Intifada, the Palestinian uprising in Israel's occupied territories, has come to us courtesy of the media. And it is through the media that our impressions of the uprising have accreted via image and text. Elia Suleiman, a Palestinian filmmaker living in New York, and Jayce Salloum, a Lebanese-Canadian video artist, have taken on our accumulated (mis)impressions by tracing their genesis in cinema and television. This highly kinetic tableau of appropriated sights and sounds works most earnestly to expose the racial biases concealed in familiar images. The storehouse of misconstrued ideas about Arab culture is shown in all its cinematic splendor, from the denigrating seraglios in films such as Elvis Presley's Harem Scarum and Valentino's The Sheik, to the dehumanization of Arabs as evinced by epics like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Speaking for oneself would be compelling if it were nothing more than this compendium of Arab stereotypes, but it is much more. Taking snippets from feature films (Exodus, Lawrence of Arabia, Black Sunday, Little Drummer Girl etc.) and network news, Suleiman and Salloum have constructed an oddly wry narrative, mimicking the history of Mideast politics. Through key political phrases (the continual call for a "substantive dialogue") and pictorial motifs (hooded terrorists wielding Uzis), we see repetitive distortions transformed into foreign policy. The injustice, of course, is that this is our history of their struggle. Speaking for oneself is a first attempt at making the image and the act one and the same. --Steve Seid Compact and poetic, Measures of Distance describes the pain of cultural separation. Mona Hatoum, a Palestinian living in London, uses a thin veil of Arabic script to signify the distance between memory and the living history of her dispersed family.