A continuing series of in-depth retrospectives exploring the work of cinema's great artists, both past and present.

A conception of a medium's history is vital to any engagement with its present and future. However, great cinema holds the unique position of always remaining contemporary, of being perpetually out of, and of its, time. The work of a great filmmaker never truly becomes history, it is never truly resigned to the past. Every time it's screened, every time someone is influenced by it, it becomes contemporary once again.

Long Takes is a rebuke to the notion that there is or should be a degree of separation between so called 'new' or 'current' filmmakers and those that apparently belong to the past. It is a rejoinder to the proclivity to categorise any film made prior to a pre-determined date, by the descriptors 'classic' and 'repertory', as if a film, after a certain number of years, becomes encased in stone, unchanging, unmoving.

Long Takes contends that the work of filmmakers from different generations belong in the same conversation, and that conversation is a contemporary, ongoing, and ever-evolving one. Building upon the success of our retrospectives exploring the work of Yvonne Rainer and Marguerite Duras, it also marks a continuing commitment to the exploration of an artists' body of work, in-depth, at length, and wherever possible in its entirety.

These long form retrospectives will provide time and space for the extended exploration of an artist's body of work, doing so with both a historical sense of cinema, as a medium now straddling its third century, and with a recognition of the unique conditions in which audiences in 2024 are presented and engage with cinema and its history.

At its heart Long Takes serves as a statement on the artists that the ICA Cinema feel hold a pre-eminent position not just in the history of cinema but also those who are, in their restless re-shaping of the medium's possibilities and their commitment to alternative methodologies of production, still shaping its future.

12 Sep - 5 Oct 2025
Being and Time
The Cinema of Angela Schanelec
Enigmatic and endlessly intriguing, the cinema of German filmmaker Angela Schanelec defies easy classification. For more than thirty years Schanelec has crafted a singular body of work that is both elliptical and philosophical. Drawing and departing from classical dramaturgy in almost equal measure, Schanelec's cinema, at its heart, is a cinema of being and becoming, a profound exploration of the very act of existing.



23 Oct - 30 Nov 2025
A Moving Image of Eternity
The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos
Spanning nearly five decades, Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos' body of work is, in a truly homeric tradition, an epic journey through myth and history. From the astonishing tracking shots that seem to collapse any distinction between time and space, to the travelling players, exiles and artists, whose stage keeps shifting beneath their feet. At its heart, the cinema of Theo Angelopoulos is one of movement, an endless voyage, an eternal search for home, and a reckoning with our pasts, both personal and collective. 

Past Programme



20 Feb - 1 June 2025
Spectres
The Cinema of Jacques Rivette
The endlessly blurred and tangled lines of reality and fiction, cinema and theatre, and art and life form the heart of Jacques Rivette’s cinema. Throughout his extensive body of work the French filmmaker continually eschews and reformulates the traditional patterns of narrative cinema whilst embracing mystery, conspiracy, and the inexplicable.



25 Oct - 8 Dec 2024
The Human Comedy
The Cinema of Hong Sangsoo
With his incisive and humorous explorations of infidelity, artistic endeavour, and communication (or lack thereof), South Korean filmmaker Hong Sangsoo's narratively concise and formally radical work has marked him out as not only contemporary cinema’s most prolific filmmaker but also its most inventive.