Following Yevgeny Antinov's "rediscovered" silentfilm, The Last Night of Rasputin, it comes as no surprise that a 1926film of his has been found in a little-known Odessa film archive. Theopening crawl reveals that this is actually a recreation in the silentYiddish film style; Eleanor Antin, San Diego-based performance artistand filmmaker, "hope(s) to make (Antinov's) complete oeuvre."In the opening scene, a man on a balcony waves his hand and brings tolife a Russian shtetl. Seemingly created from thin air, the conventionsand stereotypes are actually drawn from Yiddish literature, film, andtheater. The story, complete with a dybbuk and an exorcism, is of amerchant's daughter who loves a poet but is promised to the localbutcher. When a gypsy caravan comes to town (with Eleanor Antin as aseductive dancer) the poet leaves his fiancée to join the artistsin lively cafe debates regarding the role of art, Zionism, socialism,and anarchism: ethnic life meets modernism. Knowing the events thatfollowed and literally erased this history, Antin's recreation can beseen to subtly re-engage this debate, perhaps repositioning the paradigmof popular art, politics, and modernism. --Kathy Geritz