LEADING ’84 DOCUMENTARIES AT UCLA

Passion: How often do you find it in films today? Well, mark Monday nights on your calendars, because an outpouring of passionate films by impassioned film makers will be appearing between now and March, roughly twice a month.

This is a collection of 1984’s outstanding documentaries, a program that will be celebrated both at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at Melnitz Theatre, UCLA.

The subjects are wildly varied: the struggle of a great artist to do justice to the spirit of a great writer (“Rodin’s Balzac”); the peculiar dilemma of an actor/director, Maximillian Schell, attempting a definitive biography (“Marlene, a Feature on Dietrich”) when his legendary subject suddenly refuses to be photographed, or the almost palpable passion of a small, dogged woman for an exquisite pre-Revolutionary museum and park, which she refused to let die after the Siege of Leningrad (“Recollections of Pavlovsk”).

There is the passion of a Swedish diplomat for justice in a world that had seemingly forgotten it (“Raoul Wallenberg: Buried Alive”), and the equal dedication of the film maker that justice be accorded Wallenberg. If you think you know the Wallenberg story from the television miniseries, treat yourself to the real story, more harrowing and inspiring than any fiction. Or you can catch a spark from the American men and women who went to Spain during its civil war (“The Good Fight: The Abraham Lincoln Brigade”), good fighters, every one.

These films have all either been nominated or have won a form of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences commendation. The approaches and the skills of the film makers vary. “Rodin’s Balzac” was Marilyn Waterman’s short student film at Stanford. “Tosca’s Kiss,” a visit to the home Giuseppe Verdi established for retired artists of the musical world, is the most free-form of the lot. You might say, smugly, that the Russian-made “Recollections of Pavlovsk” was “old-fashioned” in its technique. So it is, but it utterly suits its subject, Anna Zelenova, a young, utterly determined woman who rose under the circumstances of war to head an exquisite museum and whose actions to save its treasures emerge as nothing short of heroic.

The intensity of a dedicated documentary film maker is one of the pure highs of moviegoing. See for yourself: The series opens this evening (7:30) with “Recollections of Pavlovsk” and “The Good Fight: The Abraham Lincoln Brigade,” and admission is free. Daily schedule information: (213) 825-2341; advance information: (213) 825-9261.