By Johnny Ray Huston

SHOCKED AWAKE BY a dream: that's the feeling created by José Luis Rodriguez's films – along with an underlying sense that his unbound work gives this commercial, militaristic surveillance era the home-movie stab in the eye it so richly deserves. Those who survived the Reagan years might remember phrases like "transgressive" and "high risk." Rodriguez's impulsive approach deserves better buzzwords than those, or better yet, no buzzwords at all. Poetic, primal, touched: throw adjectives at his Super-8 vision and they vanish into a still-expanding space.

Trouble loves him. An upcoming San Francisco Cinematheque screening (part of its "Fresh Eyes" program) is a homecoming of sorts for Rodriguez. It's taking place at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he was a student recently, and where he was temporarily suspended because of reactions to some of his short films – works the cinematheque will be showing this week. While the art world's leading straight white elephant tamer brings his moneyed circus to a local movie theater, here's the termite's revenge. Call it a triumphant return of the repressed.

Untitled is Rodriguez's (or, as he sometimes signs his films, José Luis Duarte's) preferred word to use in a title, and his scratched-out scrawl titles alone are livelier than many full-length features I've seen at multiplexes and art houses over the past year. A sample: "Untitled – Sex with dad," "Silence of the bride – He doesn't love me anymore, I want to die," "Untitled – Not the title."

A ceremonial self-sacrifice on the altar of family and religion, "Untitled – Animation" is atypical in terms of form; its collage approach stems from a class taught by Lewis Klahr. But in terms of subject matter, it provides a glossary: crawl through a black window frame and you'll find blood relatives and iconic objects from Rodriguez's other movies. Knives, faces, torsos (a spindly martyr in tighty whities), cocks, and gravestone angels perform a dance. Mouths swallow heads and blades pierce orifices or make new ones, their movements helped along by little foamy waves of spit.

Once he's placed a viewer in unsettling terrain, Rodriguez lingers just long enough for the mind to acclimate, then pulls the floor out or rips a hole in the wall formed by the screen. As "Homesick – I miss you" runs wild over scorched earth, the ground itself becomes hypnotic and abstract, like the patterns glimpsed by closed eyes just before sleep; that is, until the camera stumbles upon trauma. "Despoiled – I'm sorry" starts out staring deep into trauma (death, in fact); as the camera draws back, there's no surface to stand on, only a widening dirty white void. "Eulogies – I hate you" gazes at one image of a face that's a barricade, a barrier Rodriguez writes on, erases, and rips open in order to stare back at the audience.

The cinematheque program pairs Rodriguez with Tony Wu, who reworks found Super 8 and 16mm film, printing one format onto the other. In "Cemetery 4," Wu arranges fragments of a carousel-like ride around tombstones to form choreography, while dance itself is layered over the city sidewalks of "During Chaos." Wu's "Intimacy," "More Intimacy," and "More Intimacy 2" can be compared to recent shorts by Luther Price and Bobby Abate; though their tools and sensibilities differ, all three filmmakers model personalized responses to gay porn machinery. The negative flare-ups of Wu's "Intimacy" series generate a sort of white light, white cool. Their repetitions and reversals aren't wholly disconnected from the commodified rhythms of the source material, but they remain stuck in a lolling, not-quite-69 (more like 45?) position.