Jerry Lewis’ The Day the Clown Cried Emerges in From Darkness to Light

“What if woody [sic] Allen had brain injury,” remarks the comedian Adam Friedland in his slightly direct Letterboxd evaluate of Jerry Lewis’ The Girls Man. Persevering with a theme, Will Sloan additionally hails The Nutty Professor as a “profoundly strange object from a broken brain” in his personal piece on the platform. These crucial value determinations are in protecting with renewed esteem for Lewis kind the previous 15 years, with Greta Gerwig paying The Girls Man’s manufacturing design one in all its best tributes with the Barbieworld houses in her 2023 blockbuster. If comedy famously equals “tragedy + time,” the components for posthumous acclaim is definitely “outright derision + time.”

So it’s a friendlier crucial welcoming the premiere of From Darkness to Light, a peculiar however insightful documentary credited to Michael Lurie and Eric Friedler. Its topic is the most untouchable and elusive piece of Lewis-lore, his very personal The Different Facet of the Wind: the doomed 1972 manufacturing The Day the Clown Cried, a part of the first wave of worldwide cinema addressing the Holocaust, and which floundered in rights and financing points, coupled with Lewis’ personal displeasure along with his work. 

A minority of us “broken brain” aficionados nonetheless dream of laying eyes on this cursed factor, and this documentary, in its manner, has us lined whereas the Library of Congress-approved premiere of the accomplished footage is pushed again. A Display screen interview with Lurie sheds mild on his documentary’s element components in a manner the completed movie retains shrouded: the footage on show (which doesn’t eclipse greater than 20 minutes) was recovered and digitized from a Swedish archive, an anticipated reality given its co-production origins in that nation. However regardless of its meant greyscale lighting and colour scheme being in place, together with Lewis’ extremely recognizable mise-en-scène, the clips are apparently rushes and rehearsals, not duplicates of what’s stored in the Washington vaults. 

The movie additionally (and mysteriously) accommodates giant parts of re-reappropriated talking-head footage from two prior documentaries: Der Clown, made in 2016 for German TV by Friedler and which options one in all Lewis’ last-ever in-depth interviews; and The Final Giggle, by Ferne Pearlstein, a routine-looking documentary from the similar 12 months that premiered at Tribeca, meditating on how Jewish comedians reminiscent of Mel Brooks used humor to course of the Holocaust. Couple that with iMovie-style transitions, an oddly dated ’90s-esque electronica rating by Alexander Precht, and Jerry’s diaries in voiceover “revoiced,” as an on-screen caption says––no actor is credited, however we wouldn’t need to assume AI, proper?––and you’ve got a uniquely crappy package deal, in spite of its pertinence and energy of its key facets. There’s additionally an unique interview with Martin Scorsese from this 12 months’s Berlinale carried out by Wim Wenders, an early King of Comedy champion after it initially flopped. 

Nonetheless, the documentary covers all the bases you’d need, whether or not as a Jerry fan or an aficionado of messy trade tales, and the interviews themselves are energetic and insightful sufficient to deserve a second unearthing. (Additionally, its hodgepodge presentation matches the content material, as in the event you’d choose an Alex Gibney or Netflix ultra-slickness.) Like an excessive amount of nice comedy, The Day the Clown Cried’s sorry saga raises profoundly existential concepts: the notion of creative accountability, the ethics of representing atrocities, and the right-lip wiggles to try while doing a sad-clown routine (okay, not that one). In Clown, Lewis performs a German clown who’s booted right into a focus camp after he injures one other performer throughout his act, then put to work by the commandants to use his comedian talents for additional sick. It’s in horrible style, sure, however the man was forward of his time: modern comedy feels sustained in a protracted battle to out-shock itself. 

The key bulk of the story is informed, including an vital, contextualizing prologue on Lewis’ status and an afterword wrapping all the pieces up properly. You watch the scraps of footage, and whereas it would offend standard crucial opinion, then and now, there’s one thing very pure about the man’s artistry––one feels him struggling to reconcile conflicting needs to be critical and commemorative along with his goofball streak, providing that distinctive Lewis tonal and philosophical recipe current in his greatest work. The honest crucial protection begins writing itself in your head. As Godard on the Dick Cavett Present famously mentioned, and proven at the documentary’s very starting: “He’s more a painter, maybe, than a director.” From Darkness to Light is a reverent tribute to his most well-known unfinished canvas. 

From Darkness to Light premiered at the 2024 Venice Movie Pageant.