RESTORED SHORTS ARE LONG ON CHARM

Few cinematic jobs are more crucial, and unsung, than the film restorer’s. Working with materials often near disintegration, the restorer is an expert at recapturing the past, reawakening scattered dreams.

A case in point: The potpourri of short films screened tonight at 8 at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater (8949 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 278-8990) from the film archives of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

The program is a showcase of recent acquisitions by the academy’s film preservationists. The French shorts date from 1895 to the onset of World War I. The directors include many familiar names: Georges Melies, Louis and Auguste Lumiere, Emile Cohl, Ferdinand Zecca. (Some contributors are, for the moment, anonymous, their title credits disintegrated or lost.)

These shorts are charming, simple, unabashed. The Lumiere films include one that many film specialists have seen: the earliest, the 1895 “La Sortie des Usines Lumiere” (a very brief film that shows hundreds of workers exiting a factory).

But how many people have seen Melies’ characteristically antic and effervescent farce about marvelous inventions running amok, “Long Distance Wire Photography”? Or Zecca’s “The Golden Beetle”--with its hand-tinted specters cavorting satanically across the screen? Or Cohl’s dazzling cartoon, “Metamorphosis,” of blackboard chalk drawings flowing through a mad variety of shapes and forms? Or the anonymous “Dancing Pig,” with a rakish, elegantly attired hog (and lady hog) dancing blithely with smiling human partners? These French shorts--and the four others--have assumed a curious, antique charm, like delicate winds from the age of Eugene Atget, Marcel Proust and Claude Debussy.

Other films in the program include a remarkable wide-screen newsreel on the construction of a bridge over the Hudson River (circa: 1929) and two intriguing mementos of the great Alfred Hitchcock: color home movies that he shot in England in the early ‘30s (featuring wife, Alma, and daughter, Pat) and excerpts from the marathon screen tests he conducted for protegee Tippi Hedren in the early ‘60s.

The tests are fascinating--especially after the Freudian speculations and gossip in Donald Spoto’s Hitchcock biography. We see Hedren in a variety of gowns, approaching and retreating from the camera, while conversing with Martin Balsam, seated behind her on a couch. Off-screen, Hitchcock makes dry little remarks and urges them on. Balsam, improvising dialogue, sometimes makes smutty remarks. (At Hitchcock’s suggestion, to test Hedren’s reserve?) The young actress, looking impeccable and regal, only occasionally lets the wisecracks ruffle her. But whenever Hitchcock tells her to turn, retreat or give a “body profile,” she obeys. You’re reminded, irresistibly, of James Stewart and Kim Novak at the dress shop in “Vertigo”: an enigmatically comic portrait of a Svengalian relationship.

On Wednesday, at 8 p.m. at UCLA’s Melnitz Hall, one of the most prominent contemporary Soviet directors, Elem Klimov, appears with his 1985 war saga, “Come and See”--a strange film, blending harshness and lyricism in its account of the anti-Nazi partisan battles in Byelorussia. With its experimental sound track, sinuous tracking shots and long takes it obviously springs from the same innovative strain as those by the Russian film-makers Tarkovsky, Shepitko, Konchalovsky, Kalatozov and Paradzhanov.

The Otto Preminger retrospective at UCLA’s Melnitz Theater--a movie buffs’ must--continues on Thursday, with two films especially beloved by Parisian Premingerites: the 1947 soap opera “Daisy Kenyon” (with a Joan Crawford-Henry Fonda-Dana Andrews triangle) and the great 1953 film noir , “Angel Face,” which gives us a pathological rich girl (Jean Simmons), her sexy driver (Robert Mitchum) and their moody conflagration. Also showing: Preminger’s one-time scandalous sex comedy, “The Moon Is Blue,” which prompted outraged fulminations from New York’s Cardinal Spellman and a full-scale censorship battle over the use of the words pregnant, virgin and seduce. Were any pregnant virgins seduced as a direct result of watching this movie? We’ll never know, but Preminger’s defiant release of the film without a Production Code seal was a salvo in the anti-censorship wars that rang around the world.