Preceded by short: Prelude to the Cinema (Préamble au cinématographe) (Jean-Dominique Lajoux, France, 1995): A documentary produced by the Cinémathèque Française, animating the "chronophotographes" (photographs of motion) Etienne-Jules Marey made on celluloid starting in 1890. "The technical and aesthetic qualities of these films look simply astounding. Their 're-animation' gives us a chance to better appreciate the work of Marey (1830-1904), the nineteenth century's first filmmaker" (Pordenone Festival '95). (15 mins, In French with English subtitles, 35mm) (Das Stahltier). Commissioned to celebrate the centennial of the Nuremberg-Fü;rth line, this film by a great German photographer from the twenties, Willy Otto Zielke, was a work of the avant-garde that was banned by the Third Reich for its decadent aesthetics. Zielke was influenced by surrealism, and the film's originality is to be found in its unusual narrative organization, a daring collage of abstractions, rhythms, and historical commentary, all supported by the music of Peter Kreuder. With accentuated angles, a rotating camera, superimpositions, eroticized details of machines, and a prologue edited and framed so as to place the railways in perspective with the industrial world, this is a film with echoes of Dziga Vertov-the commissioned propaganda film which becomes an aesthetic experience. A crucial rediscovery, Das Stahltier is a rare example of a deliberately avant-garde feature-length production made during the period of national socialism in Germany.-From notes by Dominique Païni