Capital Celluloid 2027 — Day 76: Tue Mar 17

Innocence (Hadzihalilovic, 2004): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm

This is a 'Machine That Kills Bad People'* screening

ICA introduction:

Leslie Thornton, Peggy and Fred in Hell (The Prologue), 1984, 21 min.
Lucile Hadzihalilovic, Innocence, 2004, 122 min.
 
Leslie Thornton's Peggy and Fred in Hell maps a surreal, apocalyptic realm littered with the detritus of a pop culture bursting at the seams. Castaways in this semiotic wilderness, the protagonists Peggy and Fred have been, in Thornton words, "raised by television," their experience shaped by a palimpsest of science and science-fiction, new technologies and obsolete ones, half-remembered movies and the leavings of history. 
 
In a different kind of hell, Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s debut feature Innocence unfolds in a girls' boarding school, ostensibly at the start of the twentieth century. Based on a 1903 novella by Frank Wedekind, Mine-Haha, or On the Bodily Education of Young Girls, Innocence begins with the arrival of the youngest girl – in a wooden coffin. Investigating the socially-conditioned origins of female sexual knowledge, Hadzihalilovic uses dreamlike images to explore the metamorphosis from girl to woman.

This screening is accompanied by a commissioned essay by Chris McCormack. 

Time Out review:
Is this a horror movie or a grim fairy tale? Dedicated to her colleague, confrontationalist director Gaspar Noé, and sourced from a work by dark expressionist Frank Wedekind, Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s stunning debut describes the purgatorial existence of schoolgirls in a sequestered rural college. In their crisp white gym shifts andpigtail ribbons colour-coded by age, these prepubescent model pupils are self-policing, save for a lone crippled mistress and a ballet teacher and the hovering threat of their ‘graduation’ ceremony in the mysterious house through the dark wood from whence none ever return. Meticulously shot by Benoît Debie with the chromatic richness of the pre-Raphaelite painters  – you can almost smell the moss and decay – and miraculously acted by its predominately young cast, Hadzihalilovic’s film may make for a finally problematic feminist fable, but its unique vision conjures memories of the terrible beauty of Franju’s surreal work and Laughton’s supreme symbolist invocation of childhood, ‘The Night of the Hunter’. 
Wally Hammond

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.

The Machine That Kills Bad People is held bi-monthly in the ICA Cinema and is programmed by Erika Balsom, Beatrice Gibson, Maria Palacios Cruz, and Ben Rivers.