Falling Lessons, dir. Amy Halpern, USA 1992, 64 min.
Book tickets
Experimental filmmaker Amy Halpern’s first and only feature Falling Lessons (1992) boasts a cast of over 200 faces, including many key figures from her own community and filmmaker friends such as Chick Strand, Julie Dash, Arlene Bowman and Michael Snow. Halpern’s 16mm camera roams across Los Angeles, falling and falling again in a series of vertical pans that create a dizzying cascade of faces and places, humans and animals. At once a collective portrait and a radical, enigmatic study of the hypnotic potential of the gaze, Falling Lessons is also an indictment of police violence against LA's Black community.
Shot a decade earlier and set in 1940s Hollywood, Julie Dash’s Illusions (1982) is a film in which multiple illusions collide. It follows Mignon, a Black female studio executive who passes for white, and Ester, a Black woman who is the singing voice of a white Hollywood star, as they are forced to come to terms with an industry beset by racism and sexism.
Programme
Illusions, dir. Julie Dash, USA 1982, 34 min.
Falling Lessons, dir. Amy Halpern, USA 1992, 64 min.
Shot a decade earlier and set in 1940s Hollywood, Julie Dash’s Illusions (1982) is a film in which multiple illusions collide. It follows Mignon, a Black female studio executive who passes for white, and Ester, a Black woman who is the singing voice of a white Hollywood star, as they are forced to come to terms with an industry beset by racism and sexism.
Programme
Illusions, dir. Julie Dash, USA 1982, 34 min.
Falling Lessons, dir. Amy Halpern, USA 1992, 64 min.
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
06:30 pm
Tue, 16 Sep 2025
Cinema 1
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Cinema 1
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no. 236848.