MEMBERS-ONLY SCREENING
The Underground Railroad, Episodes 1 & 2
Museum of the Moving Image - Redstone Theater
In conjunction with Museum of the Moving Image’s current installation An Act of Seeing: Barry Jenkins’s The Gaze, a penetrating visual companion piece to Jenkins’s Amazon limited series The Underground Railroad, we are pleased to present episodes 1 and 2 of the epic adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel on our big screen. In these first two hours, one can grasp the aesthetic ambition of Jenkins’s narratively complex project: in episode 1, we meet our heroine Cora as she begins to plan her escape from enslavement in Georgia via a mysterious network of railroads heading north; in episode 2, Cora finds herself in the false comfort of South Carolina, where the local medical authorities gradually reveal their nefarious intentions for the Black community. With its cinematography by James Laxton and music by Nicholas Brittell—both collaborators on Jenkins’s Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk—The Underground Railroad is an overwhelming work of cinema that demands a fully immersive viewing experience.
