This screening will be preceded by a talk by Professor Ginette Vincendeau (King’s College), author of Brigitte Bardot (BFI, 2019) and of the forthcoming BFI Classic on Godard’s Le Mépris, who will reflect on the controversial legacy of the iconoclastic star in the era of ‘cancel culture’. The film is also being shown on March 29th. Details here. Here's all the information on the Bardot season at the cinema.
Cine Lumiere introduction: A dazzling poem of sumptuous, shimmering images, A Very Private Affair (Vie privée) was long considered one of the most beautiful colour films ever made, with its unique impressionist
texture and luminosity together with its astonishing camera movements.
Louis Malle did not want to make a documentary about Brigitte Bardot,
but a film. He said, “Explaining the Bardot myth… is the business of sociologists, not storytellers”. In the film, Jill, a young woman from Geneva, arrives in Paris and
quickly becomes a dancer, actress, and sex symbol. She is adored but
also hounded day and night by photographers and fans. She has no
privacy… A Very Private Affair (Vie privée) was invisible for almost thirty years and restored in 2023.
This film is part of a min-season of Cuban cinema at the ICA. Details here.
New York Times review: An
openly tendentious tour de force considered by many as Cuban cinema’s
peak accomplishment, Humberto Solás’s Lucía (1968) is a
landmark film. Solás, who
died 10 years ago,
was in his mid-20s when he made Cuba’s most elaborate and expensive
movie yet — and perhaps ever. A 2-hour-40-minute black-and-white
pageant, Lucía dramatizes the situation of three oppressed
women, all named Lucía, at cusp moments of Cuban history — the
1890s war of independence, the early 1930s uprising against the
dictatorship of Gerardo Machado and the post-revolutionary ’60s. Each
story has its own style, and each Lucía represents a different
social class. The Lucía of 1895 (played by the stage diva Raquel
Revuelta) is a woman from an aristocratic Havana family who, losing
her youth, embarks on a passionate affair with a handsome Spaniard. A
story of love and betrayal is set against the war between the Spanish
and the Cuban guerrillas known as mambises, many former slaves; the
sequence is reminiscent of but even wilder in its orchestrated tumult
than Luchino Visconti’s operatic costume dramas. Like the lovers in
Visconti’s Senso, the protagonist cannot will herself outside
of history. The
second Lucía (Eslinda Nuñez, who played the object of the
antihero’s fantasies in “Memories
of Underdevelopment”)
is the daughter of a bourgeois family. Unlike the first Lucía, she
tries to engage rather than escape, giving herself to an idealistic
young opponent of the Machado regime. Although not without violence,
this section is tender and even dreamy — episodes of street
fighting punctuate a “new wave” love story. Hauntingly beautiful,
Ms. Nuñez could double for Delphine Seyrig in “Last Year at
Marienbad.” But despite her character’s political commitment, she
is marginalized as a woman even as her intellectual lover is
betrayed. The 1930s revolution is incomplete. The
third Lucía is the Castro equivalent of a Soviet positive heroine —
not unlike Adela Legrá, the captivating untrained actress who plays
her. An illiterate peasant, this Lucía leaves a female work brigade
for love of a self-regarding, insanely proprietary truck driver.
Having traded labor for servitude, she must learn to assert herself
against the traditional macho husband who tells her, “I am the
Revolution.” Reminiscent of the Italian film farces of the ’60s,
the episode employs a rollicking version of the ballad “Guantanamera”
to comment on their conjugal struggle and end the movie on a note of
triumphant ambiguity.
This film is part of the Cuban film season at the Garden Cinema. Full details here.
The
screening will be followed by a Q&A with special guests from Cuba,
distinguished cinema actors Mirtha Ibarra and Eslinda Núñez.
Garden Cinema introduction: This
film heralded a new genre of sociocritical comedy in Cuba and was the
debut feature of director Juan Carlos Tabio. It is full of Cubanisms –
popular everyday problems, language and attitudes of that era and a
range of characters from an idealist architect to an opportunistic
bureaucrat. Gloria
wants her adult daughter to find a husband, who she considers a “good
match”, and engineers a chain of house swaps to move to a “better
neighbourhood” to make things go her way - but her daughter has
different ideas and to love who she wants. It examines the desire to get
ahead in a society that says everyone is equal but also celebrates the
resourcefulness with which people solve their own problems.
Time Out review: The most dementedly elegiac thriller you've ever seen, distilling a lifetime's enthusiasm for American and French film noir,
with little Chinese about it apart from the soundtrack and the looks of
the three beautiful leads. It started out as a homage to Martin
Scorsese and Jean-Pierre Melville, but the limitless arsenal of guns and
rocket-launchers appears somehow to have got in the way.
Exquisitely-tailored contract killer Jeff (Chow Yun-Fat, Hong Kong's
finest actor) accidentally damages the sight of nightclub singer Jennie
while blasting a dozen gangsters to kingdom come. He befriends the
near-blind girl, and decides to take One Last Job to finance the cornea
graft she needs. Meanwhile he is stalked by a misfit cop (Danny Lee), who
eventually falls in love with him and winds up fighting alongside him.
There are half-a-dozen mega-massacres along the way, plus extraordinary
spasms of sentimentality, romance and soul searching. The tone is
hysterical from start to finish, but John Woo's lush visual stylings and
taste for baroque detail give the whole thing an improbably serene air
of abstraction. Tony Rayns
Time Out review: A delightfully touching comedy, Milos Forman's first in America and far better than his later One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or Ragtime,
this deals with the attempts of a middle-aged, middle class American
couple to trace and lure back their runaway daughter. Scenes of their
search are intercut with sequences at a musical audition for
disillusioned youth, and Forman's wry but sympathetic humour derives
largely from the incongruities he observes in both situations: deserted
parents, concerned and conservative, getting stoned in an effort to
understand why kids smoke dope; a rosy, virginal young girl singing a
quiet folk song in praise of fucking. Never taking sides, but allowing
both factions engaged in the generation gap war plenty of space and
generosity, its gentle wit has aged far more gracefully than the
hectoring sermons of most youth movies churned out in the late '60s and
early '70s. Geoff Andrew
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.
