Body and Soul + Us

Opening Night double feature with Body and Soul beginning at 6:00pm, followed by a conversation with Shana L. Redmond, Director of the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University, and Michael Gillespie, Associate Professor in NYU’s Department of Cinema Studies and a reception, and Us beginning at 9:15pm. Get tickets!

Bundle the Opening Night double feature with a discounted copy of Us: The Complete Annotated Screenplay for $32; $30 for students, seniors (62+), and persons with disabilities; and $27 for FLC Members. Get tickets! Price reflected at checkout.

Copies of Us: The Completed Annotated Screenplay will also be available for purchase at this event.

Body and Soul
Oscar Micheaux, U.S., 1925, 35mm, 105m
Silent with English intertitles
In his boldest surviving film, pioneering Black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux casts Paul Robeson—making his screen debut—in dual roles that expose the fault lines between America’s religious and justice systems. As an escaped convict posing as a beloved preacher, and as his gentle, upright twin, Robeson embodies a devastating split between appearance and truth, and whose uncanny doubling plays out in a community shaped by racial violence, spiritual deception, and economic precarity. Made nearly a century before Us, Body and Soul claimed the doppelgänger as a distinctly Black metaphor: not for abstract guilt or buried sin, but for the internal schism demanded by a racist society—what W. E. B. Du Bois described, in 1903, as the double consciousness of Black American identity. To this day one of the great race-melodramas, Micheaux’s silent-era masterwork still shocks with its formal audacity and searing political clarity. Featuring live piano accompaniment by Makia Matsumura. 35mm print preserved by George Eastman Museum.

Us
Jordan Peele, U.S., 2019, 35mm, 116m
A haunted house turned home–invasion thriller stretched to national proportions, Us transforms a family vacation in Santa Cruz into a metaphysical horror of doppelgängers, repression, and class anxiety. When the Wilson family are attacked by their red-jumpsuited doubles—the Tethered—they’re swept into a coordinated uprising emerging from a subterranean labyrinth and government conspiracy. Blending slasher and creature-feature thrills, cultural iconography, and Jungian psychology, Peele crafts a propulsive, frequently hilarious allegory that’s at once genre pop and political provocation, in which the threat isn’t some external invader but our own warped reflection wielding a pair of scissors. Lupita Nyong’o’s astonishingly splintered dual performance anchors a film teeming with mirrored symbols, from rabbit warrens and the eerie symmetry of 11:11 to the sharp line drawn from Reagan-era mythmaking to its 2010s implosion. Us remains a richly layered, destabilizing vision, and Film at Lincoln Center is proud to revive it in a new 35mm print—made to be seen, and reseen, on the big screen. 35mm print courtesy of Jordan Peele’s personal collection.