A Question of Silence (De Stilte rond Christine M.)
Netherlands 1982. Dir Marleen Gorris.
With Edda Barends, Cox Habbema. 92 min. 35mm.

Thursday 22 May, 18.30
ICA Cinema 1

Bags, shoes, hangers and clothes rails are transformed from innocuous accessories and boutique equipment into deadly weapons in Marleen Gorris’s feature film debut A Question of Silence. Three women, all strangers to each other, cross paths in a boutique when a relatively trivial shoplifting incident unleashes their suppressed frustrations. The Dutch writer-director Gorris, notorious for her outspoken feminist views, protests here against the female condition in a male-dominated society. Gorris, who is both radical and hilariously funny, shows how seemingly harmless women can turn into an unpredictable force when driven by rage. Winner of two prestigious awards, The Golden Calf and Grand Prix (both 1982), A Question of Silence has since been referred to as a landmark feminist work.

With grateful thanks to the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands for supporting this screening.

Ms .45
USA 1981. Dir Abel Ferrara.
With Zoe Lund, Albert Sinkys. 80 min. 35mm.

Thursay 22 May, 20.45
ICA Cinema 1

Ms. 45 , (1981) directed by Abel Ferrara is a violent retribution drama in which a shy seamstress is brutally raped twice in the same day and transformed into a killer, shooting men with her .45 pistol. The transformation of the heroine is marked by the change of her style and dress, from dowdy to a sleek, cat-like vamp who wears bright red lipstick and killer boots. The film climaxes in a scene at a fancy dress party in which the character dresses as a nun in suspenders, drawing together her transformation from virgin to a murderous femme fatale.

With grateful thanks to Abel Ferrara.

Body Double (X)
France 2002. Dir Brice Dellsperger.
With Jean-Luc Verna. 104 min. Digi-Beta.

With an introduction by Guest Curator Drake Stutesman, Editor of Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media.

Friday 23 May - 20:30
ICA Cinema 1

The French artist Brice Dellsperger’s Body Double (X) (2000) is a brilliant 21st century reconstruction of the torrid 1974 film L' Important c'est d'aimer by Andrzej Zulawski . Mouthing the 1974 soundtrack and appearing in various costumes, drag artist Jean-Luc Verna acts out all of the roles within a cut up and fragmenting, digitalized visual narrative. Clothes anchor Verna’s grasp of the characters and they are the only solid structure under his and Dellsperger’s fluid exposure of miscommunication as a crime. But our initial reading of the story in itself may be another kind of crime which Dellsperger also explores through clothes by subverting their social connotations.

Office Killer
USA 1997. Dir Cindy Sherman.
With Carol Kane, Jeanne Tripplehorn. Molly Ringwald 82 min. Beta.

Introduced by Gilda Williams, London correspondent for Artforum and Editor of The Gothic: Documents of Contemporary Art (2007).

Sunday 11 May - 17:00
Tate Modern, Starr Auditorium

In her first feature film direction to date, American artist Cindy Sherman concocts a peculiarly funny caricature of psycho-thriller and horror genres. The film follows the transformation of the “pathetic” office mouse Dorine into an unruly predator, a femme-fatale-gone-wrong. Having stirred up criminal chaos,

Dorine finds much pleasure in fashioning a grisly tableau of her bitchy colleagues in a dark basement, upping the stakes in Sherman’s trademark portrayal of perversity.