Half the size of 16mm, a quarter the size of 35mm, super-8 has traditionally been considered an amateur's medium, and prior to video, was a popular home-movie format. Recently, however, filmmakers have brought super-8 film out of obscurity, retrieving discarded super-8 cameras from family closets, and made films which turn super-8's marginal status into an asset. The low-tech aesthetic, the possibility of working at home without sophisticated equipment, and the fragility of the projected image have variously attracted experimental filmmakers. In Saul Levine's Notes After a Long Silence (1989, 15 mins), image and sound are rapidly and disjunctively edited in an aggressive critique of patriarchy. Levine's film is not readily reduced to an easy reading; it suggests connections between symbolic and cultural realms, while juxtaposing gender-based associations. In Jennifer Montgomery's Age 12: Love with a Little L (1990, 23 mins), short scenes of role-playing and re-enactments are loosely associated in terms of power relations. Adults playing grammar-school girls, two women demonstrating wolf gestures and a Lacanian lecture suggest the displacement of sexuality into other realms. Local filmmaker Julie Murray's A Legend of Parts (1990, 10 mins) combines found footage and collected imagery in an energetic, frenetic orchestration of gestures from toy games to exploitation films. Five O'Clock Worlds (1990, 30 mins)*, the second part of Lewis Klahr's ongoing series, Tales of the Forgotten Future, is created primarily by collaging cut-out images from magazines, picture dictionaries and family photos. The three episodes, The Organ Minder's Gronkey, The Hi Fi Cadets and Verdant Sonar, re-examine conventional narratives, while restructuring historical and cultural possibilities in hallucinatory stories. --Kathy Geritz