This film is part of the Cuban film season at the Garden Cinema. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review: A short feature (1984) by Cuba’s Tomas Gutierrez Alea (Memories of Underdevelopment).
It seems to have been part of an official government assault on the
problem of “machismo” in Cuban society, though Alea is able to lighten
the schematism inherent in propaganda films with a fairly open shooting
style and attractive performances. Assigned to do a documentary on women
working in jobs traditionally held by men, a famous Cuban writer finds
himself falling in love with his principal subject, a feisty female
dockhand, but is ultimately unable to accept her independence. Dave Kehr
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 byBenoît Debiewith 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
*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.
Guardian review: At the age of 87, that remarkable Polish film-maker Andrzej Wajda
has directed a movie with terrific gusto and a first-rate lead
performance from Robert Więckiewicz. It’s a full-tilt biopic tribute to
the trade-union leader Lech Wałęsa, founder of the Solidarity movement:
bullish, cantankerous, with an exasperating charm and the gift of the
gab. Wałęsa’s defiance of Poland’s Soviet masters removed the very first
brick from the Berlin Wall. Famously, Wałęsa was the one subversive
trade-union leader whom Margaret Thatcher felt able to love: Arthur
Scargill did not enjoy the same admiration. Wałęsa:
Man of Hope is a belated companion piece to his Man of Marble (1977)
and Man of Iron (1981), respectively about a Stakhanovite bricklayer and
his son in Poland; it discloses now an unexpected trilogy, and somehow
suggests, in retrospect, that the heroic “Man” of those first two films
really was Wałęsa all along. The almost Napoleonic career of Wałęsa
looked at the time like a kind of miracle; Wajda sets out to examine how
that miracle came about. Wałęsa starts as a shipyard
electrician, devoted to his young wife Danuta, (Agnieszka Grochowska),
and to their growing family, and radicalised by the Gdańsk shipyard riot
of 1970. Amusingly, Wajda suggests that Wałęsa’s luxuriant moustache
made him famous and recognisable: the anti-Stalin in the cause of
freedom. His activism moreover coincided with the sensational arrival of
the charismatic new Polish Pope John Paul II; the Catholic Wałęsa was a
key political beneficiary. It’s an invigorating and very enjoyable film
from a director who shows no sign of slowing down. Peter Bradshaw
Time Out review: Andrzej Wajda's remarkable sequel to Man of Marble welds newsreel footage
of the Solidarity strike to fiction in a strong investigative drama. A
disillusioned, vodka-sodden radio producer is bundled off to Gdansk in a
black limousine. His mission: to smear one of the main activists - who
also happens to be the son of the hapless 'Marble' worker-hero. But,
tempered by bitter experience of the failed reforms of '68 and '70,
these new men of iron are more durable than their fathers, not as easily
smashed. Media cynicism, censorship and corruption are again dominant
themes, this time anchored through the TV coverage of the strike, though
the conclusion hints with guarded optimism at a possible rapprochement
between workers and intelligentsia. An urgent, nervy narrative conveys
all the exhilaration and bewilderment of finding oneself on the very
crestline of crucial historical change; and for the viewer, all the
retrospective melancholy of knowing that euphoria shattered by
subsequent events.
This film is part of the Big Screen Classics season at BFI Southbank. Details here.
Time Out review: Four sequels and a TV series bred contempt, but this first visit to
Pierre Boulle's planet, bringing a welcome touch of wit to his rather
humourlessly topsy-turvy theory of evolution, remains a minor sci-fi
classic. The settings (courtesy of the National Parks of Utah and
Arizona) are wonderfully outlandish, and Franklin Schaffner makes superb use of
them as a long shot chillingly establishes the isolation of the crashed
astronauts, as exploration brings alarming intimations of life (pelts
staked out on the skyline like crucified scarecrows), and as discovery
of a tribe of frightened humans is followed by an eruption of jackbooted
apes on horseback. The enigma of the planet's history, juggled through
Charlton Heston's humiliating experience of being studied as an interesting
laboratory specimen by his ape captors, right down to his final
startling rediscovery of civilisation, is quite beautifully sustained. Tom Milne
ICA introduction: Mi Vida Loca a.k.a. My Crazy Life, centres on a group of young Latina women who navigate friendship, rivalry, and responsibility amidst the street gangs of Los Angeles in the early 1990s. Shot in the real streets, porches, and apartments of Echo Park the film paints a picture of a close-knit community with its own conflicts, rules, and pressures. After the success of Gas Food Lodging writer/director Allison Anders delivered a new take on the female-led romance/drama by embracing the story of young Chicanas in an urban setting as colourful and vibrant as the songs on the film’s soundtrack. Organised into three connected chapters and using a mix of professional and non-professional actors, Anders unflinching eye and commitment to reality led Hal Hinson of The Washington Post to praise the “extraordinary powers of observation…each segment is richly detailed and vivid…the stuff of life.” Out of circulation in the UK for decades, Lost Reels presents an extremely rare 35mm screening of this unique drama by special arrangement with HBO and it will be followed by an in-person Q&A with writer/director Allison Anders.
Chicago Reader review:A funky independent feature by Allison Anders (Gas Food Lodging), set in the Los Angeles barrios and concentrating on the friendships between working-class women there. The stylistic boldness may get a little top-heavy in spots, but in general this is funny, insightful, and imaginatively told. The cinematographer, interestingly, is Rodrigo Garcia, son of writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez.Jonathan Rosenbaum
ICA introduction: One of the quintessential American indies of the nineties, writer/director Allison Anders elicits detailed performances from an engaging cast and astutely observes the quiet challenges of small-town life. Beautifully written, directed and photographed, the film was nominated for the Golden Bear at the 42nd Berlin International Film Festival and the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1992. Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote, “subtly etched characters, effortlessly fine performances, and a moving story that is not easily forgotten.” Tonight’s screening from Lost Reels is a rare 35mm presentation of this evocative, lyrical film followed by an in-person Q&A with writer/director Allison Anders.
Time Out review: Nora (Adams) waits tables and scrapes by, single-handedly raising two teenage daughters in a clapped-out trailer. Romance seems as scarce as rain in her New Mexico backwater: Nora and elder daughter Trudi (Skye) know what it means to be left high and dry, and even young Shade (Balk) suffers rejection at the hands of dreamy Darius (Leitch). But hopes of love die hard, and there's escapism to be found at the local Spanish fleapit. Shade decides to go father-hunting, but an attempt at match-making and the hunt for her long-absent dad (Brolin) yield decidedly mixed results. Far from gloomy fare, this debut from an American independent offers humour, wry observation and sympathetic characterisation. Without patronising her characters, writer-director Anders captures the frustrations of both generations, and the concluding optimistic note isn't forced. Delightfully oddball and strangely sane.
