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Anybody’s Woman, dir. Dorothy Arzner, USA 1930, 35mm, 80 min
Anybody’s Woman (1930) is a rarely seen pre-Code feature by Dorothy Arzner, the most prolific woman director of the classic Hollywood studio era. It charts the marriage of a chorus girl and a lawyer who find themselves coupled after a drunken night and proceed to make the unconventional marriage work.
Bette Gordon’s recently restored Super 8 film Anybody’s Woman (1981) is named after Arzner’s film. The precursor to her 1983 feature Variety, it features Wooster Group members Spalding Gray and Nancy Reilly recounting their experiences with pornography against the backdrop of images of New York’s Times Square and the surroundings of the Variety porn theatre.
A specially commissioned essay by Janique Vigier accompanies this screening.
Programme:
Anybody’s Woman, dir. Bette Gordon, USA 1981, digital, 24 min
Anybody’s Woman, dir. Dorothy Arzner, USA 1930, 35mm, 80 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.
06:45 pm
Wed, 25 May 2022
Cinema 1
£13 Full, £11 Concessions, £6.50 Green/Blue Members
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 by Janique Vigier
no. 236848.