Skip to content

A selection of films to accompany the Futurology series of exhibitions.

Museum Futures: Screening and Discussion
Sat 18 Jul 2.00pm
Free
Neil Cummings & Marysia Lewandowska’s film Museum Futures: Distributed is a machinima record of the centenary interview with Moderna Museet’s executive Ayan Lindquist in June 2058. It explores a possible genealogy for contemporary art practice and its institutions, by re-imagining the role of artists, museums, galleries, markets, ‘manufactories’ and academies. The screening will be followed by a discussion led by Neil Cummings and the curators of the Sequelism exhibition, imagining the future of art institutions.

Sequelism Artists’ Screening Programme
Fri 21 Aug 7.30pm
£3.00/£2.00 concs
Introduced by Nav Haq, Arnolfini’s Exhibitions Curator, a programme of artists’ shorts, developed by the curators of Sequelism to accompany the exhibition. Videos screened will include works by Marjolijn Dijkman, David Maljkovic and Julia Meltzer & David Thorne.

Futurology Special: Planet of the Apes Day
Sat 22 Aug 2.30pm
£6.00/£4.50 concs
The classic sci-fi franchise, replete with plot twists, prosthetics and concerted attempts to engage with the knotty social issues of the day via a ‘planet where apes are the rulers and man the beast’. The original was followed by four sequels, a TV series and cartoon, dolls, play-sets, comic books and a Tim Burton remake. Enjoy the 1968 Planet of the Apes (PG), and the first and best two sequels – Beneath the Planet of the Apes (15), and Escape from the Planet of the Apes (PG) – screened back-to-back.
Dir. Various, USA, 1968 – 73

A Double Bill chosen by Tommy Støckel to accompany his exhibition.
Slaughterhouse-Five (15) & Reconstruction (12A)
Sun 23 Aug 2.30pm
The surprisingly well-realised film adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut Jr’s celebrated anti-war novel, which follows Billy Pilgrim, survivor of the Allied bombing of Dresden and now a man ‘unstuck’ in time, as he flits uncontrollably back and forth through the span of his own life and into the future.
Dir. George Roy Hill, USA, 1972, 1h 44m
+
Winner of the Camera d’Or at Cannes, Reconstruction treads a precarious line and pulls
it off with aplomb and glittering performances. Both experimental and convincing, like a fusion between Rohmer and Haneke, it entangles the viewer in an elaborate story of a romantic affair, backed by a beautifully washed-out Copenhagen, which transgresses playfully across alternating layers of reality.
Dir. Christoffer Boe, Denmark, 2003, 1h 30m, Subtitled

The Age Of Stupid (12A)
Fri 28 Aug 7.30pm
£6.00/£4.50 concs
Rough-and-ready, urgent and passionate; apocalyptic fiction sits alongside modern reportage in this film as Pete Postlethwaite plays the last man standing in a climate-fried world, introducing an archive of news clips and interviews filmed way back in the first decade of the 21st century and musing on how humankind could have ignored the environmental warning signs.
Dir. Franny Armstrong, UK, 2008, 1h 30m

Future Shocks
Sat 29 Aug 6.30pm
£3.00/£2.00 Concs
An evening of artists films (from Stan Vanderbeek, Dara Birnbaum, Len Lye and more), retro-futurist music videos and a rare screening of the film of Alvin Toffler’s infamous futurological treatise, Future Shock, in which Orson Welles outlines the onrushing horrors of technological advance as seen from 1972 (including an uncredited Vanderbeek). Embrace or denounce the technological future gone past with these cut outs, cut ups, comic books, clunky computers and a healthy dose of hysteria.
1hr approx

Watchmen (18)
Sat 29 Aug 8.00pm
Closely based on the graphic novel written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons, with its alternate universe of vigilante superheroes and power-crazed U.S. politicians heading for nuclear disaster, Watchmen was described as unfilmable, but there are flashes of visual brilliance throughout, and performances that drill deep into the novel’s haunted soul.
Dir. Zack Snyder, USA, 2009, 2h 42m

Aelita: Queen Of Mars (U) with A New Live Score By Minima
Sun 30 Aug 7.30pm
£7.00/£5.00
Socialist science-fiction spectacular, Aelita was the first big-budget Soviet movie, intended as ideologically-correct mass entertainment to rival Hollywood. The story follows an engineer named Los who leads a construction effort to build a spaceship, dreaming that the ship will carry him to Mars where he can meet the woman of his dreams. The movie’s influence is hard to overestimate: its incredible set design would soon be echoed by the likes of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Flash Gordon.
Dir. Yakov Protazanov, USSR, 1924, 2h, Subtitled

With acclaimed soundscapers Minima performing a new live soundtrack. Minima have been accompanying silent and experimental film since 2006. Based in London and Bristol, this will be the first time they take their unique sonic palette into space.

http://futurologyprogramme.org/