The Nickel | Independent Cinema in Clerkenwell, London

A once-famous fashion model living in isolation recounts the rise and collapse of her career to a former lover and interviewer, reflecting on the emotional instability, exploitation, and fractured relationships that shaped her life. As memories surface in fragmented flashes, the line between recollection and psychological breakdown becomes increasingly uncertain.

Schatzberg draws heavily from the world of fashion photography, constructing the film through drifting memories, dislocated time, and emotional impression rather than straightforward narrative. Its fractured structure and intimate focus on self-destruction create a melancholy portrait of celebrity, beauty, and mental collapse.

Introduced and programmed by Agne Qami

Runtime: 105 mins

Certificate: 18

Wednesday 8/7

Bar 5:45pm

Film 6:15pm

Digital

Book here

WHO WANTS TO KILL JESSIE?

(1966, Czechoslovakia, Václav Vorlíček)

When scientist Růženka Beránková develops a machine capable of manipulating dreams, an experiment on her husband produces an unexpected consequence: characters from his favourite comic strip begin to materialise in the real world. Chief among them is Jessie, a glamorous heroine pursued by a superhuman strongman and a gun-toting cowboy. As the dream figures wander through Prague, leaving chaos in their wake, the boundaries between everyday reality and comic-book logic steadily collapse.

One of the great achievements of Czechoslovak popular cinema of the 1960s, Who Wants to Kill Jessie? combines science fiction, slapstick comedy, and comic-strip aesthetics into a playful satire of bureaucracy, technology, and mass media. Co-written by Miloš Macourek and featuring visual contributions from legendary comics artist Kája Saudek, the film brings speech balloons, sound effects, and graphic imagery directly into live-action space decades before such techniques became commonplace. Produced during the fertile period that also generated the Czech New Wave, it occupies a unique position between state-studio filmmaking, pop art experimentation, and fantastical genre cinema.

THE TELEPHONE BOOK + INTRO

(1971, USA, Nelson Lyon)

Alice, a lonely young woman living in New York City, becomes obsessed after receiving what she considers the perfect obscene phone call. Determined to find the anonymous caller responsible, she embarks on a picaresque journey through a city populated by voyeurs, fetishists, self-help gurus, artists, and assorted sexual eccentrics. As her search grows increasingly absurd, the distinction between romantic pursuit, sexual fantasy, and social satire begins to collapse.

Written and directed by advertising copywriter and countercultural figure Nelson Lyon, The Telephone Book emerged during a brief period when underground filmmaking, sexploitation cinema, and New Hollywood experimentation overlapped. Shot largely in stark black-and-white and featuring appearances from figures associated with Andy Warhol's Factory, the film combines explicit sexual humour with a broader satire of media culture, urban alienation, and the commodification of desire. Initially dismissed as a novelty sex comedy, it has since been reclaimed as a distinctive artefact of early-1970s American independent cinema and a singular example of post-sexual-revolution absurdism.

Introduced by Dominic Hicks

GIRL INTERNET SHOW

(2022, USA, Kati Kelli)

Meet Kati Kelli, the late outsider video artist whose subversive online uploads pushed the boundaries of the digital form. GIRL INTERNET SHOW: A KATI KELLI MIXTAPE unearths and reintroduces a surreal, singular body of work by the enigmatic artist. For nearly a decade before her passing in 2019, Kelli ran “Girl Internet Show,” a YouTube channel, parasocial experiment, and epically deranged one-woman universe built from scratch in her bedroom.

This hand-made mixtape from Jane Schoenbrun (I SAW THE TV GLOW) and Jordan Wippell features a lovingly curated selection of Kelli’s online work, unreleased videos, and TOTAL BODY REMOVAL SURGERY—her first (and final) short film opus.

WWW.RACHELORMONT.COM

(2024, USA, Peter Vack)

THEATRE OF HORRORS: THE SORDID STORY OF PARIS’ GRAND GUIGNOL

(2025, France, USA, David Gregory)

THE MARGIN (LA MARGE)

(1976, France, Walerian Borowczyk)

While travelling to Paris on business, Sigismond, a happily married provincial wine merchant, becomes obsessed with Diana, a sex worker he encounters in the city's red-light district. As their relationship develops through a series of nocturnal meetings, Sigismond withdraws further from the life he has left behind. When devastating news arrives from home, his grief, desire, and sense of dislocation become inseparable, drawing him deeper into a world of fantasy, obsession, and self-destruction.

