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.

22 October – 13 December 2026
The Lower Depths
The Cinema of Shōhei Imamura
One of the most important filmmakers to emerge from Japan’s post-war era, Imamura’s unruly, inventive, and often anthropological approach to cinema is singular in the medium’s history. Populated by bar hostesses, petty gangsters, black marketeers and unlikely lovers, his films reject official histories in favour of the messy realities of everyday life – combining extraordinary formal invention with an inexhaustible curiosity about what it means to be human. 

Past Programme

#6
2 May - 5 June 2026
Nothing But Life
The Cinema of Rita Azevedo Gomes

#5
19 Feb - 12 Apr 2026
Anguish & Ecstasy
The Cinema of Werner Schroeter

#4
23 Oct - 30 Nov 2025
A Moving Image of Eternity
The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos

#3
12 Sep - 5 Oct 2025
Being in Time
The Cinema of Angela Schanelec

#2
20 Feb - 1 June 2025
Spectres
The Cinema of Jacques Rivette

#1
25 Oct - 8 Dec 2024
The Human Comedy
The Cinema of Hong Sangsoo