Alan Arkin's Little Murders is one of the darkest American comedies ever made. Set in a New York gripped by random violence, institutional collapse, and emotional exhaustion, it follows Alfred (Elliott Gould), a photographer whose defining characteristic is his complete refusal to respond to the chaos surrounding him. Assaulted, humiliated, and threatened, Alfred meets every situation with detached indifference, embodying what he calls "apathism." 

The film provides a fantastic entry point into Gilles Deleuze's account of modern cinema in Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Deleuze argues that after the Second World War, the traditional structure of cinema began to break down. Faced with situations that exceed their capacity to respond, characters cease to act to achieve goals, and instead become witnesses to strange new forces. They confront what Deleuze calls the "intolerable": a reality that can no longer be controlled through habit or decisive intervention. 

Reading Little Murders alongside Deleuze allows us to ask what happens when the link between perception and action breaks down. Is Alfred's passivity a form of defeat, a symptom of modern alienation, or another way of confronting a world that has become unbearable?

Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life begins as a suburban family drama before descending into one of Hollywood's most unsettling portraits of madness. After receiving cortisone treatment, schoolteacher Ed Avery (James Mason) develops grandiose religious and moral delusions, becoming convinced that he alone can restore order to a corrupt world.

The film offers a provocative companion to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, which rejects the psychoanalytic reduction of desire to family relations. Against the familiar Oedipal story, they argue that desire is fundamentally social and political. Delirium is never simply private; it expresses wider investments in authority, morality, and power.

Rather than treating Avery's collapse as a purely personal psychological crisis, this discussion explores Deleuze and Guattari's argument that madness is never only private. The film reveals how individual desires are shaped by wider social forces - ideas about authority, morality, education, religion, and power. Reading Bigger Than Life through Anti-Oedipus, we explore how desire becomes the place where larger social conflicts are played out.

Jacques Becker's Le Trou is widely regarded as one of the greatest prison films ever made. Based on a true story, it follows a group of prisoners patiently excavating a tunnel beneath their cell, transforming an impossible escape into a meticulous collective project. Becker's extraordinary attention to physical labour - the scraping of metal, the weight of stone, the rhythm of exhausted bodies - makes the material world itself the film's central subject. 

The screening will be read alongside Hannah Arendt's distinction between labour and work in The Human Condition. Whereas labour sustains biological life through endless repetition, work creates a durable human world of objects, tools, and shared reality. Through this distinction, Arendt asks what it means to build a world that outlasts us. 

Seen through Arendt's philosophy, Le Trou becomes a meditation on fabrication, solidarity, and freedom. The prisoners reclaim their agency through the disciplined work of their hands, reshaping the architecture designed to contain them.

Made in the aftermath of May 1968, Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin's Tout va bien ("Just Great") examines what remains after revolutionary enthusiasm begins to fade. Combining political satire, Brechtian theatre, documentary techniques, and formal experimentation, the film refuses the comforts of conventional narrative, asking instead how cinema might participate in political thought. 

The screening will be accompanied by Alain Badiou's reflections on Godard and political cinema. For Badiou, Tout va bien is neither a historical document nor a nostalgic recollection of May '68. It is an attempt to think through the difficult question of what follows a revolutionary beginning. How can politics continue once the moment of collective uprising has passed? 

Together, the film and reading explore cinema as a site of political inquiry rather than political messaging. They ask whether new forms of collective thought remain possible after apparent historical defeat, and what role images can still play in sustaining the possibility of genuine political change.