The films of Fred Worden are inspired by and continue a lineage of filmmaking activity suggested by the work of Len Lye and Hans Richter, a tradition of graphic filmmaking "where not just representation but naturalism itself has been happily jettisoned. Energy and deep abstraction are the primordial elements of this stripped-bare world." The five films on this program, each a minimal composition of light and dark modulated through the rhythms of projection < Worden's One being an extended exploration of a single abstract film frame interactions between screen and viewer while hinting at the infinite experiences potentially gleaned from the most modest of materials. Lye's Free Radicals and Richter's Rythmus 21 will be presented by Worden in the context of his own recent work: One, Automatic Writing 2 and The Or Cloud. (Steve Polta)

What's Wrong With This Picture, Parts 1 and 2 by Owen Land, Breath by Andrej Zdravic, Chuck Hudina's Bicycle, Michael Mideke's Goats, Cargo of Lure by Jim Hoberman, Gulls & Buoys by Robert Breer, Barn Rushes by Larry Gottheim and Picture and Sound Rushes by Morgan Fisher.

Divided Loyalties by Warren Sonbert, Visible Inventory Nine: Pattern of Events by Janis Crystal Lipzin, Rainbird by Michael Mideke, An Evening at Home by Gail Camhi, Porter Springs 3 by Henry Hills, Cants from Natural History Works by Gary Adkins and Pat O'Neill's Foregrounds.

Cinematheque's seasonal program showcasing work recently received by Canyon Cinema, local distributor of alternative and experimental cinema, kicks off this Winter season. Saul Levine's Light Lick (Az Sent): Only Sunshine consists of rhythmically pulsing abstract frames. Michael Rosas-Walsh's Lake Orion builds glistening black and white dreams from multiple exposed vacation footage. Shiho Kano's Rocking Chair ominously describes the loneliness of an empty room. Mary Beth Reed's multi-layered Moon Streams ventures deep into peeling layers of paint, emulsion, and fragmented imagery. The program is rounded out by the new-to-Canyon "re-release" of Michael Snow's 1964 New York Eye and Ear Control, "starring" The Walking Woman and featuring a soundtrack by Albert Ayler. (Steve Polta)

In the 1970s, underground Superstar Ondine visited the Bay Area several times screening films from Andy Warhol's "film factory" in which he was featured. The memories of these visits will hopefully be evoked with this special screening of Warhol's 1966 classic The Chelsea Girls at San Francisco's own Castro Theatre. A sprawling parody of the Hollywood melodrama, this double-projected camp classic simultaneously screens scenes from the decadent and desperate downtown lives of Warhol's art world entourage, in garish color and gritty black and white. Expect to see outrageously improvised "performances" by Nico, Eric Emerson, International Velvet, Brigid Polk, Mary Woronov, filmmaker Marie Menken, and Pope Ondine himself! Soundtrack features a rare live recording of the Velvet Underground. (Steve Polta)

This is an assortment of lesser-known pieces, eclectic beyond the scope of any unified theory. If you nod off during one of them, the next one may wake you up. In other words, it resembles many of the evenings at the Canyon Cinematheque in the early seventies. Then, as now, audiences were reminded that film (like life) is a wide-open field. Herb De Grass's Film Watchers, Standish Lawder's Eleven Different Horses, Ainslie Pryor's Angel Camomile, Helene Kaplan's Rose and Seymour at Home in Queens, Victor Faccinto's Where Did It Come All From? Where Is It All Going?, David Gerstein's As the Sun Goes Down, A Hole Appears in the Sky, Barry Spinello's Six Loop-Paintings, Charles and Ray Eames's Powers of Ten, David Rimmer's Canadian Pacific, Will Hindle's Pasteur3 (Charles Wright)

In this program, memories and recollections of times past flicker and dance, set in motion by fleeting images and soundtracks. Brett Simonís Counterfeit Film reproduces some of cinemaís earliest images into a particularly modern flipbook. Ernie Gehrís Cotton Candy brings to life penny arcade figures and early cinematic wonders. In Ericka Beckmanís Switch Center, an industrial site becomes the stage for a mechanical ballet. Sandra Davisí CREPESCULE: Pond and Chair portrays a landscape of lingering memories and gentle reflections. Louise Bourqueís Going Back Home conveys a sense of loss and upheaval with just a few images. Jonas Mekasí This Side of Paradise: Fragments of an Unfinished Biography documents summers on Long Island with the families of Jackie Kennedy. (Steve Anker and Kathy Geritz)

Due to projection problems last February, we have rescheduled this program of our Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi series, co-presented with Pacific Film Archive. Using footage shot in the Alps between enemy countries Italy and Austria-Hungary during World War I, On The Heights All Is Peace hauntingly conveys the slow waiting, work and despair of war. Through the "wounded body of the nitrate material", the filmmakers give life to the ësoldier-maní on both sides of the invisible front. The Italian images were shot by Luca Comerio (From the Pole to the Equator), and the film is accompanied by a hypnotic original score, with lyrics based on soldiersí letters and diaries. Preceded by Transparencies, a loving look at the damaged state of this very found footage material. (Irina Leimbacher)

For the past thirty years English filmmaker Guy Sherwin has been exploring visual perception through a body of films that subtly focus on such subjects as natural landscapes, the visualization of verbal language and observations of animate and inanimate objects as fields for contemplation. Sherwinís films are rigorously conceived and realized, while also being sensually and intellectually rewarding. For his first Cinematheque presentation in more than a decade Guy will show Messages, Filter Beds, Flight and selections from the in-progress series Animal Studies. (Steve Anker)

