Peggy and Fred in Hell (The Prologue), dir. Leslie Thornton, US 1984, 21 min.
Book tickets
Two kinds of hell...
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.
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.
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, 17 Mar 2026
Cinema 1
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Cinema 1
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