See You at the Movies: The Opening Night of KINOMUZEUM

We invite our first audience to be mesmerized by three films capturing the porosity of the cinematic experience and the film medium itself.

The nighttime film program presented as part of the opening festivities for the new home of MSN Warsaw will be an endurance event, starting at midnight and ending in the morning. E.ON Polska, the cinema’s exclusive partner, will provide the audience with coffee and snacks to keep their energy going, when sleep begins to prevail over cinemania. Who will last until morning and win a First Audience card?

The documentary Scala!!! Or, the Incredibly Strange Rise and Fall of the World’s Wildest Cinema and How It Influenced a Mixed-up Generation of Weirdos and Misfits (directed by Ali Catterall and Jane Giles) introduces us to London’s Scala cinema, where John Akomfrah, Boy George and Mary Harron frequented late-night screenings. It is a story about a cinema that is no longer found on the map, but lives on in the stories and works of its regulars. It is a documentary that shows why B-movies are as important as recognized cinematic masterpieces. Finally, it is a tribute to the cinema lovers who spend their nights at the movies, the misfits working the projector room, and the weirdos who rejected neoliberalism.

Just as the demise of London’s Scala cinema is attributed (largely but not exclusively) to the growing popularity of video rentals, so the demise of Youngman Kim’s movie rental featured in the documentary Kim’s Video (directed by David Redmon and Ashley Sabin), a collection of over 80,000 videotapes, is blamed on to the rise of streaming. Like the Scala, Kim’s Video has a host of former patrons who have gone on to become filmmakers, and former employees who have developed a love of cinema on the job, by watching the films (good and bad) in Kim’s collection. But beyond the cyclicality of film culture and hypotheses of what will, in turn, kill off streaming (and what will take its place), Kim’s Video spins a genre-hopping tale of a different kind, about the life of the collection, who creates it and who cares for it, and shows how anti-institutional restitution can be carried out.

“What about you? Do you like girls?” the teenage Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) asks Owen (Justice Smith), her younger schoolmate, who is as fascinated as she is by the series The Pink Opaque.

“I think that I like TV shows,” Owen replies.

So it will be no surprise or spoiler to reveal that after finishing school, Owen finds a job at a cinema. But something is off in Owen’s life: The Pink Opaque is cancelled, Maddy disappears, and time runs differently than it should. As Jane Schoenbrun, the director of I Saw the TV Glow, points out, screens are not a “safe place,” especially when they can be used for both escape and abduction.