Preceded by Short: Able To Laugh: The Access to Comedy Players (Michael Dougan, 1993, 27 mins): Profiles the San Francisco-based troupe featuring the outrageous Benjamin Stuart. (3/4" video, From artist) Produced for England's Channel Four, Stephen Dwoskin's Face of Our Fear is a richly conceived essay about the evolving image of disability. Dwoskin, a highly accomplished experimental filmmaker, begins with the declaration that the historically distorted images of people with disabilities constitute a "negation of selfhood." He then traces this concerted effort through two thousand years of Western culture, beginning with the Greek notion of the idealized body and its opposite, the fabulous races. Using contemporary film clips, literary quotations, performance, and pictorial records, Face of Our Fear looks at the Court's infatuation with "monsters" during the Middle Ages, the "charity cripples" of the Enlightenment, the freakshows of the nineteenth century, each a resort to oppressive stigmatization. Dwoskin's intrepid critique of the face of disability doesn't come to you with cap in hand.-Steve Seid