Kinonik

SEBASTIANE (1976)
Directed by DEREK JARMAN
WEDNESDAY July 15th 7PM
SATURDAY July 18th 2PM / 7PM

Derek Jarman's Sebastiane (1976) is set in a Roman military outpost where exiled soldiers have nothing to do but exercise, argue, and desire one another. The plot, insofar as there is one, concerns the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian; the Roman soldier who refused to recant his Christian faith and was ordered shot through with arrows by Diocletian. But Jarman isn't interested in the hagiography. He's interested in the body. Specifically, in what happens when imperial authority encounters a body it can discipline but cannot make compliant.

Shot in Sardinia on a budget that wouldn't cover catering on Nolan’s The Odyssey, Jarman's first feature was made a full twelve years before The Last Temptation of Christ would scandalize mainstream audiences with a far milder provocation. The film premiered at the 1976 London Film Festival and was picketed. It is one of the most important British films of its decade, and one of the least screened. Luckily for you, we happen to have an astonishingly beautiful print.

The film is performed entirely in Latin by largely untrained actors. Not church Latin, not the ceremonial Latin of inscriptions and mottos, but a reconstructed vernacular; dog latin, soldiers' Latin, profane and quotidian. The effect is total estrangement. You can't settle into the dialogue as information delivery. You hear rhythm, tone, breath, and command. Language becomes another kind of physical act. The score, by Brian Eno, treats the landscape as an instrument.

Sebastian has been a q***r icon for six centuries, and the art historians knew it before anyone else did. Mantegna's Sebastian is an exercise in idealized male beauty that uses the arrows as an alibi. Reni's versions — he painted the subject at least six times — are frankly ecstatic. Il Sodoma's fresco in the Palazzo Pubblico gave the game away in the name alone. What Jarman did was strip the devotional frame and make the erotic substrate visible without apology. The arrows aren't metaphors. The body isn't allegorical. The desire is the content, and the empire is the thing that punishes it.

Sebastiane (1976) Derek Jarman’s first feature, entirely in Latin, reimagines the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian as a study in desire and discipline under Roman military…

Our Summer Schedule begins this week with Sebastiane by Derek Jarman.

Derek Jarman's Sebastiane (1976) is set in a Roman military outpost where exiled soldiers have nothing to do but exercise, argue, and desire one another. The plot, insofar as there is one, concerns the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian; the Roman soldier who refused to recant his Christian faith and was ordered shot through with arrows by Diocletian. But Jarman isn't interested in the hagiography. He's interested in the body. Specifically, in what happens when imperial authority encounters a body it can discipline but cannot make compliant.

Shot in Sardinia on a budget that wouldn't cover catering on Nolan’s The Odyssey, Jarman's first feature was made a full twelve years before The Last Temptation of Christ would scandalize mainstream audiences with a far milder provocation. The film premiered at the 1976 London Film Festival and was picketed. It is one of the most important British films of its decade, and one of the least screened. Luckily for you, we happen to have an astonishingly beautiful print.

The film is performed entirely in Latin by largely untrained actors. Not church Latin, not the ceremonial Latin of inscriptions and mottos, but a reconstructed vernacular; dog latin, soldiers' Latin, profane and quotidian. The effect is total estrangement. You can't settle into the dialogue as information delivery. You hear rhythm, tone, breath, and command. Language becomes another kind of physical act. The score, by Brian Eno, treats the landscape as an instrument.

Sebastian has been a q***r icon for six centuries, and the art historians knew it before anyone else did. Mantegna's Sebastian is an exercise in idealized male beauty that uses the arrows as an alibi. Reni's versions — he painted the subject at least six times — are frankly ecstatic. Il Sodoma's fresco in the Palazzo Pubblico gave the game away in the name alone. What Jarman did was strip the devotional frame and make the erotic substrate visible without apology. The arrows aren't metaphors. The body isn't allegorical. The desire is the content, and the empire is the thing that punishes it.

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.