This formally audacious feminist melodrama, in which a young doctor is torn between her devotion to career and the demands of family, marks Dulac's early attention to subjective states of mind.

Dulac's biggest-budget commercial melodrama is set in London's theatre world and explores of some of her favorite themes: independent women, unhappy marriage and the illusions of romantic passion.

Three important works exploring female desire and its cinematic evocation, whether that of the Spanish heroine in La FÕte Espagnole (Dulac's early collaboration with critic Louis Delluc) or in the fantasies of unhappy wives in The Smiling Madame Beudet and LíInvitation au Voyage.

An adulterous love affair is explored from the perspectives of both the beautiful seductress and the betrayed wife in this restored and tinted print of Dulac's earliest feature in the series.

These most radically experimental of Dulacís films are the fruit of an intense period of aesthetic exploration and her quest for an "integral" cinema based on visual rhythms and compositions. The notorious Seashell, written by Artaud, often is considered the first Surrealist film.

Leche, Naomi Uman's lyrical black-and-white hand-processed portrait of life on a dairy ranch in Central Mexico, returns to Cinematheque, this time accompanied by the premiere of its sequel, Mala Leche. Following members of the same family who have emigrated to California's Central Valley, Mala Leche takes a different formal and emotional approach. The sensual romanticism of the earlier film shifts to a cooler, more analytical depiction of immigrant working life, and together the two films create a haunting portrait of the meaning of labor, place and family as these cross borders, cultures and generations. Uman's removed, in which she literally deconstructs a piece of '70s porn, and Hand Eye Coordination, a reflection of and on her own filmmaking processes, also will be screened. (Irina Leimbacher)

http://www.madcatfilmfestival.org

This group show is a retinal safari that explores and questions how moving-image space is constructed, represented and perceived. Featured filmmakers draw from wildly animated inspirations such as stereoscopic vision, horizontal drifts and Saturday morning cartoons to challenge the notion of consensual filmic space. Indeed, these works investigate complex perceptual and cultural spaces that exist between the audience and the screen. The program includes Ken Jacobs' Flo Rounds the Corner; a live MAX/MSP performance of Untitled (folded space) by Christopher Willits and Scott Pagano; the collagist insanity of Paperrad; Leslie Thorton's warped Have a Nice Day Alone; Emily Richardson's eerie Red Shift; Francien van Everdingen's Hydrophobia; Mark Bain's Rotodynamics in 3D; and the premiere of Michael Snow's WVLNT (Wavelength For Those Who Don't Have the Time), a remix of his 1967 masterpiece Wavelength. (Total Mobile Home)

A rare evening of internationally celebrated local artist Jeanne C. Finley's rarely screened hybrid-media slide-video works. Captivating, critical and humorous, these works from 1982ñ1988 are composed of equal parts audiotape, dissolving 35mm slides and multi-monitor video. Recently remastered from analogue sources, these pivotal works engage a push-pull of documentary and narrative forms woven together with Finley's poetic photographic sensibility. Works to be screened include Against a Single Match, The Darkness Flinches; Common Mistakes; Risks of Individual Actions; Beyond the Times Foreseen; Deaf Dogs Can Hear and I Saw Jesus in a Tortilla. (Total Mobile Home)

Direct from County Dublin, Cecilia Dougherty presents a survey of her provocative and uncannily sensuous work in video. This screening will span her entire career in San Francisco and New York, from the early, unflinching portrayals of sexuality, attachment, love, community and isolation in Claudia, The Drama of the Gifted Child and My Failure to Assimilate, to the lo-res epic melodrama The Coalminer's Granddaughter, featuring Leslie Singer in her famous "Go West, Young Lesbian" leading role. Dougherty, who teaches at Bard College and works with the progressive lit collective Anthology Books, also will present two works from her recent Writers Series, portraits of writers through their writing: Laurie and Kevin & Cedar, sketching Laurie Weeks and local authors Kevin Killian and Cedar Sigo, respectively. (Konrad Steiner)

A program of short docs by young, politically and digitally savvy videomakers who studied ethnographic film at UC Berkeley or SF State. Drag queens, homeless San Franciscans, airport and childcare workers, the Ashby Flea Market, transsexuality and craigslist are the subjects of these sensitive, insightful portraits of Bay Area people and institutions. Together they provide a look at some of the diverse voices of our collective community. Works include .comm.unity (Elana Fiske, Esther Galbraith, Alexis Petru), (in)visibility (Sara Gambin, Marisa Hill, Lea Jones), Ashby (Tim Adams, Michelle Allport, Loie Vindish-Benites), The Ebony Mama Herself (Zeon Kitchiner, Marianne Laleuf, Violeta Foregger), Migrant Motherhood (Clare Bakota, Nicole Lucchesi), Some Reasons For Living (Jesse Cortez, Harjant Gill) and Behind the Checkpoint (Suzanne La, Danielle Muldoon). (Irina Leimbacher)

Cinematheque's second installment of cinema about the psychic effects of our cities and lands. Picking up where the documentary leaves off, featured artists map the Borgesian labyrinths of constructed narrative space in video games, feature films and drawings. Chip Lord shuffles the two most famous San Francisco car-chase scenes in Movie Map. Peggy Ahwesh's She Puppet subverts the gaming environment of Lara Croft, using her video martial-art to neutralize Tomb Raider's violence and explore its graphic terrain. Jeanne Moreau takes her melancholy long walk home across the alleys and backlots of Milan. Peter Greenaway's narrator takes us on A Walk Through H using elaborate fictional maps to guide the journey. We also will screen the fastest and most illegal trip across the streets of Paris ever recorded on film. (Konrad Steiner)

Crass, sick and hilarious, this no-budget 1975 black-and-white feature is filled with the essence of pure, undiluted cinematic derangement, making it the perfect film for a spooky All Hallow's Eve. Like the earliest works of John Waters, Thundercrack! revels in taboo-shattering shocks and an undying love of Hollywood kitsch. Gloriously overwritten by George Kuchar and directed by Curt McDowell, it's a torrent of clich»s heated to the point of lurid parody. The time: A dark and stormy night. The setting: An old, secluded mansion, where the terrifically obscene Mrs. Gert Hammond staggers around with mismatched eyebrows and a vomit-caked wig. Vacuum-powered penis enlargers and a huge cucumber figure prominently in what is surely one of the great underground sleaze epics. Trick or treat! (excerpted from Steve Puchalski, SHOCKCIN)

Advance ticket purchase is recommended; call 415.552.8760 for prices and details. http://www.roxie.com

This intriguing shorts program gives life to stories once unheard, characters on the brink, and dreams with no end. Works include Michael Wilson's Flora's Film, a true story of love and revenge inspired by the life of Eadweard Muybridge; Kim Wood's On My Knees, based on the turn-of-the-century diaries of servant and fetishist Hannah Culwick; Christopher Marino's Finding Fedrick, detailing the search for a missing Boy Scout; Neferiti Kelley Farias' Another, a collaged tribute to the missing women of Juarez; Jay Rosenblatt's Friend Good, a Frankenstein-inspired exploration of the journey from good to evil and back again; Ken Paul Rosenthal's hand-processed I My Bike; Waratap Pasayadaj's poetic Recall; Aaron Hawks' racy Salt; and the world premiere of Dominic Angerame's mesmerizing Consume. (excerpted from Daniela Province, Film Arts Festival)

Advance ticket purchase is recommended; call 415.552.8760 for prices and details.  http://www.roxie.com

Using direct ink and emulsion transfer processes, optical printing and micro-photography, the films of David Gatten investigate the physicality of text, printing and filmóthe fine line between the legible and the illegibleówhile embodying the solitary acts of reading, filmmaking and film viewing. Moxon's Mechanick Exercises uses rephotographed cellophane-tape transfers to meditate on the dissemination of the word and the development of movable type. The Enjoyment of Reading and The Secret History of the Dividing Lineóeach, according to Gatten, part of a series of films "about letters, libraries, ghosts and lovers during the early eighteenth century"óuse similar techniques to investigate divisions of landscapes, objects, ideas and people. As a bonus, Gatten will screen his latest, as-yet-untitled film, generated from da Vinci's Codex on the Flight of Birds. (Steve Polta)

Outsider anthropologist, pioneering musicologist (he compiled the hugely influential Anthology of American Folk Music), radical archivist, mad scientist and enduring mystic, Harry Smith (1923ñ1991) also made remarkable abstract films, synaesthetic fusions of color, sound, rhythm and composition. Cinematheque is presenting a rare opportunity to see the restored 35mm version of Mahagonny, one of Smith's most important yet little-seen works. Smith described his final masterwork as "a mathematical analysis of Duchamp's Large Glass expressed in terms of Weill and Brecht's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny." This is an epic, non-narrative, kaleidoscopic collage, an abstract city symphony portraying New York City as the titular capitalist dystopia. Visually dazzling, musically grand, and featuring cameo appearances by underground icons Allen Ginsberg, Patti Smith and Jonas Mekas, Mahagonny is a must-see work of experimental cinema and twentieth-century culture. (Steve Polta)

Joining us from Berlin, Klaus Eisenlohr's works are concerned with the spatial practices of filmmaking, and with the body in architectural and urban environments. The Sky Above Alexanderplatz and Local Time + 2 1/2 are explorations of the urban environment strongly related to the artist's photographic work on architecture. These earlier films anticipate themes in his most recent video project, realized during a two-year residency in Chicago. Slow SpaceóThe Interviews investigates the intellectual debate over the value of public space in the postmodern city, and features conversations with artists including Deborah Stratman and Thomas Comerford. Slow Space, shown as a work-in-progress, renders the creation, negation or possibilities of public space by wandering through the frame of architecture as questioned by art. (MaÔa Cybelle Carpenter)

New media artist Paul Chan spent one month in Baghdad last winter with the Iraq Peace Team, a campaign of Voices In the Wilderness, the Nobel Peace Prize-nominated group working against the sanctions, and now occupation, of Iraq. He joins us from New York to screen Baghdad In No Particular Order, a series of humorous and tender observational video portraits shot in the calm before the ensuing storm. Chan's experimental videos are radically different in tone and style. The darkly satirical Re: The_Operation uses animated drawings, digital snapshots and fictional letters to depict the Bush administration as wounded, neurosis-ridden soldiers fighting the war against terrorism. Happiness (finally) after 35,000 years of civilization is an animation-installation reinterpreting the drawings of outsider artist Henry Darger and the writings of utopian philosopher Charles Fourier. (Irina Leimbacher)

Saks will give a live lecture-demonstration on various manifestations of viral Internet culture and discuss Tobacco Geezers, his series of anti-smoking Internet and broadcast public service announcements (PSAs) aimed at youth audiences to learn about the evils of genetically modified smokes being developed by Big Tobacco. Saks will sample and culture viral- and meme-infofectious agents including SARS Games, Supergreg, eGray, Punch a Spice Girl, All Your Base, Hamster Dance and ViralFactory. He also will present SARS Bikes, a new series of Internet video spots about custom-made electric bicycles, distributed by the video collective Animal Charm. (Konrad Steiner)

This highly original "cutting attack on American greed from the '50s through the '80s and beyond" (Michael Wilmington, Los Angeles Times) is a chilling pseudo-documentary about the culture of waste-brokering from "arguably the most cynical media artist on the West (or any) Coast today" (Bay Area filmmaker Craig Baldwin). Forevermore is a meditative narrative about the legacy of toxic-waste dumping in the American landscape and psyche. The film takes a freeform, diaristic approach, combining dreams, memories, scientific documentation and visions in a revealing method of truth-telling that, in 1989, presaged the current vogue of post-objective documentaries and narrative reenactments. The film also predicts, and laments, the failure of US Federal EPA initiatives like SUPERFUND and RCRA, exposing them as yet more euphemisms destroyed by corporate politics. (Konrad Steiner)

Two premieres and a survey of Saks' solo and collaborative work involving telephone recordings. Since the early '80s, Saks has utilized audio from surreptitiously recorded telephone conversations, "found" message tapes, prank phone calls and scanner hacks to form a varied chronicle of living with the ubiquitous and invasive telephony of modern culture. Saks will screen two new works: Nation Elevated, which investigates a US National Security Agency (NSA) electronic eavesdropping apparatus called ECHELON in the current climate of "Elevated Security Threat;" and Dirt, which he describes as "utilizing a vast collection of answering machine message tapes culled from ten years of discarded machines found in thrift stores." Also included tonight are the hilarious prank puppet videos Don from Lakewood and You Talk/I Buy, and the instructional tape Fax Attack 1-4. (Konrad Steiner)

How can one narrate the multiple, complex and often elusive threads of contested social history and make them relevant to the present? Travis Wilkerson's work consistently explores this territory, marrying a sophisticated interrogation of history with a provocative approach to documentary film form. In An Injury to One, he weaves together stories of the economic and environmental impact of the copper mining industry, labor organizing, the murder of Wobbly organizer Fred Little, and the life of Dashiell Hammett as they intersect in twentieth-century Butte, Montana. Through his complex narrational structure, his use of archival and contemporary documents, and his innovative juxtapositions of sound, text and image, Wilkerson builds a beautiful, compelling analysis of modern capitalism and labor relations. Also screening: a new version of National Archive and excerpts from a work-in-progress. (Irina Leimbacher)

A beloved and influential force for generations of San Francisco artists, filmmakers and students, Dominic Angerame stands in the tradition of the great North Beach cine-poets. Both rigorously formal and libidinally revealing, Angerame's films construct transcendent moments and poetic metaphors from the landscapes and intimacies of the Bay Area. A unifying integrity runs through all of Angerame's cinematic investigations, a tender and probing use of celluloid that speaks to our shared humanity, both loving and destructive. Tonight's passions include Angerame's new erotic trilogy Pixiscope, The Waifen Maiden and Consume; the beautiful urban diary I'd Rather Be In Paris; the haunting Line of Fire; the award-winning Continuum; and his poetic call to arms Battle StationsóA Navel Adventure. Live music and vocals will be performed by Barbara Jaspersen and Kevin Barnard. (Total Mobile Home)