The Writer That Kills Bad People, an interview with Erika Balsom

Erika Balsom grew up in small town Canada, graduated from Brown University in Providence and works as a professor at King's College London. In 2018, she was the recipient of a Philip Leverhulme Prize and the Kovacs Essay Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. That same year she published An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea as part of a residency and exhibition she curated at Govett-Brewster Art Gallery / Len Lye Centre in New Zealand. This "little book", which anticipated her current publishing project, was translated into Korean and republished in 2024.

Balsom's impact on contemporary moving image art is formidable. She is influential as an academic, closely-watched (and read) as a writer and adventurous as a curator. Her most tenured engagement – besides her professorship – is as a member of the film club and curatorial collective The Machine That Kills Bad People, which organizes bi-monthly screenings at Institute of Contemporary Arts London since 2018. Her cultural breakthrough came in 2022 when she co-curated the ambitious group show No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image with Hila Peleg at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. The screen program for that exhibition is still traveling the world in various iterations, to be presented next at Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo in 2026.

Balsom will also continue this exhibition in the form of a research project on an Italian women's film collective that was active in the 1970s and 1980s. We spoke to her about the lasting impact of No Master Territories, about Cutaways, the new pocket book series she is co-editing, and about her thoughts on writing and editing in general.

For a very long time your IG grid was totally empty. A few months ago it roared to life with three whole posts – two of them about the new book series you are co-editing. Tell us about Cutaways, your inspiration for this new project, and your plans for the series.

Yes, I was an Instagram lurker for a long time, but I recently decided – finally, ambivalently – to take the plunge. We’ll see how it goes. 

Cutaways is a series of pocket-sized books that I am co-editing with Genevieve Yue for Fordham University Press. Each book traces a motif or device across a wide range of films in prose that aims to be lively and engaging. In 2018, I published a little book called An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea, which came out of a curatorial residency I did at the Govett Brewster Art Gallery / Len Lye Centre in New Zealand. The French-language series Motifs, published by Yellow Now, inspired me to look transversally at how the motif of the ocean had appeared across the history of cinema. Genevieve reviewed the book for the Times Literary Supplement, after which we began to talk about what appealed to us in this kind of format. It was cinephilic and creative; it involved substantial research but wasn’t exactly scholarly. We’re both academics who also write film criticism, and we were excited about the idea of encouraging this kind of crossover. I think the idea to actually begin a series was hers. 

We’ve just published our first two books: The Prop by Elena Gorfinkel and John David Rhodes, and Hotels by Jules O’Dwyer. The plan is to publish two or three per year; the next will be a translation of Martine Beugnet’s Blur, which originally appeared in the Yellow Now series.

Cutaways is the first book series you are editing, but you have a few significant edited volumes to your credit. As a writer what do you always hope for from the editors you work with, and as an editor what do you look for from the writers you work with?

In academia, line editing generally doesn’t happen, and there isn’t always very close attention to the craft of writing. It wasn’t until 2013, when I started writing for Artforum and began to be edited by Don McMahon, that I came to understand what a privilege it is to work with an excellent editor – one who will pay attention to how the big ideas are being articulated, but who will also check the placement of every comma. I learned so much about writing from the kinds of suggestions he would make on my texts. 

I think it’s important for editors to have a decent knowledge of the topics their writers are covering, and for them to help the writer become the sharpest and most exciting version of themselves that they can be. That might sound simple and obvious, but it isn’t always what happens! As an editor, I appreciate writers whose work is informed by a certain expertise and who can communicate with great lucidity, but who also have a distinctive voice and personal passions. An old professor of mine once said that people overwrite when they aren’t sure what they really want to say; this is something I am always looking out for as an editor. I like things to be chiselled and to feel alive. I have a low tolerance for the kind of airy, empty rhetoric that is so often found in contemporary art discourse, but also for the formulaic flatness of some academic prose. All the collections I have had a hand in editing play with format and voice in some way, combining different kinds of writing and different kinds of writers, bringing the protocols of scholarship into dialogue with other ways of approaching a subject.

You are primarily known as a scholar and a writer, but you have been curating for the better part of a decade now. Your longest-running project is The Machine That Kills Bad People, which is a bi-monthly film club organized at Institute of Contemporary Arts London that you co-curate. Tell us the mission of this screen series and how you approach the selection with your colleagues.

The Machine that Kills Bad People is: Beatrice Gibson, Maria Palacios Cruz, Ben Rivers, and myself. We took the name from Roberto Rossellini’s La Macchina Ammazzacattivi (1952). We describe the project like this: 

“The Machine that Kills Bad People is the cinema – a medium that is so often and so visibly in service of a crushing status quo but which, in the right hands, is a fatal instrument of beauty, contestation, wonder, politics, poetry, new visions, testimonies, histories, dreams. It is also a film club devoted to showing work – ‘mainstream’ and experimental, known and unknown, historical and contemporary – that takes up this task.” 

