The Movement of Things (Serra, 1985): ICA Cinema, 6.15pm
The Machine That Kills Bad People* is a bi-monthly film club programmed by Erika Balsom, Beatrice Gibson, Maria Palacois Cruz and Ben Rivers. Tonight's programme for their latest screening:
Quiproquo, Dir. Rose Lowder, 1992, 16mm, 13 min
Time Out review of The Movement of Things:
This
film, the only one by Portuguese Manuela Serra, had a complicated
production, which lasted from 1979 to 1985. It was shown at a couple of
festivals and at the Cinemateca, and in sessions outside the commercial
circuit, and is now premiered in a restored digital copy, with a final
plan that was not included in the original editing and was introduced by
the director. The Movement of Thingswas
shot in the northern village of Lanheses, following the daily lives of
three local families, and as an only child and rarely seen, it gained
the status of a cult film and a singular work of national
cinematography. But it is far from being comparable to the tapes of António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro, in whose line it belongs. It
is a curious and significant document about life in rural Portugal in
the years after the 25th of April, even though the interior of the
country had not been profoundly modified by the socio-economic and
customs changes caused by the revolution.
Eurico de Barros
Here (and above) is the trailer.
*The Machine That Kills Bad People is, of course, the cinema – a medium
that is so often and so visibly in service of a crushing status quo but
which, in the right hands, is a fatal instrument of beauty,
contestation, wonder, politics, poetry, new visions, testimonies,
histories, dreams. It is also a film club devoted to showing work –
‘mainstream’ and experimental, known and unknown, historical and
contemporary – that takes up this task. The group borrowed their name
from the Roberto Rossellini film of the same title, and find inspiration
in the eclectic juxtapositions of Amos Vogel’s groundbreaking New York
film society Cinema 16.
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