Before film found its voice, the silent film "spoke" with theraise of an eyebrow, the flip of a hand, the measure of a gait.Tonight's program rediscovers the expressivity of gesture in both silentand sound films. When focus shifts away from the "moving lips," theentire screen can speak. Ken Jacobs's Keaton's Cops (1991, 20 mins,Silent) makes this explicit with its precise highlighting of typicallyunnoticed gestures of Buster Keaton. Andy Warhol's Blow Job (1963, 35mins, Silent) harks back to the silent film in offering us a close-up ofa face, and forward to the modernist film in thwarting our expectations.Film's beginnings can be traced to studies of motion, such as Marey'sanalyses of human and animal movements (Marey Documents, France,1888-1904, excerpt, Silent). Such scientific inquiries led to time andmotion studies, such as Frank ("Cheaper by the Dozen") Gilbreth's filmexperiments with repetitive gestures in the work place (The OriginalFilms of Frank B. Gilbreth, 1968, excerpt). The socializing content ofGeorges M?i?s's early trick films is less immediately apparent, but asLucy Fischer has observed, in M?i?s's magic it is women who disappearwith the wave of a male magician's hand. (The Vanishing Lady, 1898, TheMystic Swing, 1900, Mystic Reincarnation, 1901, France, c.5 mins,Silent). In Home Stories (Germany, 1991, 6 mins, Color), MatthiasMueller edits clips from American films of the fifties in a wonderful,horrifying orchestration of the gestures of women trapped in their homesand by the redundancy of theiroptions. In contrast, Abigail Child findsplayful, topsy-turvy options in the antics of men and women in herdance-inspired rethinking of early home movies, Covert Action (1984, 11mins). -Kathy Geritz