While typically one reads a book and watches a film, the avant garde has incorporated text with film since its earliest days. Artists have combined text and image for a variety of reasons, from an appreciation of typography to a desire to multiply discourses. Tonight and next Tuesday we present films that use text and image to examine some aspect of sexual discourse. In tonight's program, the use of written text allows the artists to make connections, to analyze power within social and political contexts and, crucially, to use language to realign power by disconnecting words from their traditional usage. These artists say "violence," "homophobia," "pleasure" where others have said nothing. It perhaps isn't surprising to find such concern with (re-)defining terms in feminist and lesbian/gay cinema. With the power to name and describe comes the power to make visible a world. Richard Kwietniowski's humorous alternative gay alphabet exposes not a parallel vocabulary but an oppositional one (Alfalfa, UK, 1987, 9 mins). In Seven Lucky Charms (USA, 1992, 16 mins), Lisa Mann contextualizes one woman's response to repeated spousal abuse, and implicates viewers in a rethinking of their own place within power relations. Yann Beauvais' AIDSIDA (sid a ids, France, 1992, 6 mins) links the treatment of AIDS in France with institutionalized, systematic homophobia. In Linda Tadic's powerful Systems of Authority, Methods of Repression (USA, 1990, 40 mins) she recalls a (personal) history of sexual abuse while detailing a contemporary (social) history of political activism-both against a background of dominant ideology. -Kathy Geritz