Cinema by its very nature is evidence of times past, of people, places, impressions. Yet the actual experience of watching a film is ephemeral, ending when the theater lights come up. The films on tonight's program work with this difficult territory between absence and presence. In The Secret Story by Janie Geiser, decaying toy figures, old illustrations and other objects suggest lost narratives which are re-pieced together. Kerry Laitala's Secure the Shadow uses antique medical images of the disturbed body to develop a haunting meditation on mortality. Stan Brakhage's hand-painted The "b" Series is a beautifully visualized introspection on ephemerality and impermanence. The inevitability of loss also figures in Timoleon Wilkins' MM, here including the medium of cinema itself. Fragments of a life are re-exposed in Greta Snider's Flight, creating shadowy rayograms in a memorial to her father. Dominic Angerame's Line of Fire links telling details of a damaged body and a destroyed home. Guy Sherwin's Under the Freeway is a subtle record of an urban site that has disappeared. Images culled from cinema's earliest days are magically transformed into a ghostly train journey in Ken Jacobs's The Georgetown Loop.-Curated by Kathy Geritz and Steve Anker