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The Machine That Kills Bad People: The Alcohol Years + You Made Me Love You
Institute of Contemporary Arts

Programmed by the Machine That Kills Bad People, this screening of Carol Morley’s *The Alcohol Years* (2000) and Miranda Pennell’s You Made Me Love You (2006) foregrounds and unsettles the camera's gaze. 

Carol Morley’s documentary The Alcohol Years is a deeply personal journey through the filmmaker’s past in 1980s Manchester, a period she scarcely remembers. The film is constructed from interviews with friends and acquaintances who knew Morley during this time, each sharing their perspectives on her then-destructive lifestyle. In a vivid portrayal of the city, the film weaves memories and viewpoints, offering a complex and moving picture of Morley's quest to rediscover her lost self.

Miranda Pennell's short film You Made Me Love You is an experimental exploration of gaze and presence, featuring twenty-one dancers interacting with the camera, blurring the line between observer and observed an intriguing commentary on the nature of performance and the desire for recognition in the modern world.

A specially commissioned essay by Sophie Robinson accompanies this screening.

Programme:
You Made Me Love You (2006), dir. Miranda Pennell, colour, sound, 4 min.
The Alcohol Years (2000), dir. Carol Morley, colour, sound, 50 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.
 
07:00 pm
Wed, 14 Feb 2024
Cinema 1

All films are ad-free and 18+ unless otherwise stated, and start with a 10 min. curated selection of trailers.

Red Members gain unlimited access to all exhibitions, films, talks, performances and Cinema 3.
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Essay