As is the case with the independent cinema, much of Chilean video was produced with the support of foreign cultural institutes, particularly those of France and Germany. By offering scholarships abroad, organizing video festivals and screening avant-garde films, a European mode of alternative media practice was encouraged among Chilean videomakers. This has, in effect, minimized the adulation of pop culture that marks many Third World video communities influenced by the U.S.'s media spectacle. The videoworks in tonight's program are preoccupied with a provocative balance between the political and the aesthetic. In Three Women , Leopoldo Correa takes footage of the widows of the "Desgollados" (left-wing activists who were murdered by the Pinochet regime) as they are assaulted with water cannons and heightens the historical moment into an elegy about radical oppression. Using the rhythms of a traditional Mapuche song, Juan Downey's No stresses the need for political opposition in this PSA for the 1988 plebiscite. Nestor Olhagaray's The Appointment and Interview Story, which he made with Marcela Poch, establish sharp contrasts between media representations and their intended social uses. The Appointment juxtaposes looming images from surveillance cameras with desensitized shots of unidentified citizens. Interview Story has a passively disrobed woman listening to opera while newsreel footage of military manuevers threatens to overwhelm the scene. Francisco Arevalo's Carriers of Fantasy takes on the commodification of desire by deposing images from corporate advertising. Pablo Lavin's absurdist On The Road explores the impossibility of personal fulfillment under harsh political rule. Dreams of sexual and social liberation are stymied in this landscape of endemic frustration. In Gonzalo Justiniano's carefree documentary Pacifist Warriors, weekend punks enjoy the neutralized club-life of Santiago. Rather than taking on the rebellious stance of their British models, these Chilean youths have surprisingly appropriated the iconography of punk without the informing anarchy.