tENT tonight presents IMP ACTIVISM Issue #3, a "vaudeo magazine" featuring political activist works intENT upon quasi-documenting secret shoppers for trickster culture while attempting to overthrow the dominant paradigm (so he tells us). Titles include Ski Mask News, Undie-Pendance Day, Pretzels for the Suits, The Asshole is a Tense Hole, Nestled Deep.. (about spiritual ecologist Teddy Carns), Contestational Robotics 1998-2000, Teenagers from Inner Space, Evidence of Police Conduct & Misconduct Against May Day Celebrants and Little Brother Gets Busted. (Steve Polta)

tENT's second screening showcases recent media manipulations and perceptual conundrums including In Perplexing Pursuit of the Prodigy Paleontologist (a mobius mystery), Foiled Again! (foil hats as symbols of resistance to mind control), Shuffle Mode (the philosophical side of permutation), Space Ballet (condensed) (a surveillance dance), Where Weíre Trailer #2 (why bother to check out the feature when you can check into the trailer?), Lab Rats Explain Their Veggie-Oil Powered Van (run your diesel vehicle on fish & chips waste), Who is tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE? (a "demo reel" from Ken Bye's in-progress documentary about tENT), Cuntralia (making movies about sexual obsession can be dangerous to one's health) and Guitarists Anonymous Withdrawal Aids (learn how to break banal habits), a performance work for VCR, filmstrip, slides and (sampled) guitar. Mingle with tENT at a reception following the show. (Steve Polta)

Alongside Delluc, Dulac, Epstein and Gance, L'Herbier was a seminal figure of the French narrative avant-garde, sometimes called Impressionism. The Late Mathias Pascal is based on Pirandello's 1904 novel of the same name, a story of a librarian who takes advantage of his mistakenly reported suicide to try to free himself from the grief and strictures of his domestic and professional life. "To be dead was to be free" comments an intertitle; but freedom is short-lived, and an identity, once forsaken, is not easily reclaimed. Known for its striking mise-en-scÀne and startling representations of the main character's hallucinations and disoriented states of mind, this dark but witty tale stars Russian »migr» actor Mosjoukine and features impressionistic sets designed by Cavalcanti and Lazare Meerson. (Irina Leimbacher)

Our two-evening series kicks off with works made to music by an eclectic array of composers including Paul Bowles, Johann Strauss, The Beatles, Ikue Mori and James Tenney. Films include Eisenstein and Alexandrov's Romance Sentimentale, Nathaniel Dorsky's Night Waltz, Dean Smith's here we are now, Robert Attanasio's Counterfeit Music Videos nos. 2, 3 and 6, "Lanky" Stu Bircke's Primal Scene, Abigail Child's 8 Million, Charlotte Pryce's X and Stan Brakhage's ? (Reel 5). (Konrad Steiner)

Tommy Becker's videos combine spoken word, performance, music and costume design to create sentimental vignettes in which faceless individuals consistently find themselves in states of adversity. Music, sounds and spoken monologues accentuate Becker's performance-based works, highlighting the humorous yet melancholy states of his characters as they struggle to shift perspectives, overcome alienation or refine behavioral patterns. Choral-like monologues, exaggerated gestures and obscured identities enhance the unearthly realm in which Becker's characters enact their strange scenarios. Melodramatic scenes unfold in empty sets or against single-colored backdrops that place emphasis on physical movement, color, composition and sound. This screening, Becker's first with Cinematheque, includes recent works such as bartholin?part 1, newfound freedom, aisheteru means i love you, and walden. Becker also will present a beguiling performance piece. (Total Mobile Home)

Michele Smith's two-hour silent epic Regarding Penelope's Wake is an obsessively edited collage/montage/hand-painted/ripped/cut/etched/scratched elaboration of found footage culled from numerous sources, including a 1970s public-speaking instructional film, Themes from the Odyssey, 8mm stag films, Self Protection for Women, a biography of Vincent Van Gogh, ethnographic documentaries, science films, home movies, The Frog Prince, a film about underwater sound, and many other educational oddities. Derived as much from James Joyce as from Homer, this highly abstracted telling of Ulysses' fabled odyssey weaves through multiple experimental narratives, visual rhymes, structural disruptions, rhythmic couplings, reckless visual puns, carefully balanced counterpoints of light and shadow, and delirious punctuations of movement and color. Consisting of hundreds of clips from 16mm and 8mm films, Smith?s opus will be shown on digital video. (Scott Stark)

Our second evening of music-inspired cinema features work made to music by a diverse group of composers including Arthur Honegger, Richard Wagner and Charlemagne Palestine. Films include Jean Mitry's Pacific 23, Aaron Ross' PSEKELIS, Garin» Torossian's Sparklehorse, Konrad Steiner's Devil Egged, Gordon Avil's Master Hands, Len Lye's Rhythm and Free Radicals, Joyce Wieland's 1933, Harold Becker's Blind Gary Davis and Pip Chodorov's Charlemagne 2: Piltzer. (Konrad Steiner)

