Transmission Attempts Florian Zeyfang (Germany, 1998, video, 2:30)
What do politics mean to the artist, and what does the artist mean to politics? Quotes from films made in the 60s and 70s, when answers to these questions were still being sought, are transformed via ‘projections’ and ‘dis­turbances’ into an animated vision.

What Farocki Taught Jill Godmilow (USA, 1998, video, 3o:oo)
Godmilow’s film is literally a replica, in color and in English, of Harun Farocki’s German-language black & white film ‘Inextinguishable Fire’ from 1969. At the peak of the Vietnam War, Farocki graphically illustrated the physical properties of Napalm B. ‘What Farocki Taught’ reopens the discussion around the faithful representation of information, (political) histo­ry and human experience which Walter Benjamin set in motion with his ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’.

Ekleipsis Tran T. Kim-Trang (USA, 1998, video, 22:28)
A newspaper article about a group of Cambodian women in California who suffer from ‘hysterical blindness’ was the impetus for this video. The loss of sight amongst these women is a physical reaction to the traumatic stress they were left with after the civil war in their homeland. Ekleipsis intertwines the history of this war with that of the phe­nomenon of hysteria, and shows how some people manage to overcome emotional pain and loss.

First Lesson (uit: Night Lessons) Guillermo Cifuentes (Chili, 1998, video, 9:oo)
In Night Lessons, Cifuentes personally and subjectively posits himself in relation to a history of political violence in Chile. His rituals, carried out in isolation, invoke media images from the 1980s. The images are examined as com­ponents of a collective representation of the past, a past that is written on bodies.