Orchestra performing live to He Who Gets Slapped

The latest score by Alloy Orchestra accompanies He Who Gets Slapped, a little-known but sensational silent melodrama made in Hollywood by the acclaimed Swedish-born director Victor Sjöström. Lon Chaney, the Man of a Thousand Faces, plays a brilliant scientist who loses both his groundbreaking research and his wife to a dishonest man. Wounded, he joins the circus and becomes a sad clown who suffers repeated humiliation and abuse—to the delight of hundreds of spectators. This piercing film, shown in a restored version from George Eastman House, may have inspired Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel and Ingmar Bergman’s The Naked Night/Sawdust and Tinsel and is a perfect fit for Alloy’s unique instrumentation.