It’s not often that recent American experimental films by relative newcomers find their way to Chicago. For this reason alone these two programs, devoted to Super-8 and 16-millimeter work, are worth checking out, although I prefer the second program to the first. The Friday program of Super-8 films includes Peggy Ahwesh’s Martina’s Playhouse (1989), a lively 20-minute jaunt, much of it having to do with gender construction, with Ahwesh herself among the players, who range from toddlers to young adults; Tom Rhoads’s demonically minimalist and aggressive Warm Broth (1988), 36 minutes of selected baby phrases distorted and repeated like mantras, with child’s-eye glimpses of domestic details made to seem both innocent and sinister through repetition; and three animated shorts by Lewis Klahr collectively known as “The Morning Films” (1988), all using paper-cutout collages, with interesting spatial effects and arresting pop imagery, even if the plot and thematic continuity are obscure. Saturday’s four 16-millimeter offerings are Christoph Janetzko and Dorothee Wenner’s Hollywood Killed Me (1988), which re<-stag<-es the gaudy deaths of such notables as Lupe Velez, James Whale, Thelma Todd, and Albert Dekker in relation to a bag lady's daily rounds; Konrad Steiner's silent and lovely LIMN IV (1988), featuring lightning-quick alternations between color and black-and-white images; the recently revised prologue to Leslie Thornton’s ongoing series “Peggy and Fred in Hell,” a mind-bending, postapocalyptic comic nightmare about two kids rediscovering and reinventing our present civilization; and Ted Lyman’s Testament of the Rabbit (1989), a home movie of a train journey from England to Scotland, which uses the moving train as a rhythmic base and is full of striking visual effects and self-conscious subtitles.