Kinonik

Tonight's showing of "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" is sold out online, but a little monkey tells us that there will be a few tickets at the door. These are strictly first come first serve, so if you missed out on grabbing a ticket online, our doors open at 6:30!

WR: MYSTERIES OF THE ORGANISM (1971)
Directed by Dusan Makavejev
WEDNESDAY June 10th 7PM
SATURDAY June 13th 2PM / 7PM

From his laboratory in Rangeley Wilhelm Reich pointed sheet-metal tubes at the sky and claimed he could draw the sexual energy of the universe out of the atmosphere. He lined wooden boxes with steel wool and sat patients inside them to absorb it. In 1956, the FDA burned six tons of his publications in a New York incinerator; the following year he died in federal prison, charged with contempt of court for refusing to stop building the boxes. Out of this and other material Dušan Makavejev collaged a comedic delirium that skewered psychiatry and soviet Marxism at the same time. It’s either a work of heresy or genius depending on who you ask.

Makavejev belonged to the Black Wave — the Yugoslav filmmakers of the 1960s and early '70s who registered fractures in Tito's federal project that the political class could not yet afford to name. Brotherhood and Unity was still the official language, and the Non-Aligned Movement was a going concern. The films weren't predicting the dissolution so much as they were symptomatic of it.

Makavejev built his narrative and argument through intercutting juxtapositions. Stalin's state funeral is spliced against an er****on; Reich's cloudbusters scan the Maine sky with the earnestness of a man who believes the cosmos owes him an answer; in Belgrade, a young communist named Milena stands on her balcony delivering speeches about revolutionary or**sm to her neighbors. Nothing here is sorted into a hierarchy of seriousness because Makavejev's whole point (maybe) is that the sorting is the pathology: each system which promises liberation begins by telling you which desires are permitted and which ones aren't. Naturally, the systems unsettled by the film promptly banned it. Those willing to look directly in the mirror and laugh will recognize this a artist at the peak of his talent.

WR: Mysteries of the Organism In this unclassifiable and "insanely brilliant comedy ... [Makavejev] has outdone himself, taking on the State Religions of two superpowers: Marxism (Russia) and psychiatry (America)." - Roger Ebert

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...