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...

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.