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The Smiling Madame Beudet, dir. Germaine Dulac, 1923, black and white, silent, English intertitles translated from French, 38 min.
This Machine That Kills Bad People screening features two films about women who possess desires to murder men: The Smiling Madame Beudet (1923) by avant-garde filmmaker Germaine Dulac, and A Question of Silence (1982), written and directed by Dutch filmmaker Marleen Gorris.
The Smiling Madame Beudet (1923) is recognised as an early feminist classic. It portrays the struggle of an astute woman trapped in a loveless marriage. Stage and screen actor Germaine Dermoz stars as Madame Beudet, a bourgeois housewife subjected to the taunts of her malicious husband. Dulac uses techniques such as slow motion, distortions, and superimpositions to depict Madame Beudet’s inner world as she contemplates a drastic escape from her oppressive life. Dulac's film remains an important exploration of psychological imprisonment and unspoken despair.
Marleen Gorris' feature A Question of Silence (1982) follows three women – Christine, a nonverbal housewife; Andrea, an executive secretary; and Annie, a waitress – who, without prior acquaintance, come together in a moment of collective rage to murder a male boutique owner. As criminal psychiatrist Janine investigates their motives, she uncovers the profound discontent and silent suffering the women have endured. In 1983, artist Barbara Kruger wrote of the film: “A Question of Silence is a fluent reminder of the cinema’s ability not only to please us with the eloquence of formal, optical arrangements and conventional scenarios, but to critically alter the moments of our lives’.
A specially commissioned essay by Chloe Aridjis accompanies this screening.
Programme:
The Smiling Madame Beudet, dir. Germaine Dulac, 1923, black and white, silent, English intertitles translated from French, 38 min.
A Question of Silence, dir. Marleen Gorris, 1982, colour, sound, 92 min. Dutch with English subtitles.
The Smiling Madame Beudet (1923) is recognised as an early feminist classic. It portrays the struggle of an astute woman trapped in a loveless marriage. Stage and screen actor Germaine Dermoz stars as Madame Beudet, a bourgeois housewife subjected to the taunts of her malicious husband. Dulac uses techniques such as slow motion, distortions, and superimpositions to depict Madame Beudet’s inner world as she contemplates a drastic escape from her oppressive life. Dulac's film remains an important exploration of psychological imprisonment and unspoken despair.
Marleen Gorris' feature A Question of Silence (1982) follows three women – Christine, a nonverbal housewife; Andrea, an executive secretary; and Annie, a waitress – who, without prior acquaintance, come together in a moment of collective rage to murder a male boutique owner. As criminal psychiatrist Janine investigates their motives, she uncovers the profound discontent and silent suffering the women have endured. In 1983, artist Barbara Kruger wrote of the film: “A Question of Silence is a fluent reminder of the cinema’s ability not only to please us with the eloquence of formal, optical arrangements and conventional scenarios, but to critically alter the moments of our lives’.
A specially commissioned essay by Chloe Aridjis accompanies this screening.
Programme:
The Smiling Madame Beudet, dir. Germaine Dulac, 1923, black and white, silent, English intertitles translated from French, 38 min.
A Question of Silence, dir. Marleen Gorris, 1982, colour, sound, 92 min. Dutch with English subtitles.
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.
06:45 pm
Wed, 31 Jul 2024
Cinema 1
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Cinema 1
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Essay
no. 236848.