Continuing our series exploring the history of abstraction in cinema, presented on the first Tuesday of each month through May, tonight's program suggests the diversity of abstract films in the forties and fifties. The concerns reflected vary from Francis Lee's abstract expressionist 1941, a response to World War II, to Dwinelle Grant's research on perceptual phenomena in Color Sequence, thought to be the first flicker film. In Geography of the Body a magnifying glass was used to explore, and defamiliarize, the human body, a composite image of Marie Menken, Willard Maas and George Baker, while the text relates an interior journey. Marie Menken's Hurry! Hurry! reuses scientific footage shot with a camera which magnifies beyond (initial) recognition. Harry Smith has been characterized as a hermetic artist with ties to alchemy and magic; his own descriptions of his films use ironic metaphors of the body. He calls them "cinematic excreta" and claims they are organized in patterns "derived from the interlocking beats of respiration, the heart and the EEG Alpha component." Mary Ellen Bute, credited with making the first film using electronic imagery; Norman McLaren, a pioneer of cameraless films; and Shirley Clarke, who brought her experience of dance to film, all variously explored relationships between music and image. --Kathy Geritz