Linda Tadic in Person Deftly making connections between sexual abuse, the struggle for reproductive freedom, protests against political repression, and conventions of film construction, Linda Tadic's recent feminist documentary, Systems of Authority, Methods of Repression is at once committed and compelling. While the range of material examined is broad, Tadic's underlying point is that abuse can only be understood within a social context. Thus she cuts from an ironic coupling of close-up shots of Washington presidential monuments with a voice-over describing Freud's retraction of his seduction theory, to documentary video footage of a political march, and then to a clip from Night of the Hunter in which a young boy, referring to preacher Mitchum, claims "he's not my dad." The statement resonates, from the personal level-as throughout, in voice-over, the filmmaker recalls experiences of sexual abuse by her stepfather-to an activist position, a rejection of patriarchal forms which perpetuate exploitation. --Kathy Geritz "Current Events begins with the premise that unspeakable things occur daily in the world but, for most of us, they are just momentary electronic interference on the screens of our personal lives. Distant people and terrible events break the surface of the news, vie for our attention, and then disappear-someone else's reality, to us no more than a dream. The question of how to bridge the gap between concern and action lies at the heart of this quietly provocative film. Arlyck juxtaposes black-and-white film from the turn of the century and footage from his own sixties documentary with recent scenes from the daily lives of strangers, family and friends... While examining the ways in which activities of the sixties have been turned into caricature, the film searches for the elusive nature of present-day political sensibility."