Kinonik

THE WITCH (1966)
(La strega in amore)
Directed by DAMIANO DAMIANI
WEDNESDAY May 27th 7PM
SATURDAY May 30th 2PM / 7PM

Damiani made one gothic horror, and made it at exactly the moment the form was exhausting itself. La strega in amore releases August 1966, between Bava's Sei donne per l'assassino (1964) and Argento's L'uccello dalle piume di cristallo (1970) — in the three-year gap when the Italian gothic cycle had run out of room and the giallo had not yet found its commercial shape. Barbara Steele's last major Italian gothic, Un angelo per Satana, comes out the same year and feels like a terminal object.

Damiani's film does something different. It keeps the gothic furniture — the witch-figure, the palazzo, the older woman as repository of dangerous knowledge — while evacuating the gothic apparatus almost entirely. The lighting is naturalistic (and gorgeous). The supernatural is ambiguous, possibly psychological. The moral economy is secular and bourgeois, closer to Polanski (Repulsion, Cul-de-Sac) than to Bava. What it points toward is the modern Italian interior as a site of psychosexual ruin — the giallo's actual native territory, four years before Argento codified its form.

Damiani changes Fuentes's translator (in Aura, 1962) into a historian, Sergio, brought to the palazzo to organize the papers of a dead general. The figure that emerges — the specialist whose cognitive equipment is exactly what makes him vulnerable, the cataloguer consumed by what he was meant to merely arrange — is the giallo protagonist before the giallo exists. The archive swallows the archivist. Damiani never returned to the gothic. The form he passed through this once was already dissolving as he touched it.

Join us tonight or Saturday!

The Witch Science meets seduction and the subversion of will in this dreamy gem of Italian supernatural horror. Call your dad, you're in a cult.

Join us tonight for a special presentation: WITH, HOLDING is a one night celebration of experimental and art Films selected by Jenelle Stafford and Hannah Bonner:

Richard Serra's Hand Catching Lead (3 min) (Kinonik)
Chuck Close's Slow Pan for Bob (10 min) (Kinonik)
Caroline Savage's Vo**ur (7 min)
Hollis Frampton's Nostalgia (38 min)
JJ Murphy's Sky Blue Water Light Sign (7.75 min)
Stephanie Barber’s 3 Peonies (3 min)

The screening begins at 7 PM!

WITH, HOLDING Experimental and Art Films selected by Jenelle Stafford and Hannah Bonner:Richard Serra's Hand Catching Lead (3 min) (Kinonik)Chuck Close's Slow Pan for Bob (10 min) (Kinonik)Caroline Savage's Vo**ur (7 min)Hollis Frampton's Nostalgia (38 min)JJ Murphy's Sky Blue Water Light Sign (7.75 min)Stephanie...

WITH, HOLDING
Thursday, May 14th at 7 PM
Tix: www.kinonik.org
Experimental and Art Films selected by Jenelle Stafford and Hannah Bonner:

Richard Serra's Hand Catching Lead (3 min) (Kinonik)
Chuck Close's Slow Pan for Bob (10 min) (Kinonik)
Caroline Savage's Vo**ur (7 min)
Hollis Frampton's Nostalgia (38 min)
JJ Murphy's Sky Blue Water Light Sign (7.75 min)
Stephanie Barber’s 3 Peonies (3 min)

The image wants to be obscured. With tenderness and humor, these selected shorts from Kinonik’s archive and Canyon Cinema interrogate the possibilities and mechanics of what the motion picture frame will and won’t reveal. Hands grasp, curtains close, soundscapes and figures onscreen evade reconciliation. As James Broughton says, “It is not we who play with cinema. The nature of cinema plays with us.”

The first in a series of programming that highlights regional artists working with 16mm film. Portland-based filmmaker Caroline Savage will be in attendance.

WITH, HOLDING Experimental and Art Films selected by Jenelle Stafford and Hannah Bonner:Richard Serra's Hand Catching Lead (3 min) (Kinonik)Chuck Close's Slow Pan for Bob (10 min) (Kinonik)Caroline Savage's Vo**ur (7 min)Hollis Frampton's Nostalgia (38 min)JJ Murphy's Sky Blue Water Light Sign (7.75 min)Stephanie...

