UCLA SCHEDULES DOCUMENTARY SERIES

From a glowing biography of Ingrid Bergman to “28-Up,” Michael Apted’s exceptional, long-range portrait of 14 lively young Englishmen and women--poor, posh and in between--there are exceptional works to be found in the free Contemporary Documentary Series which begins Tuesday and runs through March 10 at UCLA’s Melnitz Hall. It’s a particularly strong program this year, one well worth seeking out. What follows is an informal guide to some of the series’ highlights through December.

Sponsored jointly by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, the Academy Foundation and UCLA, the films include Academy Award winners and nominees, and significant work in the documentary field over the last two years.

Tuesday night’s exceptional choices include two contrasting biographies, Ingrid Bergman (in a film by Gene Feldman) and Jackson Pollock (by Amanda Pope). You have the sense from her adoring father’s first home movies that to Bergman the camera was always a friend and omnipresent. The footage included on Pollock is extremely rare, particularly on the painter at work, his canvas at his feet, his mind seemingly fixed on some interior image as he spills and drips paint from its can, with swift, absolutely sure gestures.

What one gains from the interviews with Bergman intimates Liv Ullman, Ann Todd, Jose Ferrer, Kay Brown, Angela Lansbury, and from Pollock’s wife, artist Lee Krasner, is an intimate sense of what drove both these artists: Bergman’s transcendent strength, moral courage and need to work, and the doubts and pressures that increasingly bedeviled Pollock.

The next program’s subjects (Oct. 21) could hardly be more opposite nor more colorful: the towering goddess “The Statue of Liberty” and the firebrand demagogue “Huey Long,” who seemed for a while to cast as big a shadow over the state of Louisiana. (Both films are by Ken Burns.) The statue is photographed as though by a lover, against purple-orange sunsets, her torch ablaze, but the most memorable footage is from her assembly, in Frederic Bartholdi’s studio in the 1880s. One turned the corner of a Paris street and there she was, seemingly striding across neighborhoods, breathtaking and not a little frightening.

The same words might describe the “Kingfish,” Huey P. Long, whom FDR characterized as “one of the two most dangerous men in the country.” Long, who combined populism and tyranny with a masterly hand, and who was assassinated, is captured vividly yet meticulously in this feature-length portrait.

From Sting to Roy Smeck, that demonstrably lively “Wizard of the Strings,” music is the subject of the Nov. 4 program. In “Bring On the Night” Michael Apted focuses on Sting as he forms a new band with six American jazz musicians, rehearsing in the improbable surroundings of a French chateau. Lively and as revealing as Sting allows a camera to be, the music became the album “Dream of the Blue Turtles.” Ex-vaudevillian Smeck played everything but the fringe on the curtains in the first Vitaphone short in 1926, and is still going strong in Peter Friedman’s Academy Award-nominated short on his life and singular abilities. Also on the program is the affectionate “Making Overtures” (by Larry Weinstein), which brings us the Northumberland Symphony Orchestra--warts, hog farmers, teen-agers, octogenarians and all.

The Nov. 18 program features the monumental “28-Up,” (begun by Donald Brittain for Granada Television, continued by Michael Apted) on-going portraits of young Britishers today, with visits conducted at seven-year intervals from the ages of 7 to 28. The film combines careful interviews with marvelous editing to let us watch these young people grow before our eyes, like flowers. This one is an absolute must-see, particularly by whole families, to understand the crucial nature of a decent education.

Also a must is “Small Happiness: Women of a Chinese Village,” by Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon, part of Dec. 1’s program. This first film about rural life in China focuses on the women in a tiny village 400 miles south of Beijing, where life is only inching away from the feudal. These are only highlights. For the full daily schedules call (213) 825-2345. For advance program information, call (213) 825-2581.