Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati, two masters of visual comedy, were among the many feature-length narrative filmmakers Cinematheque presented during the decade. Sherlock, Jr. is a wonderful fantasy with Keaton as a projectionist who enters the film he is showing, and Mr. Hulot's Holiday is a tour-de-force burlesque of a modern-day vacation.

Obscure Love and Death is a collection of Super-8mm films (most from SF and/or NYC) that are specially made and selected for its subconscious theme. Variations here are the individual takes; read however you like, for the night of dead-lovely chill, I guess. For the Valentine's Day special, we are adding the thicker flavor to the bloody chocolate which will help you drive through your own nightmare! Filmmakers include: Jose Luis Duarte, Yoriko Washiyama, Karen Johannesen, Angelina Krahn, Brian Traylor, Albert Ray, Martha Colburn, Glen Fogel, Andy Lampert, Stom Sogo, Lee Ellickson, Moira Tierney, Francois BouÈ, Joshua Cicerone, Natalie To and much more mads. (Stom Sogo)

This decade saw the full maturation of a parallel avant-garde to the avant-garde, an out-of-the-closet queer cinema that celebrated sexual difference and unconventional film form. Su Friedrich's Gently Down The Stream, Michael Wallin's The Place Between Our Bodies, Tom Chomont's Oblivion, James Broughton's Hermes Bird, Barbara Hammer's Multiple Orgasm, and Curt McDowell's Confessions.

Roger Jacoby appeared several times at Cinematheque before his life was abruptly ended from AIDS complications, but his fervent passion for hand-processing and expressive camera work still reverberate and influence young filmmakers today. New York-based Lee Krist will show a selection of his own Jacoby-inspired films, made from his own emulsion and processing fluids and then projected with a hand-cranked 35mm projector. Krist will show Roger's Kunst Life I-III and How To Be A Homosexual, Part II.

One week after the events of September 11th, independent filmmakers Caveh Zahedi and Jay Rosenblatt put out a call to over 100 experimental and documentary filmmakers asking for contributions to a collective film project addressing the recent events and their aftermath. The response was overwhelming, and tonight's program is a sampling of those responses. Among the filmmakers who contributed works are Frazer Bradshaw, Eva Brzeski, Paul Harrill, Cathy Cook, Rock Ross, Barabara Klutinis, Anne Robertson, Jay Rosenblatt, Lucas Sabean, Caveh Zahedi, Phil Solomon and Ira Sachs. (Caveh Zahedi)

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 "soldier-man" 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 soldiers' diaries. Preceded by Transparencies, about the state of some found footage material.

Tonight marks the culmination of the retrospective and the Bay Area premiere of their newest opus, Images of the Orient (Tourisme Vandale). Using archival footage shot by wealthy Europeans on a trip to India at the end of the 1920s, the film analyzes the behavior and orientalizing attitudes of Westerners in the East as "the new Otravelers' move in compact groups towards the exotic, towards its ruin." Preceded by African Diary, using footage from a personal diary film shot in Algeria by an anonymous Frenchman between 1927 and 1936.

From 1976 through 1980 Hollis Frampton visited Cinematheque on five occasions, each time screening entire programs of new films from his highly productive career. Not screened at Cinematheque in its entirety since his very first visit in April 1976, Hapax Legomena is a seven-part investigation of the specific conditions of cinematic representation and the limitations and paradoxes of visual description and narrative. Hapax Legomena includes nostalgia, Travelling Matte, Critical Mass, Special Effects, Poetic Justice, Ordinary Matter and Remote Control. (Steve Polta)

Tonight's program offers an overview of the fertile contribution women artists were making to independent, avant-garde filmmaking by the Seventies, ranging from wickedly funny psychodramas to thoughtful explorations of cinematic form. Films: Barbara Linkevitch's Chinamoon, Gunvor Nelson's Take Off, Anne Severson's Near The Big Chakra, Dore O's Kaskara, Sandra Davis' Maternal Filigree, Martha Haslanger's Lived Time and Barbara Hammer and Barbara Klutinis' Pools. (Steve Anker)

Dutch filmmaker Barbara Meter returns to the Bay Area with recent films that use different European settings and past cultures to explore universal themes such as war, memory, and dislocation. Even though Meter has been making films since the 1970s, her most recent films achieve a new level of poetic expression. Films will include Appearances, which moves from the uncanny to the warmth of the familial in evoking German life during the first half of the twentieth century; Departure on Arrival, a tensely impressionistic evocation of the passage of time as referenced by Eastern European Jewish life in the middle of the last century; and From The Exterior; Greece, To Me; Convalescing and others. (Steve Anker)

Jon Jost made five appearances at Cinematheque between 1971-81. Jost's first feature-length film, Speaking Directly: Some American Notes (1973), is a wry personal essay made a few years after his 27-month stint in prison for draft dodging. Made in Montana on a miniscule budget, this critique of America in the early 70s is brilliantly idiosyncratic reflection on society, filmmaking and how one chooses to live one's life. (Irina Leimbacher)

The seventies was Chick Strand's most prolific period, featuring some of her most accomplished and endearing work. Tonight's selection exhibits a wide variety of cinematic concerns: Cosas de Mi Vida, Elasticity, Cartoon le Mousse and Guacamole. (Program and note by Carmen Vigil)

Bay Area Films & Videos The series begins with a program of films and videos highlighting some of the younger Bay Area experimental moving-image artists frequently represented at the Cinematheque. Installations: Michael Rudnick's Animated Glasses, Lynn Marie Kirby's Photons in Paris: Image Encoding. Film and Video Screening: Steve Polta's Estuary #1 (Constant Passage), silt's Pieces of a River Shore, Greta Snider's Flight, Kerry Laitala's Hallowed, Thad Povey's Thine Inward-Looking Eyes, Rodney Ascher's Somebody Goofed, John Muse and Jeanne C. Finley's Language Lessons, Konrad Steiner's Bum Series and Michael Rosas-Walsh's Lake Orion.

