Introduced by Alan Sekula (Les Hommes du port). Alain Tanner, Switzerland's preeminent film director, has a passion for the sea and seaports, for travel beyond an imagined horizon, that one can detect in his feature films. In Men of the Port, he returns to his neorealist beginnings and to the Genoa port where he indulged his dreams of the sea as a young man. Tanner captures the gestures and voices of Genoa today, a port in decline with much changed. But its core is unchanged: union solidarity, self-management, democracy, and pride are still the central precepts of dock life. If Tanner's romantic ideas of seafaring are belied by the dockworkers, for whom the port is devoid of any exotic notions, the inverse is also true: the sense of unfulfillment inherent in the life of a cineaste is contrasted to the profound and complete fulfillment expressed by the men of the port, nourished by "our culture of freedom and unity." Nor is the workplace lacking in intellect and art: Tanner interviews poets, records an original ballad, and finds the philosopher in every man. Our program is introduced by the photographer Alan Sekula, whose MATRIX exhibition Fish Story, concerning "maritime space-the world of harbors, ships, and the littoral edges of the sea," was featured at the museum in 1994 and was subsequently published as a book. Sekula is Director of Photography at the California Institute of the Arts, in Valencia, and the author of Traffic in Photographs (M.I.T. Press). He is currently a Getty scholar researching the new stage of development of the Los Angeles port at San Pedro, a study that arises from his interest in changes and developments-including issues of labor and economics-in ports around the world.