The Machine That Kills Bad People (held bi-monthly in the ICA Cinema and programmed by Erika Balsom, Beatrice Gibson, Maria Palacios Cruz and Ben Rivers) presents:
Madame a des envies (1907) + My Twentieth Century (1989)
When: Wednesday Dec 21 at 6:45PM
Where: ICA London
Book tickets here via the ICA website
Taking place onboard the Orient Express on New Year’s Eve 1899, Ildikó Enyedi’s My Twentieth Century is a joyous fable of scientific, political and sexual revolution that follows the lives of two twins, Lili and Dóra, born in 1880 in Budapest at the same moment that Thomas Edison presented his electric lightbulb to the world. Shot in luminous black and white, Enyedi’s first feature film echoes the exuberance of early cinema.
Also on the edge of the twentieth century, French secretary Alice Guy (later Guy-Blaché) directed one of the earliest narrative short films La Fée aux choux (The Cabbage Fairy, 1896). She would then go on to set up her own production company Solax Studios, and to direct hundreds of titles. In her Madame a des envies (Madam’s Cravings, 1906), a pregnant woman played by Guy herself seeks to satisfy her immense appetite, seizing a vast quantity of things to eat, drink, and smoke.
Programme:
Madame a des envies, dir. Alice Guy, France 1907, 4 min.
My Twentieth Century, dir. Ildikó Enyedi, Hungary / West Germany 1989, 103 min.