Kinonik

Kinonik Kinonik is a nonprofit microcinema dedicated to the communal experience of watching film in analog formats.

We preserve and present film as a living medium with the aim of fostering dialogue, education and resistance against cultural homogenization. Kinonik maintains an archive of nearly 1,000 16mm films and screens films in Portland, Maine at SPACE, Congress Square Park and (weekly!) at our 121 Cassidy Point Dr. studio. Join our mailing list for email about our film screenings: https://mailchi.mp/kinonik/kinonik

THE COMFORT OF STRANGERS (1981)Directed by PAUL SCHRADERWEDNESDAY June 17th 7PMSATURDAY June 20th 2PM / 7PMAmong my favo...
06/17/2026

THE COMFORT OF STRANGERS (1981)
Directed by PAUL SCHRADER
WEDNESDAY June 17th 7PM
SATURDAY June 20th 2PM / 7PM

Among my favorite English words insinuation ranks as an all-timer.

Merging with traffic. Flowing on foot into a crowd of pedestrians. The opening gambit of an eavesdropper. A sideways accusation or a needle breaking the skin. Harold Pinter writing four characters talking around a thing. Christopher Walken squirming his way into your pants.

Each calculated dissonance in Badalamenti’s waltzing dirge of a score; Spinotti’s disembodied post-giallo SteadiCam; Everett, Richardson, Mirren and Walken performing with a degree of seriousness and discipline beyond the expectations of a thriller… all unified by Schrader’s weird sleights of hand that prevent this film from being one.

A genre tease was always a risky move, so let me be blunt: this is not a thriller. The print we present this week will hopefully heighten what Schrader’s earlier audiences weren’t primed to see: “Just like language can have a surface of politeness, I tried to create a beautiful surface, an apple that is so shiny and so delicious that you can’t help but bite into it.”

Maybe it’s just me, but a chomp is not the right way to eat an apple. It always scrapes your gums. The introduction of a sharp knife is the best way, really, to open one up.

Come, bask in the light of these summer shadows.

Death drifts through Venice like a string between two tin cans. Pre-Continental Christopher Walken plays the ghost of Thomas Mann guiding couples therapy.

WR: MYSTERIES OF THE ORGANISM (1971)Directed by Dusan MakavejevWEDNESDAY June 10th 7PMSATURDAY June 13th 2PM / 7PMFrom h...
06/09/2026

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.

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

Woman in the DunesDirected by Hiroshi Teshigahara 1964 | June 3 and 6An entomologist visits a coastal village to collect...
06/02/2026

Woman in the Dunes
Directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara 1964 | June 3 and 6

An entomologist visits a coastal village to collect tiger beetles in the sand dunes. He misses the last bus. The villagers offer him a place to sleep: a shack at the bottom of a sand pit, reached by rope ladder, shared with a young widow. In the morning the ladder is gone. The woman explains: every night they must shovel sand into buckets that the villagers haul to the surface, or the dunes will bury the house, then the next house, then the village. The sand never stops. He came to collect insects; he's been collected. An ant lion digs a conical pit in loose sand and waits at the bottom for prey to slide in. The steeper the walls, the more impossible the climb.

Kōbō Abe wrote the novel in 1962; Teshigahara filmed it with Tōru Takemitsu's score scraping and buzzing like an insect caught in glass. The cinematography turns sand into skin and skin into sand—close-ups of grains sliding across a woman's shoulder, sweat pooling in the hollow of a collarbone, the texture of labor and desire becoming indistinguishable. He tries to escape. He fails. He tries again. He stops trying. He and the woman develop something that might be tenderness, or might just be what happens when two bodies are pressed together by circumstance and gravity. He discovers a method for collecting water through capillary action in the sand and becomes absorbed in the project. By the end, he has a chance to leave. He doesn't take it.

This is what the return to nature actually looks like. Not transcendence on a mountaintop, not Riefenstahl in a short-sleeved shirt conquering a peak; just sand, labor, the body reduced to what it can do, and the disturbing discovery that you might prefer it to the life you left behind.

Join us Wednesday or Saturday for this captivating film.

An entomologist skids into an ant lion. He tries to escape. He stops trying. One of the most unsettling and erotic films ever made.

THE WITCH (1966)(La strega in amore)Directed by DAMIANO DAMIANIWEDNESDAY May 27th 7PMSATURDAY May 30th 2PM / 7PMDamiani ...
05/27/2026

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!

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 selec...
05/14/2026

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!

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, HOLDINGThursday, May 14th at 7 PMTix: www.kinonik.orgExperimental and Art Films selected by Jenelle Stafford and H...
05/11/2026

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.

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 MorningKAREL REISZ 1960 | May 13 at 2 PM and 16 at 2 & 7 PM Tix: www.kinonik.org"Those who canno...
05/11/2026

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.

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 ONCLEdir. Jacques Tati, 1958Showings at 7 PM Wednesday, 2 PM & 7 PM SaturdayBefore Mr. Bean approached the world wit...
05/04/2026

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.

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 nothi...
05/02/2026

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.

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 WilderWednesday 4.15 Saturday 4.18Tickets: www.kinonik.orgIn a basement nightclub cal...
04/14/2026

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.

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.

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04101

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Wednesday 6:30pm - 9:30pm
Saturday 1:30pm - 4:30pm
6:30pm - 9:30pm

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