An introduction to the retrospective, foregrounding filmmakerswhose other films appear in later programs. Each uses a unique formalapproach to seize the physical nature of the film medium as it confrontsthe viewer, often via manipulation of the human body-throughself-portrait, performer, or model. Kubelka'sMosaik im Vertrauen, Austria's first major avant-garde film (shown inits beautiful original 35mm version), serves as a fitting portal to theseries. Stunning in assuredness and ambition, it is at once a bitinglyironic glimpse of postwar Vienna and a thorough subversion of narrativeconventions. Kren's early 48 Heads...regurgitates a group of reprintedimages as grist for his cinematic mill; Bodybuilding is Ernst Schmidt,Jr.'s raucous depiction of an Otto Muehl "Materialaktion";Hernals, by Hans Scheugl, is a carefully constructed study contrastingtwo cinematic views of a violent incident; Export's Mann & Frau& Animal, a lacerating assertion of the animal nature of humanity;Manufraktur is Tscherkassky's tactile re-compression of the materialspace formed by a found image; Mattuschka's Kugelkopf, a creation of acontrasty black-and-white world where skin and blood mingledisconcertingly with other objects in the picture; Color de Luxe is anassaultive meditation by Dietmar Brehm on images of the corporeal; andMartin Arnold's passage à l'acte, an inside-out version of thevisual and social dynamics implicit in a Hollywood studio film.-SteveAnker