Artist in Person The Malady of Death is an adaptation of Marguerite Duras's story of the same name-her text comprises the voiceover-which is a particular reading of the story in which word and image, in a complex interplay, explore male sexuality. The processes of reading are revealed to be complicated, poetic and political, as an unspecified narrator names and describes "the malady" and tells of a man and woman's sexual encounters. The male "you" is multiplied, depicted by many men, each photographed nude, variously fragmented and abstracted, studied and distanced. The "her," the "difference," is literally absent from the image but present metaphorically, "possessed" but not known. While societal connections between possessing sexually, economically, and by force are explored in relation to male sexuality, the implications of the act of looking permeate all these discourses. The erotic depiction of the male body for both the camera and the viewer, the displaced and disembodied representation of the woman, and the structured alternation of image and black-at times like an eye opening and closing, but also suggestive of what culturally can and cannot be imagined-create a viewer who cannot easily possess the story, but who must rather read and reread. (Text performed by JD Trow, c. 40 mins, Color) It will be preceded by Typography/Surface Writing (1983, 37 mins, Color), in which "like Kafka's In the Penal Colony, from which it is loosely adapted, the main theme is violence: physical, psychological, and environmental" (J.S.) and Historical Film Study: Bringing the Blues to Jazz (1982, 6 mins, B&W).-Kathy Geritz Jeffrey Skoller teaches The Language of Cinema in Film Studies at UC Berkeley, Spring 1994, and at San Francisco Art Institute and California College of Arts and Crafts.