"Over the fifty years covered by tonight's program, text has been used in avant-garde and experimental films in diverse ways for diverse effect. In some, the combination of pictorial image and text is poetic, a poetry which is personal and intimate, or based on the ambiguity between seeing and naming. In others, the text is the only image, creating 'visual' or 'concrete poetry' emphasizing the aesthetics of the filmed word, the relationship between words, or the difference between spoken and written texts. Text is used to give access to both the personal-anxieties, dreams, memories-and the social-the role of institutions, the politics of filmmaking, the contrast between what is said and left unsaid in public discourse. While the inclusion of text alters the medium's usual emphasis on pictorial imagery, its use is (perhaps surprisingly) visually compelling-aesthetically, but also in the almost compulsive act of reading which is emphasized in films which interfere with it and which play with the processes and possibilities of creating and finding meaning." Kathy Geritz