Kinonik

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.

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

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...

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.