The year l924 brings to mind many films but probably not The Last Night of Rasputin, a film by the Soviet silent film director Yevgeny Antinov, which after years of suppression is now receiving screenings thanks to glasnost. "Despised by the modernists for his love of narrative, hated by the traditionalists for his modernist techniques, disapproved of by the government for his self-indulgence and individualism, and ignored by their lackey scholars, he was loved only by the people"-or so it was, according to history by Eleanor Antin, a San Diego performance artist who has been creating personas since the early seventies. Two of her most recent creations, Yevgeny Antinov and Eleanora Antinova, a celebrated black ballerina with Diaghilev's Ballet Russe, figure in the film and performance, The Last Night of Rasputin. The notion of a fixed identity is impossible in the multiple worlds of Antin and her personas. Taken together, Antinov/Antinova cover the poles of male/female, white/black, director/actor. But it is perhaps the relationship between presence and absence which is the most provocative. Both Antin, as the creator of the film (and of the personas), and Antinov, the supposed director of the film, are absent within the film and performance. We hear of Antinov only through the reminiscences of Eleanora Antinova; she steps though the proscenium arch and into a historical gap, a life created out of thin air. And in "living" such a life, Eleanor Antin does away with the markers which distinguish history and fiction. Within Antin's time scheme, time can be lost and found. She sees the future as filled with possible pasts. The Last Night of Rasputin is not the last of Yevgeny Antinov's "lost" films, but only the first. On Wednesday, March 7 at 7pm, Eleanor Antin will present a free lecture at California College of Arts and Crafts, Nahl Hall, 52l2 Broadway at College in Oakland.