SAURA, ERICE FILMS IN ‘SPANISH CINEMA’ SERIES

This week’s offerings in UCLA Film Archives’ “The New Spanish Cinema and the Films of Carlos Saura” are the richest yet, highlighted by some of Saura’s finest films, including “Cria Cuervos” (“Raise Ravens”) plus Victor Erice’s wondrous film “The South.” All of the Saura films are marked by his preoccupation with the blurring between past and present and fantasy and reality.

Saura’s scintillating 1970 satire, “Garden of Delights” (tonight at 6 in Melnitz Theater), tells of a family going to any extreme to jog the memory of an industrialist (Jose Luis Lopez Vega) whose brain has been damaged in a car crash--and whose company is in desperate need of the millions he has stashed away in a numbered account in a Swiss bank. For Saura, this predicament, a source of rich, dark humor, becomes a point of departure for a serious examination of a man’s life and its meaning (or lack of it).

Screening right after “Garden of Delights” is Saura’s 1969 film “The Den,” a highly claustrophobic--and fairly tedious--chamber drama in which a young wife (Geraldine Chaplin) is profoundly affected by her inheritance of elaborate antique furniture to the extent that she is carried away in heady Freudian fantasies, ensnaring her husband (Per Oscarsson) as well.

Ten years after his superb “Spirit of the Beehive” (1973), Victor Erice made “The South” (screening Friday at 8 in Melnitz), another masterwork dealing with the imagination of a sensitive, impressionable young girl (played at age 8 by Sonsoles Aranguren, at 15 by Iciar Bollan) and her maturing perception of the world and, in particular, of her father (Omero Antonutti, familiar for his appearances in the Taviani brothers’ films).

Erice’s images are breathtaking--they could have been lit by Rembrandt. “The South” is a film of love and sorrow suffused with an appreciation of life’s beauty as well as its inevitable disappointments.

Playing with “The South” is Saura’s “Mama Turns 100” (1979), a darkly outrageous yet actually quite subtle comedy which expresses well Saura’s mixed feelings about the coming of change. Chaplin stars as an English governess who returns to her former place of employment, a remote, decaying mansion where a decaying aristocratic family is gathering to celebrate the centenary of its once-formidable matriarch (Rafaela Aparicio, also in “The South” as a lovable family retainer).

Screening Saturday at 8 p.m. are “Cria Cuervos” (1976) and “Cousin Angelica” (1973), two of Saura’s most celebrated films.

The first, like Erice’s “The South,” centers on a 10-year-old girl (the extraordinary Ana Torrent of the haunting dark eyes) who imagines--and we do, too--that she has powers over life and death as Saura illuminates her relationship with her dying mother (Chaplin, in perhaps her finest collaboration with Saura).

Remarkable in its ability to communicate so naturally and straight-forwardly the perceptions and the responses of a child to a traumatized grown-up world, “Cria Cuervos” is an indirect comment on life under Franco while “Cousin Angelica” (1973) is one of the first Spanish films to deal with the agony of its Civil War. It is also an unusually affecting story of a lost love. Jose Luis Lopez Vasquez plays a middle-aged man who visits his mother’s family--rich, conservative and pro-Franco--for the first time in 40 years and is overcome by memories of a bittersweet past. Both films are instances of Saura’s ability in communicating from much left implicit. Information: (213) 825-2581, 825-2345.

Arnold Leibovit’s “The Fantasy Film Worlds of George Pal,” a video documentary on the late animator and science-fiction pioneer, screens Wednesday at 8 p.m. at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. A labor of more love than incisiveness, it is composed of clips from the Hungarian-born film maker’s long career interpersed with affectionate reminiscences by his co-workers. The terrific clips embrace his early career, through his beloved Puppetoons and on to the later live-action adventures and science-fiction projects. Information: (213) 278-8990, Ext. 222.