Michael Wallin has been at the nerve center of San Francisco filmmaking since the late sixties, when he studied with Bruce Baillie, James Broughton and Peter Kubelka; he was for years a co-manager of the Canyon Cinema Cooperative. More recently, Wallin was a recipient of the 1988 Phelan Art Awards in Filmmaking. Robert Anbian in Release Print describes Wallin's films as "intensely personal, autobiographical works (which) seek a kind of metaphoric transformation in the manipulated film image." Tall Grass (1968/1980, 15 mins, Silent, Color): Portrait of the artist as a young romantic: shot in 8mm in 1968, during a summer spent in Mendocino, and blown up and edited in 16mm in 1980. Monitoring the Unstable Earth (1980, 20 mins, Color): In Monitoring...my interest was in presenting a sort of "topological revue" which could possibly...suppress habitual response patterns (naming, judging, etc.), and enable my viewer to really SEE. Fearful Symmetry (1981, 15 mins, Silent, Color): The film uses precisely mathematically determined single-framing...to forcefully bring to consciousness an inherent symmetry and balance in the visual field. Along the Way (1983, 20 mins, Color): A visual journal...The overriding interest in landscape persists; the result is an interesting tension between the formal and the personal... Michael Wallin Decodings (1988, 15 mins, B&W): Wallin's acclaimed new film explores the possibilities of, and barriers to, intimate relationships between men in our society by "decoding" the messages conveyed in our collective media consciousness. The result is "a profoundly moving, allegorical search for identity from the documents of collective memory, in this case found footage from the forties and fifties. Wallin unfolds his parable at a steady, voluptuous pace...The search for self ends in aching poignancy...marking the dawning of anguish and loss..." (Manohla Dargis, Village Voice). Selected for Whitney Biennale '89.