Blind Spot (Die Reise nach Lyon), dir. Claudia von Alemann, West Germany 1981, 107 mins, German and French with English subtitles
Book tickets
A final double bill from the Machine that Kills Bad People.
Light Reading, dir. Lis Rhodes, 1978, 20 min., 16mm
Blind Spot (Die Reise nach Lyon), dir. Claudia von Alemann, 1981, 112 min., digital
The LAST screening of THE MACHINE THAT KILLS BAD PEOPLE! After eight years, the series is coming to a close with the launch of a book containing all the essays specially commissioned for each screening. As always, two towering films. But at this final event, the film club will reveal the secret rule that has governed their programming all along.
Lis Rhodes's Light Reading (1978) begins in darkness. A woman’s voice reads extracts of text by the American modernist writer Gertrude Stein. When the voice stops, a loose narrative takes shape from a series of collaged photographs, including one of a bloodstained bed. In this film, as in others, Rhodes explores the power relationships present in both "the grammar of looking and the grammar of language."
Claudia von Alemann's Blind Spot (Die Reise nach Lyon, 1981) is the story of a woman who abruptly leaves her partner and young daughter in West Germany to travel to Lyon. There, she wanders near-empty streets in pursuit of Flora Tristan, the socialist feminist activist and writer who spent time in the French city in 1844, just months before her death. Although it is ostensibly a fictional narrative, Blind Spot is also a cinematic search for a feminist approach to the feminist past.
Copies of The Machine that Kills Bad People: Notes from a Film Club, published by The Visible Press, will be available for sale at a discounted price.
Light Reading, dir. Lis Rhodes, 1978, 20 min., 16mm
Blind Spot (Die Reise nach Lyon), dir. Claudia von Alemann, 1981, 112 min., digital
The LAST screening of THE MACHINE THAT KILLS BAD PEOPLE! After eight years, the series is coming to a close with the launch of a book containing all the essays specially commissioned for each screening. As always, two towering films. But at this final event, the film club will reveal the secret rule that has governed their programming all along.
Lis Rhodes's Light Reading (1978) begins in darkness. A woman’s voice reads extracts of text by the American modernist writer Gertrude Stein. When the voice stops, a loose narrative takes shape from a series of collaged photographs, including one of a bloodstained bed. In this film, as in others, Rhodes explores the power relationships present in both "the grammar of looking and the grammar of language."
Claudia von Alemann's Blind Spot (Die Reise nach Lyon, 1981) is the story of a woman who abruptly leaves her partner and young daughter in West Germany to travel to Lyon. There, she wanders near-empty streets in pursuit of Flora Tristan, the socialist feminist activist and writer who spent time in the French city in 1844, just months before her death. Although it is ostensibly a fictional narrative, Blind Spot is also a cinematic search for a feminist approach to the feminist past.
Copies of The Machine that Kills Bad People: Notes from a Film Club, published by The Visible Press, will be available for sale at a discounted price.
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.
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.
Book tickets
Tue, 02 Jun 2026
Cinema 1
06:30 pm
Ticket information
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Access information
Cinema 1
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