Saturday Night & Sunday Morning
KAREL REISZ 1960 | May 13 at 2 PM and 16 at 2 & 7 PM
Tix: www.kinonik.org

"Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven."

Mistranslation, Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven (1971)

What is a lathe but opposing forces in revolution?

Untested as a leading man, Albert Finney plays Arthur outside the permissions of British cinema — a working-class protagonist who drinks through Saturday night, cuckolds in duplicate Sunday morn, and refuses each day to be improved. Arthur turns metal on a lathe, curls of swarf falling away, each spiral glint a reminder of matter shifted from its core.

Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson were already remaking the screens of the United Kingdom. Karel Reisz crystallized a foundational document of the British New Wave.

The Le Guin reader will recognize what Arthur is standing against. Devotees of Kinonik might remember Norma Rae. Arthur’s lathe is cosmology bolted to the floor of a postwar British factory and put on piecework — the geometry of protracted heaven, sold to private equity and rented back.

Our hero has no theory, would laugh at the suggestion, not tryna redesign the world. Arthur knows deep in his cups that one can be brought to the lathe without consenting to the cut. The week machines him; he machines the week-end.

The condition Le Guin diagnosed in 1971 has, in the fifty-five years since, become ambient and total. What we get from Reisz’s 1960 masterpiece is a precis; anger clarified like butter before browning.

Sometimes you bring the work to the tool. Sometimes you bring the tool to the work.

Saturday Night & Sunday Morning Albert Finney works the lathe all week and drinks the paycheck all weekend. He refuses every institution offered to him and has nothing to replace them with. Raw as a dropped egg.

MON ONCLE
dir. Jacques Tati, 1958
Showings at 7 PM Wednesday, 2 PM & 7 PM Saturday

Before Mr. Bean approached the world with his singular and nasty confidence, M. Hulot wandered as a freshly embodied mind dropped into human form: no manual, no training, no prior agreement with his environment about how things are supposed to work. In some ways, he’s an alien. But we know he’s not an alien because he has a sister — and she’s married into the wealthy Arpel family.

The Arpels want you to believe that they have solved living through plastics. Their house is designed for a universal user born pre-loaded with every YouTube tutorial in existence. It rejects tradition, common sense, and reality itself. They’ll have you know that it is very, very expensive. But nothing in it works, and the fountain only runs for guests they want to impress.

Hulot, however, can't be impressed. He approaches every object as if for the first time and the house breaks around him not because he's clumsy but because the system can't accommodate a consciousness that hasn't accepted the end-user license agreement. He's the one figure who can't be optimized, which means he's the one figure who can't be captured. His nephew is delighted by his failure.

Tati films all of this with the detachment of an entomologist. But there’s a warmth to his disinterest, a distinct bias toward the gentle decay of the old quarter, the dogs running their morning circuit, the boys punking on strangers. He shows us the gap between a world designed for a theoretical body and an actual body that arrived without instructions — and how much was on the side of the body, before we paved it over.

Without Mon Oncle we wouldn’t have Jackass. And that would suck.

Mon Oncle The Arpels have built the perfect modern home. Everything is automated and nothing works. Monsieur Hulot wanders through it like a man from another century. We feel you my dude.

There was a spat recently between Ray and Dave Davies and Moby about The Kinks' song Lola. Jacques Demy's Lola has nothing to do with the spat or song. Demy's debut is about love and waiting and has been called a "musical without music." Kinonik is showing Lola tonight, 5/2, in Portland, Maine. You should see it.

Lola Everyone in Nantes is in love with the wrong person. Anouk Aimee waits for a man who left while another waits for her. Demy's debut drips with profound love for his home.

