Nina Fonoroff in Person Nina Fonoroff returns to the Bay Area to present her most recent film, The Accursed Mazurka (1994, 38 mins), which she describes: "Dramatic recitations, clinical records, obsessive journal entries, and watercolor illustrations depicting a pierced and bleeding brain are some elements that make up this fabulation around the occasion of mental breakdown. The event is reconstructed by a woman who has temporarily lost her 'reason,' her body, and her sense of personal identity. At first she attributed her illness to repeated hearings of a piece of music on the radio. Neither tragic victim nor heroic survivor of the mental health system, she must endure the sense that she is a 'conductor of electrical current, a direct feedback loop, a dis-integrated circuit'....On the road to recovery, the protagonist reflects that health is merely an elaborate device, an apparatus as necessary as it is elusive." Two earlier films will also be presented: Department of the Interior (1986, 8.5 mins, B&W), in which "my aim was not to 'represent' or 'express' a particular state of mind or emotion, but to endeavor to generate a set of possibilities for new connections between sensory experience and the experience of meaning"; and A Knowledge They Cannot Lose (1989, 17 mins, Super-8mm), which "concerns the death of my father...It is less an epitaph and more a reflection of my struggle to mourn." (NF) Nina Fonoroff has an MFA from the graduate film program at San Francisco Art Institute and currently teaches at Hampshire College.