Tonight's program of recent Austrian experimental films will be introduced by Martin Arnold, whose film, Pièce Touchée, received first place in this year's San Francisco International Film Festival's Golden Gate Awards, Experiments in Form division, as well as at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. In it he reworks a brief moment from a fifties Hollywood film, isolating and repeating gestures so that a typical movie kiss tells an unintended story; it reveals more hesitation than desire. The program features films by five young filmmakers, most of whose work will be seen for the first time in the Bay Area. Dietmar Brehm: 3 Kronen (l987, 3 mins, Color, s-8); 3's Company (l989, 4.5 mins, Color, s-8); The Murder Mystery (l987/88, 20 mins, B&W and Color, s-8): "...a pornographic-sadistic phantasy of murder in flickering black-and-white and torn images..." Brehm is a graphic artist and painter, and has made over sixty films. Peter Tscherkassky: tabula rasa (l987/89, l8 mins, B&W and Color, s-8): "The title indicates that an attempt is being made to say everything; that the claim to enlightenment, aesthetic modernity and perception are not attitudes, but the serious underlying grounds of his films..." --Alexander Horwath. Tscherkassky is a filmmaker and theorist. Lisl Ponger: Souvenirs (l982, l2 mins, Silent, s-8): "...especially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality and eventually in one's own."--Susan Sontag, On Photography; Train of Recollection (l988, 6 mins, Silent): "The past isn't dead. It's not even past."--William Faulkner. Ponger is a photographer and filmmaker, and organized a tribute to Austrian experimental film at the Vienna Museum of the 20th Century in l987. Mara Mattuschka: Kugelkopf (Eine Ode to IBM) (l985, 6 mins, B&W); Parasympathica (l986, 4 mins, B&W); Es hat mich sehr gefreut (l987, l.5 mins, B&W): "We found that the `Doppelganger-Motiv,' that is, the split into two or more personalities, is frequently encountered in many experimental films by women. Usually, the division is also related to black and white (masculine and feminine). Nearly all of Mara Mattuschka's films deal...with a divided personality (always played by Mara herself)..."--Birgit Hein, International Experimental Film Congress catalog, Toronto, l989. Mattuschka studied at the studio of Maria Lassnig at the Vienna School of Applied Art. Martin Arnold: Pièce Touchée (l989, l5 mins, B&W)