It is entirely appropriate that in a month when we are reviving so many Eastern European classics which themselves represent subversive acts of art, we should welcome as our guest Amos Vogel, one of whose specialties is censorship and banned cinema. Vogel's studies delve into the insurgent nature of cinema itself; in his definitive book Film as a Subversive Art (1974) he writes: "Subversion in cinema starts when the theater darkens and the screen lights up. For the cinema is a place of magic where psychological and environmental factors combine to create an openness to wonder and suggestion, an unlocking of the unconscious. It is a shrine at which modern rituals rooted in atavistic memories and subconscious desires are acted out in darkness and seclusion from the outer world. The power of the image, our fear of it, the thrill that pulls us toward it, is real. Short of closing one's eyes-in cinema, a difficult and unprecedented act-there is no defense against it... "`In our age, as never before, truth implies the courage to face chaos' (Erich Neuman)...The enormity of chaos has necessitated enormity of artistic means to portray and dissolve it. The ugly, the grotesque, the brutal, and the absurd provide the truths of a society in decline. Those who depict these truths are the 'committed' artists of our day. Far from withdrawing into empty aestheticism, they are themselves anguished configurations of the alienation and deeper wisdom they portray. The simple answers of the 1930s are behind them. On a higher plane, they have returned to the questions."