Adapted from André Pieyre de Mandiargues' Prix Goncourt-winning 1967 novel, The Margin occupies a distinctive place within Walerian Borowczyk's career. Although often grouped with the director's erotic works, the film is less concerned with provocation than with melancholy, loss, and emotional fixation. Starring Sylvia Kristel, fresh from the international success of Emmanuelle, alongside Warhol regular Joe Dallesandro, it combines art-house modernism with the visual language of 1970s European erotic cinema. Set against the streets and hotels of Paris, the film transforms the city's red-light district into a dreamlike landscape where grief and desire become impossible to separate.

MYSTERY MOVIE

THE VANISHING (SPOORLOOS)

(1988, Netherlands/France, George Sluizer)

While stopping at a motorway service station during a cycling holiday in France, Saskia disappears without a trace. Years later, her partner Rex remains consumed by the mystery, unable to accept the absence of an explanation. As his obsession deepens, he begins receiving messages from a seemingly ordinary man who claims to know exactly what happened. What follows is not a conventional investigation but a chilling confrontation with the nature of curiosity, certainty, and the human need for closure.

Adapted by Tim Krabbé from his novella The Golden Egg, The Vanishing is one of the defining European thrillers of the late twentieth century. George Sluizer's film rejects the mechanics of the conventional murder mystery in favour of a rigorously controlled study of obsession and psychological terror. Drawing much of its power from its matter-of-fact presentation of extraordinary events, the film transforms everyday spaces—petrol stations, campsites, suburban homes—into sites of profound unease. Its influence can be traced through decades of psychological thrillers, while its famously devastating conclusion remains among the most unsettling in modern cinema.

THEY LIVE

(1988, USA, John Carpenter)

Arriving in Los Angeles in search of work, drifter John Nada stumbles upon a pair of sunglasses that reveal a hidden reality. Through their lenses, advertising slogans become commands, money displays subliminal messages, and a significant portion of the population is exposed as alien beings disguised as ordinary humans. As Nada attempts to understand the scale of the deception, he becomes involved with an underground resistance movement determined to expose the forces manipulating society from behind the scenes.

Released at the height of the Reagan era, They Live combines science fiction, action cinema, and political satire to critique consumer culture, economic inequality, and the influence of mass media. Adapted loosely from Ray Nelson's short story Eight O'Clock in the Morning, the film translates Carpenter's recurring interest in outsiders and hidden power structures into one of his most overtly political works. Although initially received as a genre curiosity, it has since become a widely discussed text of late twentieth-century American culture, with its imagery and slogans continuing to resonate far beyond their original context.

LIGHT SLEEPER

(1992, USA, Paul Schrader)

John LeTour works as a drug courier serving a wealthy Manhattan clientele, spending his nights moving between apartments, hotels, restaurants, and clubs while reflecting on a life that seems to have reached an impasse. Sober for several years but increasingly uncertain about his future, he finds himself preoccupied by the return of a former lover just as changes within the city's drug economy threaten the fragile routines that structure his existence. As professional and personal crises begin to converge, his search for meaning takes on an increasingly desperate character.

The final entry in Paul Schrader's informal trilogy of solitary male protagonists that includes Taxi Driver and American Gigolo, Light Sleeper uses the framework of a crime drama to explore questions of guilt, redemption, and spiritual longing. Set in a rapidly changing New York at the end of the 1980s, the film captures a city caught between eras, where old economies and social worlds are disappearing. Anchored by one of Willem Dafoe's finest performances, it stands as a key work in Schrader's career, combining noir traditions with the writer-director's enduring interest in isolation, self-examination, and the possibility of transcendence.

CHINESE ROULETTE

(1976, West Germany, Rainer Werner Fassbinder)

A wealthy German couple invites guests to their country estate for a weekend gathering, but the atmosphere quickly turns hostile as hidden resentments, lies, and psychological games surface. The arrival of a disabled young girl and her mute companion intensifies the tension, pushing the group into a destructive game of accusation and emotional manipulation.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder structures the film as a chamber-piece of escalating cruelty, where dialogue and gaze become weapons in a controlled social experiment. Its confined setting and shifting alliances create a pressure-cooker environment in which bourgeois civility steadily collapses into open hostility.

THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN

(1979, West Germany, Rainer Werner Fassbinder)

A German woman marries a soldier during the final days of World War II, only to have their wedding interrupted by his deployment and the collapse of Nazi Germany. Believing him to be dead, she rebuilds her life in postwar West Germany, using ambition and pragmatism to climb socially and economically while maintaining emotional distance from those around her.

