ICA Cinematheque
The ICA Cinematheque is a new strand of programming that will incorporate classic art house titles, film seasons, director retrospectives and 35mm repertory screenings into the weekly cinema events.
This Thursday we will be delving into the ICA Films back catalogue to present a rare 35mm screening of Thai-auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s striking 2004 romance Tropical Malady. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize, headed by Quentin Tarantino, at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, this delirious, opaque and singular work prefigures the director’s later films Syndromes of a Century (2006) and the Palm D’Or winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2012).
On Friday we commence NY, NY - a trilogy of films investigating popular cinematic representations of New York in the last two decades of the twentieth century: Spike Lee’s broiling urban drama Do the Right Thing (1989), Mary Harron’s slick adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ pitch-black Wall Street satire American Psycho (2000) and Abel Ferarra’s gritty crime thriller King of New York (1990), featuring an unforgettable performance from Christopher Walken as the aspirational drug baron Frank White.
Resonating with the Bernadette Corporation exhibition 2000 Wasted Years currently on display in the upper and lower galleries, these films capture the vision of a pre-9/11 New York - the late 1980s/early 1990s era of Giuliani and Bloomberg, itself a formative period in the Bernadette Corporation’s evolution, that is highly representative of the city’s multiple, often contradictory identities and its fervent embracing of capitalist moral values.
