The Machine That Kills Bad People

Since May 2018, together with friends María Palacios Cruz, Beatrice Gibson, and Ben Rivers, I’ve programmed a bi-monthly film club at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, called the Machine that Kills Bad People. Taking our name from Roberto Rossellini’s 1952 film La macchina ammazzacattivi, we describe ourselves like this:

“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.” There is one additional rule that informs out programming, but this is never announced to the public.

This programme extends this project into the space of 25 FPS by adopting our typical double-bill format to show two films dear to the Machine, both by women filmmakers who have recently left us: one by Amy Halpern, whom we are showing this month in London (albeit with a different work, her essential 1992 feature Falling Lessons), and a second by Robina Rose, whose film Nightshift we desperately wanted to screen but couldn’t because of the ins and outs of restoration premiere policies. Halpern described Invocation as, "An invitation and a benediction. A temporary sculpture, which exists only as long as the hands describe it, and maybe briefly afterwards as after-image in the eye." Rose, meanwhile, plunges the viewer into a different kind of suspended time: a night at a West London hotel, presided over by a pallid clerk played by Jordan Rooke, a performer best known for her role in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (1978). Both works usher the viewer into an altered realm of spells and dreams, gestures and darkness. And both films serve as reminders of the grandeur that can be created with meagre means.

Erika Balsom