We programme a double bill every two months and commission an essay to accompany the screening. Sometimes the films we choose have very clear connections, as in our next screening, which puts Narimane Mari’s Bloody Beans (2013) alongside Alanis Obomsawin’s Christmas at Moose Factory (1971). Both films feature children and take up questions of colonial violence and anticolonial resistance. Other pairings are less obvious, more mood-based. 

We generally choose the films in quite an informal way, over dinner or drinks. This is really a project driven by friendship and enthusiasm. We do have one secret rule that governs our programming but which we do not announce to the public. I think it is easy enough to guess what it is if you take a look at everything we have shown since our first screening in 2018, which featured Barbara Loden and Laida Lertxundi. That said, it has been amusing to us to realize that many regular attendees of the series have missed it! We’re planning to publish a book bringing together all the commissioned essays, so maybe that will be the moment for the big reveal…

Your largest exhibition to date, and maybe your most impactful, was No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image, co-curated with Hila Peleg at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin in 2022. Looking back on this major undertaking, what does it mean to you in the context of your career?

No Master Territories was a personally transformative project for me. I had a long sabbatical from my university that began in mid-2019, which meant that it ended up coinciding with the Covid-19 pandemic. I spent the lockdowns immersed in research for the exhibition, which opened in summer 2022. At a time when it felt the world was fading away, diving into the expansive histories of feminist filmmaking, theorizing and organizing was a lifeline. The material felt so inspiring and relevant to me. The wide scope of the research made it very different from a typical academic project, as did the fact that it was intensely collaborative. It was a challenge of the best kind.

In some ways, No Master Territories feels like the culmination of the scholarly work I had done leading up to it, in terms of considering the different ways of exhibiting moving images and in thinking through the intersecting histories of documentary and experimental film. It also marked a return to an area that had been of central interest to me during my undergraduate years –  feminist avant-garde filmmaking – and provided the foundation for the work I’m continuing to do now. 

In that sense, it doesn’t feel over quite yet. It will travel to Kunstnernes Hus (Oslo) next year in a new iteration, and it was through research for the exhibition that I developed my current project, which looks at the films made collectively by Maria Grazia Belmonti, Anna Carini, Rony Daopoulo, Paola De Martiis, Annabella Miscuglio and Loredana Rotondo in Italy in the late 1970s and early 1980s. We showed their film Un processo per stupro (A Trial for Rape, 1979) in the Berlin iteration of the show and I became determined to do further research on them. That’s happening now. I would love to do another big exhibition project in the future, but I’m not sure exactly how it would come about. In the meantime, I’m enjoying focusing on writing.

Tell us your thoughts about the current state of arts writing in general. What are you seeing/reading that encourages you, and what discourages you? What are your hopes for this field in the near future?

It is hard to feel optimistic about the current state of film and art criticism. I no longer write for the two publications that really made me a critic. Cinema Scope folded last year, and I was one of many writers to sever ties with Artforum after its corporate owners fired editor David Velasco for expressing solidarity with Palestine. Our withdrawal was based on the conviction that the magazine no longer had editorial independence or integrity. 

At this point, I don’t feel like there are many places where it is possible to write about the kinds of things I am interested in, in the way that I would want to, with the kind of editorial support I value. I miss having a regular “home” at a publication. I see all too clearly how unsustainable it is for most people to keep writing – the pay is abysmal (much worse than writing about visual art) and the possibility of burnout is real. I can only do it because I have an academic job. In general, I’m writing fewer short-form pieces these days.

It is easy to complain like this, but at the same time there is a reason Mattias Frey titled his book The Permanent Crisis of Film Criticism – it always seems bad, and yet it always keeps going one way or another. What I would consider my best work has been done for Fireflies Press, who bring an immense level of knowledge, taste and care to everything they do. I love reading what they put out. For more punctual criticism, I always read the writers Melissa Anderson publishes at 4Columns. There are new initiatives popping up that give some hope: just recently, I discovered a great site called Intervals, with London listings and essays. 

As for the state of film production and exhibition, I’m not pessimistic at all. I see lots of great films every year, they just aren’t typically getting as wide a distribution as they deserve. I think we are in a new golden age of repertory programming. Perhaps the decline of the industry – which feels well underway at this point – will be a boon for those of us who have a different idea of cinema, one in which art, politics and collective gathering are central.

Complete this sentence, please. “To be a writer means…”

To be a writer means to be a masochist.