Alan Arkin's Little Murders is a dark comedy set in a New York overwhelmed by random violence, failing institutions, and emotional exhaustion. It follows Alfred (Elliott Gould), a photographer who responds to this world by withdrawing from it. He refuses involvement, embraces what he calls "apathism," and turns looking into a form of self-protection. Yet the film gradually suggests that his indifference is not an escape from the world around him, but one of the ways that world has taken hold of him.

 

The film offers a striking introduction to Gilles Deleuze's account of modern cinema in his book Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Deleuze is interested in films in which the usual link between seeing something and knowing how to respond begins to break down. Characters face situations that are too chaotic, arbitrary, or unbearable for any obvious action to make sense. They wander, watch, endure, and struggle to understand what is happening around them.

 

Little Murders gives this problem a social and political dimension. Violence is no longer simply the act of a particular person with a clear motive. It becomes anonymous, unpredictable, and almost part of everyday life. At the same time, the disorder of the city begins to shape the inner lives of the people who live there. Apathy, optimism, family, religion, psychology, law, and finally violence itself all become ways of coping with a world that feels impossible to change.

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Little Murders opens a difficult question: how can we learn to see, think, and eventually act without simply reproducing the world we are trying to resist?

Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life begins as a suburban family drama before opening onto a larger question: can madness be more than a private collapse, becoming instead a point at which the tensions of society are made visible within an individual life?

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This screening pairs the film with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s revolutionary Anti-Oedipus,  a text that challenges psychoanalysis for reducing desire and madness to the family. Rather than treating the unconscious as a private theatre organised around childhood, repression, and parental conflict, Deleuze and Guattari place it within a broader social field. Politics, religion, education, race, economics, and systems of authority do not just influence personal experience from the outside, but shape the very forms that desire takes.

 

For Deleuze and Guattari, desire is not simply the pursuit of what we lack or cannot possess. It is affirmative, productive, and excessive. It forms connections between bodies, institutions, beliefs, images, and structures of power. Yet desire is not inherently liberating. It can invest in hierarchy, obedience, nationalism, moral purity, and repression just as powerfully as it can produce experimentation, transformation, or escape. Madness, from this perspective, is not outside the social world, and can expose and intensify the forces already at work within it.

In the passage we will discuss, Bigger Than Life becomes an example of cinema’s ability to show how a seemingly personal crisis can expand across the social field. Delirium takes up questions of education, religion, morality, authority, and social order. 

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Through Bigger Than Life and Anti-Oedipus, we will ask how desire moves between the individual and the collective, why people become attached to the forces that constrain them, and whether madness can reveal the political and libidinal organisation of a world that otherwise appears normal.

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 who transform an impossible escape into a meticulous collective project. Becker's extraordinary attention to physical fabrication - the repurposing of iron beds into tools, the scraping of concrete, the hacking of the cell's infrastructure - makes the material world itself the film's central subject. The prison operates as a closed system designed to reduce men to passive bodies; the prisoners respond by becoming engineers of their own reality.

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The screening will be accompanied by Hannah Arendt's distinction between labor and work in The Human Condition. Whereas "labor" merely sustains biological survival through an endless cycle of consumption, "work" creates a durable world of objects and shared technologies. Crucially, Arendt argues that true community and political solidarity are forged when human beings gather around the material things they build together.

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Read through Arendt's philosophy, Le Trou becomes a meditation on fabrication, technological resistance, and the creation of community through matter. The prisoners reclaim their agency through the subversive work of their hands, reshaping the architecture designed to contain them. This raises an urgent contemporary question: in an era defined by closed systems and passive consumption, how do we reclaim our agency through the material world? Does the physical act of making, repairing, and altering our environment remain our most radical practice of freedom?

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 essay "The End of a Beginning: Notes on Tout Va Bien" from his book Cinema, which reflects on Godard and political cinema. For Badiou, Tout va bien is neither a historical document nor a nostalgic reflection on May ’68. Instead, it captures an ambiguous historical moment: the end of a revolutionary sequence that may also contain the possibility of another beginning. The film examines the gap between political aspirations and historical reality.

 

Through its depiction of a factory occupation, class conflict, and the changing relationship between intellectuals and workers, Tout va bien explores the difficulties of representing politics on screen. Godard and Gorin do not present revolution as a simple narrative of victory or failure, but rather examine the tensions, contradictions, and uncertainties within political commitment itself.

Together, the film and Badiou’s text explore cinema as a form of political inquiry rather than a vehicle for delivering political messages. They ask how images can think through moments of historical transition, and whether cinema can still create new possibilities for thought when familiar forms of political action appear exhausted.