Film series: Encounters with the Uncanny

Prepare to be unsettled by our exploration of the uncanny at Cornell Cinema this fall.

The uncanny is an elusive term used to describe an encounter that feels at once familiar and strange. The term comes from the German word “unheimlich” (unhomely) and was first used by German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch in a 1906 essay, On the Psychology of the Uncanny. The feeling can be rooted in an encounter with something new and strange in a familiar place, or with something familiar in an unfamiliar context, that generates a sense of uncertainty, disquiet, doubt, and even fear.

Our “Encounters with the Uncanny” series—inspired by Professor Patty Keller’s fall course—features an unsettling set of films that engage this space between what is known and unknown, familiar and strange, real and imagined. From the fetishization of car crashes in David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996) to the impossible doppelgängers in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Double Life of Véronique (1991) to the eerie intergenerational connections of Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling (2026), the films in this series are as difficult to describe as the feelings they provoke. Together, they call into question what we think we know, unsettling any easy sense of reality and forcing us to examine the impossible.

Organized in collaboration with Patricia Keller, Associate Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature in the Department of Romance Studies

Cosponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature