In Visionary Film, his analysis of the American avant-garde, P. Adams Sitney discusses what he terms "trance films," works by Maya Deren, Sidney Peterson, Curtis Harrington, Kenneth Anger and others which are united by their use of "elements of dream, ritual, dance, and sexual metaphor." Sitney relates them to The Blood of a Poet, which he posits as the "source of the trance film." He also compares Deren and Alexander Hammid's Meshes of the Afternoon to Un chien andalou; and elaborates on its debt to-and difference from-its Surrealistic precursors. Comparing an image of Maya Deren at a window with one from Un chien andalou of Pierre Batcheff at his window, he notes, "Batcheff, leering out of the window, is an icon of represesed sexual energy. Deren, with her hands lightly pressed against the window pane, embodies the reflective experience." Paul Hammond argues in his introduction to The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on Cinema, "It needs emphasizing that Surrealism's incompatibility with the partial, aesthetic program of the avant-garde remains a consistent one up to the present day. Critics who insist on pursuing the purely academic question of the Surrealist influence...on say, the American avant-garde of the 1940s and after (Maya Deren, Curtis Harrington, Kenneth Anger, through to Stan Brakhage and others) are straining after a gnat. Even if they overlook-as they usually do-the basic ethical incompatibility...they must be aware that...the Americans have never really got to grips with Surrealism, that the psycho-sexual obsessions of Anger, Harrington and Markopoulos, however 'oneiric' they may be, owe everything to Jean Cocteau, a lot to each other, and nothing to Buñuel." Tonight you can draw your own conclusions, as we present four classic American experimental works from the late forties which either relate a dream or create a dream-like experience, followed on the second program by Jean Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet. We also include Deren's never completed Witch's Cradle, filmed in the Surrealist "Art of This Century" gallery in New York in 1942, with Marcel Duchamp as an actor. Surrealist- or Cocteau-influenced? Or if you prefer, let the dreamers dream undisturbed. --Kathy Geritz