A Clockwork Orange + extended intro

We are delighted to be joined by film critic Arjun Sajip for an extended intro before the screening. 

Alex (Malcolm McDowell) is a youth in future London, spending his days stealing, enjoying classical music and committing ‘ultraviolence’ with his droogs. When he’s arrested, he is offered the chance to reform by way of the experimental Ludovico Technique, a brainwashing to put him back into society’s fold.

Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s classic dystopian novel was a major source of anxiety about the perversion of youth on its release in 1971. Monstrously, mindlessly violent or a savage satire on the older generation’s declinist view of youth culture? Although never banned in the UK, Kubrick himself withdrew the film from circulation in fear of copycat violence. Viewed with fifty years’ distance, its power to shock remains, but its lessons also feel all the more prescient.