The Machine That Kills Bad People is an engaging and expansive collection of thirty-nine essays by leading film writers and critics including Elena Gorfinkel, Daniella Shreir, and Laura Mulvey, commissioned by the bi-monthly screening series at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London which was programmed by Erika Balsom, Beatrice Gibson, María Palacios Cruz and Ben Rivers from 2018 to 2026.
The Machine That Kills Bad People is, of course, the cinema itself – 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 film club’s otherwise promiscuous programming was governed by a single rule that has remained undisclosed until now: only female filmmakers would be shown. As a result, this book offers an idiosyncratic journey through more than a century of women’s cinema, imagining new historical narratives and compelling its readers to question the status quo.
