The Machine That Kills Bad People its a collection of thirty-nine essays commissioned by the bi-monthly screening series of ‘mainstream’ and experimental, known and unknown, historical and contemporary films held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, from 2018 to 2026.
The screenings were programmed by Erika Balsom, Beatrice Gibson, María Palacios Cruz and Ben Rivers and governed by a single rule: 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.
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.
The Visible Press, 256pp, 20cm x 13cm, illustrated paperback, 2026
