SCREENINGS TONIGHT AND SUNDAY : AN OVERVIEW OF DOCUMENTARY RACE

The five nominated documentary features--”Broken Rainbow,” “Las Madres,” “Soldiers in Hiding,” “The Statue of Liberty” and “Unfinished Business”--have all been reviewed separately in these pages. While the Oscar for documentary short subject has never been one of the eagerly watched races, this year’s five nominees prove that a well-made short can be enormously entertaining and informative and that a badly made one can be drearier than going to work on a rainy Monday morning.

“Making Overtures” (Barbara Sweetie, producer; Larry Weinstein, director) presents an affectionate look at the Northumberland Symphony, a community orchestra in Cobourg, Canada. The camera work, like the orchestra’s performance, is not always the most polished, but the warm rapport the film makers, the musicians and the members of the community obviously share redeems the technical weaknesses. “Overtures” is a satisfying, cozy film, reminiscent of Garrison Keillor’s stories about music-making in Lake Wobegon.

In contrast, “Witness to War: Dr. Charlie Clements” (David Goodman, producer; Deborah Shaffer, director) is a powerful, technically polished study of one man’s moral commitment. An honors graduate of the Air Force Academy, Clements abandoned a career as a combat pilot in Vietnam to become a doctor, serving as a medical missionary in El Salvador. The audience sees Clements’ struggle to face both the atrocities inflicted on the peasantry by the U.S.-backed government forces and the violence of the insurgents. This moving film should be seen by anyone interested in the current debate over the Reagan Administration’s policies in Central America.

“Overtures” and “Witness” represent two very different styles of excellence within a single genre, and the voting members of the academy will have a difficult time choosing between them. Unfortunately, good intentions and good film making are not always synonymous, as two other nominees demonstrate.

Like “Witness,” “The Courage to Care” (Robert Gardner, producer-director) deals with moral commitment: Men and women who risked their lives to rescue people from the Holocaust. Static imagery and choppy editing rob these personal reminiscences of much of their impact. The resulting film is less affecting than it could--and should--be.

“The Wizard of the Strings” (Alan Edelstein, producer; Peter Friedman, director) uses a fairly standard array of old still photographs, film clips and contemporary interviews to examine the career of that star of vaudeville, film and recording, Roy Smeck. A respectful but unfocused portrait, “Wizard” fails to give the viewer a sense of the qualities that distinguished Smeck’s performances on the guitar, banjo and ukulele from the work of other performers.

The gap in quality between the first four films and “Keats and His Nightingale: A Blind Date” (Michael Crowley, producer; James Wolpaw, director) is so great that it seems to have been included by accident. In this amateurish, self-indulgent attempt at humor, the film makers manage to insult both the hapless “everyday people” who don’t like or understand Keats’ poetry, and the academics who do. The National Endowment for the Humanities should demand a refund of the grant that helped finance this sniggering waste of celluloid; the purpose of the endowment is to advance the humanities, not mock them.

Films nominated for Oscars in the documentary feature and short film categories will have excerpted and full-length showings here over the next few days.

The International Documentary Assn. will present a 50-minute compilation film at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills at 7:30 tonight, following a 6 p.m. reception. (Donation is $25, with discount tickets available to students.)

Sunday, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. as part of the association’s Docu-Day, all nominated short films and feature-length documentaries will be shown in a free program at Melnitz Hall, UCLA, with film makers pariticipating in panel discussions. Information: (213) 655-7089.