In Stephen Matheson's Stanley (1995, 15 mins), an obsessive tool collector relies on the control and symmetry promised by his curious devices. Welding interviews, alligator wrestling, and found footage, this portrait describes the efficacy of ritualized gestures in the production of sanity. The Narrative Passage (1991, 13:50 mins) features Torsten Burns as a man stricken by a kind of masculinized hysteria. Struggling with the limitations of the body, he seeks some posture, some orientation compatible with his cramped physical environment, but he just doesn't seem to fit. A potent critique of inculcated anxiety, Burns's pitched performance approaches pure frenzy. In Corpse and Mirror (1996, 25 mins), a grown son recalls his deceased father's bout with madness. His memories are constantly tripped up by the inability of language to express extreme emotional states. A sure-handed mix of expressive music and haunting images, Allard and Diekman's work shows how the nomenclature of mental illness can dictate a family's dark history. On Our Own (1990, 47 mins) follows the comic misadventures of two psychiatric patients released from a state-run asylum due to funding cuts. Gibbons and Oursler play the severely disturbed protagonists as they re-learn the absurdities of life among the sane. Particularly pointed is a sequence in which artist Tony Conrad conducts simultaneous therapy sessions with his two wards.-Steve Seid