This program features work by pioneering Bay Area artists whose art and presence had an impact on early activities of Canyon Cinematheque (as it was then known), as well as two by prominent non-locals filmmakers: Here I Am by Bruce Baillie, Angel Blue Sweet Wings by Chick Strand, FFFTCM by Will Hindle, Schmeerguntz by Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley, Third Eye Butterfly (for double projection) by Storm De Hirsch, Arnulf Rainer by Peter Kubelka, The White Rose by Bruce Conner and July '71 in San Francisco, Living at Beach Street, Working at Canyon Cinema, Swimming in the Valley of the Moon by Peter Hutton.

Reflecting Cinematheque's shift from a primarily local exhibitor to one equally incorporating artists working nationally and internationally, this program focuses on the concentrated and stylistically formal approach to films which increasingly dominated Cinematheque programs during these years: Night Movie #1 (Self Portrait) by Diana Barrie, The Bladderwort Document by Janis Crystal Lipzin, Flight of Shadows by Michael Mideke, The Riddle of Lumen by Stan Brakhage, Fuji by Robert Breer, Shift by Ernie Gehr, 31/75: Asyl by Kurt Kren, Masquerade by Lawrence Jordan, The Gardener of Eden by James Broughton and Joel Singer and Hollis Frampton's Gloria!

This decade saw the emergence of a generation of filmmakers who turned their attentions away from strictly formal artistic explorations to personal and political concerns, including re-examination of narrative traditions. The decade also saw the emergence of film performance installation and the first instance of Cinematheque's exhibition of video: Covert Action by Abigail Child, Peggy and Fred in Hell (Prologue) by Leslie Thornton, Recuerdos de Flores Muertas by Willie Varela, Martina's Playhouse by Peggy Ahwesh, Migration of the Blubberoids by George Kuchar, Splash by Thomas Allen Harris, and Measures of Distance by Mona Hatoum.

The films on this program are deeply reflective works on particularities of cinematic space, and the majority are makers who emerged during these last ten years: Gunvor Nelson's Time Being, Phil Solomon's Figure/Ground (The Snowman), Janie Geiser's The Fourth Watch, David Sherman's Tuning the Sleeping Machine, Luis Recoder's Magenta 1, Martin Arnold's passage ‡ l'acte, Peter Tscherkasskey's Outer Space, Cade Bursell's Skate, Jeanne Liotta's Muktikara, Shuo-wen Hsiao's Intrude Sanctuary, and Ken Jacobs' Georgetown Loop.

Since the 1970s, when he helped create the artist collective Ant Farm and other groups exploring experimental approaches to video and television, Chip Lord has produced a large body of videotapes that explore social customs in different societies and their relationships to technology. El Zócalo, premiering tonight, is an observational portrait of Mexico City's central Plaza de la ConstituciÛn across one day in August. Soldiers, Aztec dancers, clowns, food vendors, protestors, rain, dogs, tourists, kites, balloons and dignitaries all meet in the public space of the ZÛcalo. Shown with The Aroma of Enchantment by Chip Lord, shot in Tokyo, where a strangely mutated idea of America takes many forms. (Steve Anker)

Brakhage's first sustained foray into complete abstraction, The Text ofLight is an epic adventure in perception, a meditation on the variancies of
vision and a discovery of entirely new worlds within everyday objects.Also: Two Super-8 films: Desert and Sketches. (Steve Polta)

"He Was Born, He Suffered, He Died"; @; The Shores of Phos: A Fable; The Wold Shadow; RR; Sincerity I; Nightmare Series

The Arabic Numeral Series, a series of twenty films ranging from five to thirty-two minutes in length, "inspired and governed by strata of the mind's moving-visual-thinking," abstract films using pure color and light suggesting internal worlds of non-linguistic experience, thoughts on the verge of appearance. (Steve Polta)

French-Canadian Filmmaker (and early Cinematheque programmer) Vincent Grenier has, since the 1970s, produced a body of films that explore subtle relationships between light and color, combining unique approaches to portraiture and landscape with formal cinematic concerns of dimensionality and abstraction. Grenier has recently begun concentrating on digital video, producing an array of works which explore this new medium with equal enthusiasm, concentrating especially on the creative possibilities achieved from a fusion of film and video. This program highlights Vincent's recent digital work (Miracle Grow, Brendan's Cracker, CapturÈ, Color Study, Material Incidents and Winter Collection) and a selection of earlier films. (Steve Polta)

Former Program Director Vincent Grenier established a strong curatorial direction and voice for Cinematheque screenings that later Program Directors Charles Wright and Carmen Vigil (later Vigil alone) sustained throughout the decade. Join Grenier, Wright, Vigil, late-seventies Administrative Manager Jon Livingston, filmmaker and curator Janis Crystal Lipzin and moderator Steve Anker for a discussion focusing on hot issues which remain essential today: what were pros and cons of directing much of the programming away from a primarily grass-roots community; of seeking (and getting) funding support; and of a greater degree of institutionalization?

The seventies was a period of ferment for British filmmaking. During this time filmmakers visited the U.S. and challenged narrative form by using the forces of nature and landscape in entirely new ways. Program includes: After LumiÈre: L'Arroseur Arrose and Time and Motion Study by Malcolm Legrice, Condition of Illusion by Peter Gidal, Sheppard's Bush by Mike Leggett and Chris Welsby's Seven Days.