Daniel Reeves has been a major force in sculpture, film, video, and installation since 1970. His videos focus on personal, political, and spiritual themes, from socially condoned violence to the divine nature of existence. Since 1982 Reeves has concentrated on developing a video poetics bent on exploring personal transformation and individual responsibility. For ReevesÇ experience and conviction shape not only his content, but relate directly to his commitment to revitalizing the sacred in art, making works of universal significance and profound understanding of the human condition. For his first Cinematheque program Daniel will show a range of videos made between 1981 and 2001: Obsessive Becoming, Smothering Dreams, Sabda, A Mosaic for the Kali Yuga and his latest, One With Everything. (Steve Anker)

Made in 1926 as a tribute to Soviet resources and to its people, One Sixth of the World contains footage shot by Vertovís cameramen from the Arctic Circle to the Chinese border, from the Black Sea to the Sea of Okhotsk. 1930ís Enthusiasm, Symphony of the Don Basin, "the most significant contribution to the Soviet sound film" according to Annette Michelson, is a gorgeous atonal celebration of Soviet coal mining, as the workers achieve their Five Year Plan quota in a mere four years. Charlie Chaplin said: "Never had I known that these mechanical sounds could be arranged to sound so beautifully. I regard it as one of the most exhilarating symphonies I have heard." Restored by Peter Kubelka! (Irina Leimbacher)

Colorado filmmaker James Otis is one of the country's most accomplished yet little-known personal/experimental filmmakers. Otis was an early pioneer of computer-generated animation, and his several films in that genre remain classics of the form. His pseudo-hyper-stereoscopic landscape studies bring the Western land to uniquely cinematic life. Of late Otis has been applying his precise passions to lenslessly teasing emulsion into phrasings of big questions. And all this with a sense of humor. Since Otis brings films to the Bay area only every 20 years or so, a wide-ranging selection is planned, including Family Dinners, Gridrose, Englewood Cottonwood, Upper Blue Lake and several others.

"One of the best film artists I know." - Stan Brakhage

Canyon Cinema has been distributing 35mm films ever since a print of The Residentsí Hello Skinny was accidentally deposited in the early ë80s. Since then, Canyon has accumulated dozens more, but the recent addition of Patrick Bokanowskiís rarely screened feature LíAnge (The Angel), made a 35mm program seem particularly opportune. In a rare U.S. screening, Peter Tscherkasskyís Cinemascope LíArrivÈe will open the program, followed by Eliís Moon, by S.F. filmmaker Michael Rosas-Walsh and New Yorker Donna Cameronís unique paper-emulsion foray into 35mm, World Trade Alphabet. The shorts conclude with the Hello Skinny print that started it all. Bokanowskiís LíAnge, a surrealist/expressionist spectacle of trick photography, will finish off this evening of large-gauge revelry. (Mark Toscano)

Dana Plays will present a selection of films that she has made over the past fourteen years, including her recent award-winning Nuclear Family, which uses found footage to create a dark portrait of the violence and turbulences underlying seemingly ordinary family life. Dana will also present Love Stories My Grandmother Tells, a densely metaphorical portrait of her 90 year-old paternal grandmother reminiscing about her early bohemian life and love affairs; Zero Hour, an examination of the changing face of war documentation as evident through WWII US Navy war material and Shards. (Steve Anker)

Thomas Allen Harris has explored his cultural heritage and personal history as an African-American gay man through numerous widely shown and celebrated films, videos and museum installations that heís made during the past fifteen years. Thomasí earlier Vintage is a complex essay portraying African-American family life as experienced by gay and lesbian siblings. His newest "mythobiography," È minha cara/thatís my face, was filmed on Super-8mm film in parts of the U.S., Brazil and Africa. In it he weaves together his own childhood memories as an American ex-patriot living in Africa with recent sounds and images drawn from these contemporary international black societies, combining them to create a highly personal, multi-layered and resonant vision of parallel cultures. (Steve Anker)

New York film and video maker Ken Jacobs last visited the Bay Area in 1999 when he presented several inspiring performance pieces from his ongoing Nervous System series. For tonightís program he has sent CIRCLING ZERO:

Our daughter Nisi and son Aza happened to both be staying at our loft on Chambers Street when fundamentalist Islam struck. A friend observing the burning buildings from Brooklyn phoned to say, "Get out. It can fall on you." But we were upstate until 9.15 when the city partially reopened to incoming traffic, so that my taping begins with our approach over the almost empty George Washington Bridge. It would be another 15 days before we were allowed to move back into our place. Our friend Lucia lent us her high-rise apartment, facing south with a dead-on view of smoking lower Manhattan. I kept taping, hours of street observations. Although Iíve given a title to this loose selection of materials it is not so much a work as sampling of the ongoing actuality. (KJ)

For our final program of the season Cinematheque will present an evening of short films and videos celebrating Berkeleyís bastion of independent film exhibition, the Fine Arts Cinema. Although the Fine Arts is one of the Bay Areaís oldest functioning movie theaters, their current form of imaginative programming ó creatively pairing and juxtaposing narrative, documentaries and experimental films in ways that brings new insights into each work screened ó is a result of the programming team that has been in control for only the past five years. Sadly to say, the team will soon be giving up control of the theater and retire, at least for the moment, their unmistakable curatorial imprint. Tonightís selection will be chosen equally by our two staffs; phone our office one week prior for titles and makers to be shown. (Steve Anker)