Two films concerned with watching, silently. This emphasis on the visual runs deep in our culture, where "to see" can mean "to know." In Abraham Ravett's The Balcony, his camera observes, undetected, presumably from his balcony, his neighbors' activities on balconies in row after row of high-rise apartments. Unlike Hitchcock's Rear Window, where every watched window frames a drama, here the accumulated details are the minutiae of the everyday. Yet regardless of how mundane the "caged in" lives may seem, it is difficult to pull our eyes away from the view-our voyeuristic desires match the project of filmmaking. Stan Brakhage has often described his films as documentaries, referring to his investigations of how we see, whether in experiments with cinema's unique capacities to view the world or attempts to replicate "closed-eye" vision. In 1971, Brakhage was allowed to photograph an autopsy, a word which comes from the Greek, meaning "the act of seeing with one's own eyes." In the resulting difficult, intensely disturbing work, Brakhage attempts to understand death. In seeking the ultimate mystery-in asking why-he encounters the physical, anonymous human body, and in the process "sees" the limits of knowing through observation. Kathy Geritz