Pelle Lowe in Person Boston has long been a center for experimental filmmaking. Tonight we feature recent works, very diverse in their styles and concerns, by four of its most established, talented makers. Pelle Lowe, teaching a guest seminar at the San Francisco Art Institute this week, will present Work (1994-5, 20 mins, Color, Super-8mm), made with Saul Levine, which "strains a familiar image by Manet-Olympia-to reveal underlying relations of gender and power between artist and model. By way of a series of displacements, signifiers float like capital through a demimonde of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll." (Lowe) Mark LaPore's observational film, A Depression in the Bay of Bengal (1996, 28 mins, Color/B&W, 16mm), casts an unblinking gaze at contemporary and historical Sri Lanka. Intercutting his own exquisitely photographed images, often camera-roll in length, with early Edison footage (from the aptly named Conquest Pictures), LaPore contrasts the duration of the audience's looking, the duration of certain traditions of everyday life, and the rupture of ethnic strife. "I went to Sri Lanka with the idea that I would remake Basil Wright's 1934 documentary Song of Ceylon. After spending three months there I realized just how impossible that would be....Each of the places in which he filmed still exist, but thirteen years of ethnic war have colored the way in which those places can be perceived. I have made a film about traveling and living in a distant place, which looks at aspects of daily life, and where the war shadows the quotidian with a dark and rumbling step." (LaPore) Luther Price is largely known for his edgy super-8mm films. run (1994, 13 mins, Color, Sound on tape, Super-8mm) reveals another side to his work. In a beautiful, lyrical portrait centered on pigeons on telephone wires, the splice marks themselves become part of his formal patterns.-Kathy Geritz