Cinema / Film

The Edges of Cinema: Book Launch + Little Boy

The Mall, London

Fri 30 Oct · 18:30

73m · Film

About this event

Join us to celebrate the publication of Erika Balsom's The Edges of Cinema: Essays on Twenty-First Century Film Culture with the London premiere of James Benning's little boy (2025). Recent years have seen a panic over the future of mainstream film. Yet in her new collection The Edges of Cinema , Balsom argues that film culture is at its most vital on the margins, where the moving image meets visual art, documentary brushes up against experimentalism, and curators are reshaping established histories. Bringing together a decade of selected essays and reviews, the book explores subjects ranging from computer-generated animation to the effects of digitisation, and from the status of observational cinema to a new golden age of repertory cinema, in order to make a case for the politics, provocations, and pleasures of a less ordinary cinema. To celebrate this publication, join us for the first London screening of little boy by James Benning, an artist and filmmaker central to the book. For some fifty years, Benning has chronicled American hegemony and counterhegemony through an expert manipulation of light and time, giving unconventional shape to histories of settlement, racial violence, land use, and unbelonging. In little boy – winner of the grand prize at Paris's Cinéma du Réel festival – he continues this investigation, using popular songs, political speeches, and architectural models to traverse decades of U.S. history. What are the rules governing the organisation of all these component parts? That is left for the viewer to discern. In Benning's words, little boy is "a film looking at the past to warn about the future, from a little boy’s point of view. A companion to American Dreams (lost and found) (1984).”