Barbican Cinema Announces Two Major 2019 Seasons as Part of Life Rewired

Barbican Cinema announces two major 2019 seasons as part of Life Rewired: Stanislaw Lem on Film and Anime's Human Machines.

The Barbican today launches Life Rewired, an arts and learning season running throughout 2019 exploring what it means to be human in the face of technological and scientific forces that are dizzying in their speed, scale and complexity.

The year-long season investigates the impact of the pace and extent of technological change on our culture and society, looking at how we can grasp and respond to the seismic shifts these advances will bring about.

Barbican Cinema is delighted to present Smart Robots, Mortal Engines: Stanislaw Lem on Film andAnime's Human Machines as main seasons in Life Rewired.

Taking place throughout April 2019, Smart Robots, Mortal Engines: Stanislaw Lem on Film is a season of lesser-known adaptations of the work of Polish author Stanislaw Lem - a world inhabited by robots, cyborgs and intelligent machines of all varieties.

Lem's allegorical and comedic texts are often concerned with the encounter of human and artificial intelligence, by extension with what it means to be conscious, and what it means to be human. His works were read all over the world.

Cinematic highlights include The Interrogation of Pilot Pirx, in which the commander of a flight to Saturn must decipher which of his crew are androids and which are human; similar dilemmas arise in Maskawhere a killer robot, in the form of a beautiful woman, tries to subvert her pre-programming to not kill the man she was made to destroy. In Solyaris - screening here in the rare Russian TV version from 1968 - an astronaut is confronted with a replica of his dead wife, an emanation of the planet he is orbiting.

A trained physician who survived the Holocaust, Lem retired from sci-fi writing in 1989, feeling that many of his brutal visions for the future had already become reality. Today, his examination of our relationship with technology feels more pertinent than ever.

Barbican Cinema also presents Anime's Human Machines throughout September 2019 as part of Life Rewired. Curated by anime expert Helen McCarthy, this season features landmark films that expanded the scope of anime that could be made, including Akira (Katsuhiro Ôtomo) and Ghost in the Shell(Mamoru Oshii), as well as rarer titles.

Japanese animation has questioned our relationship to technology for decades, creating some of the most compelling human-robots and robot-humans in all cinema. These films confront the onslaught of technology, and question what shifts may be required in our perception of what it means to be human.

Also included, in tribute to its status as a key work of Japanese cyberpunk and important influence on anime's post-human imaginings, is the live action Tetsuo, the Iron Man (Shinya Tsukamoto).

Sir Nicholas Kenyon, Managing Director, Barbican, said:
"Life Rewired in 2019 will be a thought-provoking mix of new ideas from the worlds of the arts, technology, science, culture, economics, philosophy and politics, which aims to help us understand the big questions facing our society. The Barbican's commitment to exploring arts without boundaries see us embark on a year-long season which asks how the arts can help us understand and shape our future, at a time of unprecedented volatility and uncertainty."

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