Tonight's is the first of three programs in which autobiography is examined within a social and cultural context; we have selected films in which flashbacks are given a wide angle. Whether looking back on a childhood, attempting to understand the adult one has become, or as a child trying to make sense of the universe, our comprehension of the world and our place in it is shaped and patterned by language. In Sink or Swim, Su Friedrich uses black-and-white home movies, archival footage and her own images to examine her relationship with her father, whose sudden departure from her life when she was still a young girl only increased his presence in her thoughts. Even the twenty-six short narratives of her film are structured using one-word categories, many of which might have been lifted from his field of anthropology: virginity, utopia, seduction, pedagogy, kinship, etc. But while her dad wrote obtuse, critical articles on kinship while his family was breaking up, Friedrich's "study" is filled with personal, fragile memories. In the silent Messages, Guy Sherwin keeps a diary record of his five-year-old daughter Maya's questions, drawings and writings. Her attempts to use language are intercut with hieroglyphics, Braille, sign language, and other meaning systems which place the viewer in a similar position as Maya, on the border of understanding. The relationship between language and one's perception of the world is explored through formal studies of the landscape and everyday objects over which Maya's questions are printed: why can't you see the wind? are clouds made from steam? is the sun following us? Ultimately the diary reflects back on Sherwin and connects the interpretive, poetic possibilities of language to the perceptions of an artist. --Kathy Geritz