Leslie Thornton returns to PFA for her first visit since 1989. Thornton is known for her brilliant montage of found footage and found sound, in which one is rarely supplemental to the other, but more often misaligned to produce uncertainty and mis-recognition. Beautiful and poetic while often perplexing and surprising, Thornton's work-whether film or video, drawing on old or new technologies-seems to imagine a cinema that was "made either at the dawn of cinema or at its demise" (Roddy Bogawa). Tonight's selection includes Thornton's lush and evocative Adynata (1983, 30 mins, Color) which uses excerpts from Theresa Cha's Dictée and a host of well-known films to create a semiological overload which critiques ways the West links the Orient with femininity. X-Tracts (1975, 9 mins, B&W) and Jennifer, Where Are You? (1981, 10 mins, Color) are early indications of her interest in language, and in the relationship between voice and sexual difference. Chimp for Normal Short (1999, 7 mins, Sepia) reflects on children and chimps finding "enough accidental similarity and difference to make us really uncomfortable" (Thomas Zummer). Another Worldly (1999, 24 mins, B&W), comprised of dance footage, has been called a culture jam, an anti-musical, and a recursive ethnography. Plus her most recent film, Have a Nice Day Alone (2001, 7 mins, B&W), "a palpable experience of an 'artificial intelligence,' one that is both complicit with us and utterly alien....Thornton's newest work sings like it doesn't have any conception of music-like it's the very first song." (Alan Sondheim)-Kathy Geritz