Joseph Strick's The Balcony
Tuesday, July 1, 2025 at 7pm
361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
Introduced by Hilton Als
The Balcony, Joseph Strick, 1963, 16mm, 84 mins
Jean Genet, in a note to Shelley Winters: “I have seen many productions of my Balcony in many languages, but your madam is absolutely the definitive madam. Merci.” He was referring to her role in Joseph Strick’s film adaptation of the play, an independent production made possible by The Balcony’s earlier success Off-Broadway. Strick today is best-known for his work on the experimental documentary The Savage Eye (1959) and the harrowing Interviews with Mai Lai Veterans (1971), but The Balcony remains a distinctive and somewhat overlooked entry in his filmography. And while Winters is indeed a standout—Genet felt she “very much understood the mother in the madam”—the whole cast is a remarkable ensemble, featuring early-career turns by Ruby Dee, Peter Falk, Lee Grant, even Leonard Nimoy.
The drama largely unfurls within a “house of illusion,” a brothel organized as a many-chambered soundstage, in which each room serves as a backdrop for the fantasies of its clientele; behind its curtains a milkman or an accountant might become a bishop taking confession, a judge interrogating a thief, or a general disciplining his spirited mare, if only for an hour. Meanwhile, beyond the bordello doors, a revolution is sweeping the land. The Chief of Police hatches a scheme to restore order by conscripting the johns into service, parading around these ersatz authority figures as evidence of the establishment’s continued grip on power, even though their real-world counterparts have already perished in the unnamed country’s civil war.
Artifice is here Genet’s great theme. The false and the fake are not imitations of life but life itself. “The Balcony,” wrote Roland Barthes, “demonstrated the tragic play of essence and existence, the self and the other; it was a meditation on existential, not moral, values; its aim was to disturb the understanding of being, not good.”
Print courtesy "Movie Mike" Olshan.
Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 6:30pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.