This new Russian documentary, in its Bay Area premiere, examines the lives and works of the three Kaufman brothers: David (known as Dziga Vertov), Mikhail (who shot most of Vertov?s films through Man with A Movie Camera and became a filmmaker in his own right) and Boris (who emigrated first to France and then to the U.S. and is known for his cinematography for Vigo, Kazan and Lumet). Including rare archival images of the three brothers and clips from their respective works, this documentary explores their Polish-Jewish family history, the personal and aesthetic divergences between Vertov and Mikhail after 1928, and their relationships with Boris. It will be accompanied by Vertov's Kino Pravda from 1922 and two shorts shot by Boris: Jean Vigo?s Taris (1931) and Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider's Film (1965, starring Buster Keaton). (Irina Leimbacher)

Art Jones' provocative music videos, documentaries on hip-hop history, and VJ collaborations with Soundlab, DJ Spooky and Anti-Pop Consortium all question the powers and politics invested in pop culture. From his work as a member of Not Channel Zero in the early '90s to digital cross-pollinations with the new media collective ITEL, Jones challenges stale academic critiques of American commodity culture. Screening tonight are his digital music video trilogy Love Song #1 and Making the Video/Mama Said Knock You Out One More Time, an exploration of the making of media(ted) race and gender identities featuring LL Cool J. Jones also will present the world premiere of 711, an experimental documentary made during a residency in Hong Kong. A live VJ performance by Jones will knock you out at evening's end. (MaÔa Cybelle Carpenter)

The work of Gibbs Chapman and James T. Hong combines elements of personal documentary and industrial production to suggest entropic endgame scenarios, ironically pointing to the untenable lengths reached by the human drive toward complexity and rationality. Chapman's An Examination of Exhibits A(1)óE(5) composites a pseudo-industrial essay on what he calls "the human insistence on order from chaos" through bizarrely collaged found footage, while Your Tax Dollars at Work exposes hidden meanings in scrambled congressional news coverage. Chapman also will premiere Turbine's Russian Scissors. Hong's BEHOLD THE ASIAN: HOW ONE BECOMES WHAT ONE IS stands as an aggressive treatise on identity, race and conformity; in his words, "Identity politics for everyone and no one." Hong's earlier CONDOR: A FILM FROM CALIFORNIA is a quasi-existential meditation on the extinction of the California Condor as a metaphor of our time. (Total Mobile Home)

In celebration of her new book, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, renowned Bay Area author Rebecca Solnit (As Eve Said to the Serpent, Wanderlust) will give a copiously illustrated talk linking Muybridge's work as a photographeróhis fascination with serial and sequential images, with freezing and exploring timeóto the technological involvements of his patron Leland Stanford, builder of the transcontinental railroad and founder of the university that gestated Silicon Valley. Citing a scandalous, previously unpublished first-person account, Solnit suggests that the breakthrough leading to cinema took place in San Francisco itself (as did Muybridge's first public screening of his animated photographic images). "This book," Solnit says, "is a genesis story for Hollywood and Silicon Valley, for the way that California has generated the forces that changed the world." Following her lecture, Solnit will sign copies of her book (available for purchase this evening) and join us for an informal reception. (Irina Leimbacher)

In its Bay Area premiere, Gieling's The Prisoners of BuÒuel takes us back to Las Hurdes, the isolated region of Spain where Luis Bu“uel shot his controversial documentary Land Without Bread in 1932. Banned in Republican Spain, censored in Britain and used as an anti-Fascist propaganda tool in France, BuÒuel's film has been subject to various readings. Gieling's projection of the film in a local village square in 1999 elicits the inhabitants' reactions both to the film and to the perceived depiction of their region as a kind of hell on earth, encouraging us to consider the political and moral implications of representational practices. The documentary will be accompanied by BuÒuel and Dali's first surrealist shortóthe still-shocking Un Chien Andalouóand the American voiceover version of Land Without Bread. (Irina Leimbacher)

Bobby Abate's recent work forges radical paths of queer desire and genre criticism through film, video and the internet. Tonight, for his first appearance at Cinematheque, Abate arrives from New York City with a scintillating suitcase of vital new work. Abate's 16mm films The Tanti Man, The Zero Order and Chisholm invoke Kenneth Anger-esque horny montage fantasies of personal psychodrama and popular culture syncopated to nostalgic tunes. One Mile Per Minute is, in Abate's words, "a look at the generation of the 'culture jammed' consumer preened with 'Friends' hair, 'Survivor' courage and CNN awareness." Abate's Real Videos log on to "the breakdown of identity, communication and human relationships via the internet." (Total Mobile Home)