A FOREIGN AFFAIR directed by Billy Wilder
Wednesday 4.15 Saturday 4.18
Tickets: www.kinonik.org

In a basement nightclub called the Lorelei, Marlene Dietrich purrs about the black market. The man at the keyboard is Frederick Hollaender, who wrote her songs in Berlin before the war, and who is now back at a different piano in a different Berlin, playing new songs about the ruins. The club is full of American officers trading ci******es for champagne and German women performing availability in exchange for them. Upstairs, the city is rubble. The war has been over for two years.

Into this room stumbles an Iowa congresswoman on a fact-finding mission. She has come to assess the moral condition of the occupation… which she has prejudged as lacking and aims to reform. By the end of the picture she will be drunk in this basement, singing about corn.

Wilder shot the exteriors in late 1947, weeks before the Berlin Blockade and airlift. The U.S. military government banned the film in occupied Germany — the same office that, two years earlier, had commissioned his denazification documentary, Death Mills. The problem, apparently, was tone. Considered by some as his most cynical film, it lampooned the imperial gestures of post-war America at the same time it skewered our prudishness.
Wilder had worked smoky rooms like this as a young man in Berlin, before he was Billy Wilder. He knew what a piano in a basement was for, and here he put it to use.

A Foreign Affair Marlene Dietrich is the most dangerous thing left standing amidst the ruins of Berlin. A congressional delegation arrives to restore order. They don't stand a chance.

Some folks have had questions about where you are allowed to park, this map should help clarify.

Join us for this week's screenings of Ingmar Bergman's "The Virgin Spring", in which a brutal murder inspires a grieving father to build a church. Bergman's medieval parable asks whether faith is a response to horror or a mode of avoidance. Tickets are available for all three shows! See you at the movies!

The Virgin Spring A brutal murder inspires a grieving father to build a church. Bergman's medieval parable asks whether faith is a response to horror or a mode of avoidance.

Join us as we kick off our new schedule with Pabst's towering achievement! Mountain pun!

THE WHITE HELL OF PITZ PALU (1929) directed by G.W. Pabst
Wednesday April 1 7pm
Saturday April 4 2pm / 7pm
Tickets: www.kinonik.org

Young Leni Riefenstahl climbs a 12,000-foot peak in the Bernina Alps wearing a short-sleeved shirt and knee-length skirt, ice forming on her face in sub-zero winds. She developed severe frostbite during the five-month shoot; a bladder infection would plague her for the rest of her life. This is where she learned to make films. Six years later she directed Triumph of the Will.
The Bergfilm — the German mountain film genre — taught her everything: how to frame pure bodies against sublime landscape, how to choreograph masses of moving figures (watch the torchlit rescue sequence), how to make physical struggle look like spiritual transcendence. Arnold Fanck pioneered the genre; G.W. Pabst co-directed to keep the melodrama grounded. What they built together was a Völkisch framework for understanding nature: German vitality confronting elemental forces, the body as raw material for ideological transformation.

This is the origin point. Before wellness influencers told you to optimize your mitochondria, before raw milk evangelists promised purity through unprocessed living, before anyone talked about returning to ancestral health, there was the Bergfilm. Mountains as proving grounds. The body meeting nature as a test of worthiness. Physical purity standing in for spiritual and racial purity. The genre flowered in Weimar Germany alongside the rise of Na**sm, then died when the Reich no longer needed mountain metaphors. But the logic survived: nature as purifier, the city as contamination, authentic living as bodily discipline, human vitality as something to be managed and optimized and kept pure.

The White Hell of Pitz Palu Young Leni Riefenstahl in the Bergfilm that taught her everything. The body meets the sublime and ideology follows. A Vőlkisch framework for our relationship to nature.

Tonight's screening of John Huston's "Beat the Devil" is sold out online, but we'll have a few tickets at the door, first come, first serve. Learn all about the hectic production that has made this film so celebrated amongst film fans from the link below and join us this week for a screening!

Beat the Devil: 'It was a hell of a lark doing it' Truman Capote wrote it on the hoof, Humphrey Bogart lost his teeth in a car crash during production, and director John Huston fell off a cliff … the chaos and carousing on set made 1953’s Beat the Devil a delirious cult classic, writes Thirza Wakefield