The Machine That Kills Bad People
Monday, October 5, 2026 at 7pm
Light Industry, 361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn

Anybody's Woman, Bette Gordon, 1981, digital projection, 24 mins
Merrily We Go to Hell, Dorothy Arzner, 1932, digital projection, 83 mins

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.

Programmed by Erika Balsom, Beatrice Gibson, Maria Palacios Cruz, and Ben Rivers, The Machine that Kills Bad People showed double bills at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts on a bimonthly basis between 2018 and 2026. June of this year brought an end to our regular slot but also marked the publication of a book assembling 39 of the essays commissioned to accompany our screenings.

To celebrate this collection, published by The Visible Press, we’re presenting Merrily We Go to Hell and Anybody’s Woman. The first is a pre-Code feature by Dorothy Arzner, full of marital woes, alcohol, and adultery. The second is Bette Gordon’s Super 8 precursor to Variety (1983), featuring Wooster Group members Spalding Gray and Nancy Reilly discussing pornography and fantasy against the backdrop of Arzner’s filmmaking and the Variety theater.

- MTKBP

Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.

Copies of the book will be available for sale at the snack bar.

Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served, except for members subscribed at $8/month or more, who may reserve a seat by emailing [email protected] at least two hours prior to showtime. Box office opens at 6:30pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.

On A.A.A. Offresi
Tuesday, October 6, 2026 at 7pm
Light Industry, 361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn

A lecture by Erika Balsom

On the eve of the Berlusconi era, when social mores were changing and Italian television was beginning its rapid transformation into a private enterprise, a feminist collective under contract to public broadcaster RAI2 made an experimental video work that became a national scandal. In 1981, Maria Grazia Belmonti, Anna Carini, Rony Daopoulo, Paola De Martiis, Annabella Miscuglio, and Loredana Rotondo used hidden cameras to observe the interactions of French sex worker Véronique Lacroix and her clients in a Roman apartment—unbeknownst to the men involved. When asked about their use of this technique, they responded, “It’s profoundly dishonest. But everything that relates to the image is always dishonest.” They called their film A.A.A. Offresi; roughly translatable as “A.A.A. Services Offered,” the title recalled a classified ad for sex work, with the three A’s at the start ensuring a good position in alphabetical order.

The documentary premiered without incident at the Berlin International Film Festival in February, in what would turn out to be nearly its only official public screenings. On the day it was scheduled to air on Italian television a few weeks later, it was censored. Politicians who had never seen the film were certain it was assault on morality, even though it showed almost no sex and instead focused on discussions before and after, mostly about money. The public weighed in from the left and the right, with one letter-writer going so far as to threaten to blow up a cinema or poison the water supply to the RAI offices if it went on air. Soon, the collective faced criminal charges for the facilitation of prostitution and the invasion of privacy, even though they took care not to show any of the men’s faces. The subsequent trial ended in a full acquittal, but the judge ordered that A.A.A. Offresi remain under indefinite sequestration owing to its use of non-consensual recording. This illustrated talk will tell the story of this controversial film, long presumed to be lost.

- EB

FREE

Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served, except for members subscribed at $8/month or more, who may reserve a seat by emailing [email protected] at least two hours prior to showtime. Box office opens at 6:30pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.

Light Industry is supported by our members. Public assistance is provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.