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Edited by Erika Balsom, Beatrice Gibson, María Palacios Cruz and Ben Rivers
The Visible Press, June 2026
The Machine That Kills Bad People is an engaging and expansive collection of thirty-nine essays commissioned by the bi-monthly screening series at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 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.
With contributions by: Chloe Aridjis, Rebecca Jane Arthur, Huda Awan, Erika Balsom, Alice Blackhurst, Hannah Bonner, Ricardo Matos Cabo, Amina Cain, Steven Cairns,Teresa Castro, George Clark, CAConrad, Corina Copp, Kit Duckworth, Devika Girish, Leo Goldsmith, Elena Gorfinkel, Xiaolu Guo, Laura Guy, May Adadol Ingawanij, Juliet Jacques, Beatrice Loayza, Chris McCormack, Siavash Minoukadeh, Laura Mulvey, Tendai Mutambu, Eileen Myles, Vanessa Onwuemezi, Ara Osterweil, Andréa Picard, Caitlin Quinlan, Lucy Reynolds, Sophie Robinson, Sara Saljoughi, Sophia Satchell-Baeza, Daniella Shreir, Laura Staab, Janique Vigier, Genevieve Yue. In addition, Ben Rivers has created new ink-wash drawings that illustrate eighteen of the films that were shown in the series.