Set during the “Wirtschaftswunder” (economic miracle), Fassbinder follows Maria’s rise through a rapidly changing society, where personal relationships are increasingly shaped by survival and opportunism. The film links private ambition with national reconstruction, tracing how love, power, and history become entangled in postwar identity.

WHO KILLED CAPTAIN ALEX?

(2010, Uganda, Nabwana Isaac Godfrey Geoffrey)

A mafia leader's brother is captured in a shootout, prompting a revenge attack on the army camp. But when troop leader Captain Alex is killed during a raid, a violent war escalates between the two sides. The captain's brother takes matters into his own hands, while mafia henchmen take to the skies to bomb Kampala.

Narrated with energy and wit by 'Video Joker' Emmie, ultra-low budget thriller Who Killed Captain Alex became an international viral sensation when its trailer first hit YouTube. Self-taught film-maker Nabwana Isaac Godfrey Geoffrey produced, directed, shot, wrote and edited the film from his home in the slums of Uganda (a.k.a 'Wakaliwood') for under $200.

THE NINTH CONFIGURATION

(1980, USA, William Peter Blatty)

In a secluded military psychiatric hospital, soldiers tormented by wartime trauma are evaluated under the care of a maverick psychiatrist whose methods challenge both protocol and belief. When a cynical New York surgeon is drafted in to assess a delusional patient claiming that alien forces influence government policy, professional skepticism collides with existential inquiry. As the institution’s internal logic spirals between rapture and disorder, questions of faith, madness, and redemption loom large.

Adapted from Blatty’s own novel, The Ninth Configuration defies easy categorisation — part psychological drama, part dark comedy, and part metaphysical fable. The film uses its isolated enclave as a crucible for probing the limits of belief and the human response to uncertainty, crafting a narrative that is as much about the search for meaning as it is about the fractures of the psyche.

THE SWIMMER

(1968, USA, Frank Perry & Sydney Pollack)

On a summer afternoon in suburban Connecticut, Ned Merrill unexpectedly appears at the home of friends and decides to return to his own house by swimming across every pool in the neighbourhood. What begins as a whimsical challenge gradually becomes an odyssey through a landscape of garden parties, tennis courts, and affluent back gardens. As Ned moves from one property to the next, encounters with friends, former lovers, and acquaintances begin to reveal unsettling gaps between his self-image and the reality of his circumstances.

Adapted from John Cheever's celebrated short story, The Swimmer transforms the post-war American suburb into a dreamlike psychological landscape. Released at the end of the 1960s, the film uses the apparent prosperity of upper-middle-class America as the backdrop for a meditation on memory, denial, ageing, and personal collapse. Burt Lancaster's performance anchors a work that shifts almost imperceptibly from social satire to existential tragedy, creating one of the most distinctive and enigmatic films of its era. Through its fragmented journey across a seemingly ordinary suburban environment, The Swimmer exposes the anxieties and disillusionments concealed beneath the mythology of American success.

THE BLACK MARBLE

(1980, USA, Harold Becker)

A show dog trainer in desperate need of money kidnaps a prized show dog and demands a ransom. The case falls into the hands of a melancholic detective and his new female partner, whose personal relationship develops throughout the case.

The Black Marble stands apart from the harder-edged police thrillers that dominated American cinema in the 1970s and early 1980s. Directed by Harold Becker, the film combines procedural detail with deadpan comedy, romance, and a keen interest in the emotional realities of police work. Rather than focusing on spectacular violence or institutional corruption, it examines the eccentric personalities, private vulnerabilities, and fragile relationships that exist behind the badge, resulting in one of the most humane and understated entries in Wambaugh's body of work.

SHRIME TIME: A NIGHT OF BIZARRO UNDERSEEN ANIME

From radical student animation collectives to sun-bleached techno-dystopias and gore-drenched horror, Shrime Time shines where the sun daren’t: revealing the backside of seldom-seen Japanese visual culture. Expect screenings from the 1960s to the present day, paired with special guests: musicians, artists, researchers and those obsessed with the outermost edges of Japan’s visual imagination.

The Shirime a yokai (Japanese folkloric spirit and the evenings conveniently misspelled namesake) whose sole purpose is to startle unsuspecting samurai by revealing an eyeball in place of an arsehole. In his sick, twisted way, Shirime embodies the very spirit of B-cinema - a flash of grotesque brilliance, whose origin and intent remain a mystery, leaving the path forever altered.

So come. Sit still in the dark. Let the rectacular eye stare deep into your curious soul.

The Shirime is watching.

Certificate: 18

Thursday 16/7

Bar 6:00pm

Film 6:30pm

Digital

Book here