‘INVISIBLE CINEMA’ VISIBLE AT LHASA

“The Invisible Cinema,” three lively and sophisticated programs of independent films from New Zealand, Canada and the United States, will screen Friday, Saturday and Sunday at 8:15 p.m. at the Lhasa Club, 1110 N. Hudson St.

Friday evening will be devoted to the work of the late New Zealand-born experimental animator Len Lye; Saturday’s offering is “Independent Film Now,” and there will be a selection of short films from New Zealand screened on Sunday.

Lye, who emigrated to America in 1944, was a pioneer in the technique of painting or scratching images directly onto the celluloid, which gave his work an extraordinary vibrancy. Three of his most important films, “Color Cry” (1952), “Rhythm” (1957) and “Free Radicals” (1978), are keyed to music.

In the first, stripes, plaids and polka dots pulsate to Sonny Terry singing “The Fox Chase”; in the second, Lye jump-cut footage on a Chrysler assembly line to match the beat of African drum music to create a most unusual TV commercial; and in the third, a jagged white line on a black background echoes the rhythms of African music.

Stan Brakhage, the dominant figure in the American avant-garde film, is represented in the second program with several of his song films, most notably “Songs 21 & 22” (1966), which Brakhage says charts a progress from an “inner” to an “outer” reality, i.e., from thickly textured--one might say downright mossy--images to more open and representative images, such as water dappled by moonlight. Emily Breer says that in her “Fluke” (1985), “sense makes nonsense as nonsense makes sense”--and that’s just about what happens as she plays, in a jokey, deliberatively primitive style, with jangly juxtapositions of images of nature and technology culled from found footage.

Chris Gallagher’s “Mirage” offers a disturbing, thoughtful impression of Hawaii as the film maker superimposes trite travelogue footage (and newsreels of the bombing of Pearl Harbor) over a constantly repeated Super 8 clip of a very young woman performing a hula strip as Elvis Presley is heard singing over and over, “Dreams come true in blue Hawa-aaa-iiii.”

The ‘80s have brought some cracks and fissures in New Zealand’s traditionally conservative society, and William Keddell captures this new mood of unrest and resistance in his highly demanding and surreal “The Maintainance of Silence” (1985), in which he explores a young man’s troubled, questioning response to an actual event, the bombing of a state security computer, which maintained files on all citizens. The bomb was set off three years ago by Neil Roberts, a 22-year-old Aucklander, who lost his life in the process. Prior to this act, Roberts had written on a restroom wall, “We Have Maintained a Silence Closely Resembling Stupidity.” Keddell’s film is an attempt to view Roberts as a true anarchist and not just another punk, which was the way he was depicted in the New Zealand media.

Also on the program of New Zealand shorts are Gregor Nicholas’ “Bodyspeak” (1983), which contrasts the natural, sensual rhythms of Maori dancers with the rigid movements of tango dancers, and Vincent Ward’s well-known “In Spring One Plants Alone” (1980), a thoroughly devastating documentary on an 82-year-old Maori woman’s struggle for survival while coping with her indolent, irascible and seemingly deranged 45-year-old son. Phone: (213) 461-7284.

The County Museum of Art’s “The Best of Irene Dunne” continues at its Bing Theater Friday at 1 p.m. and again at 8 p.m. with “Show Boat” (1936) and “Cimarron” (1931), both of which are durable pieces of epic Americana. In the first, the evergreen Kern-Hammerstein musical, Dunne is the lovely, resilient and loyal Magnolia, fated to fall for Allan Jones’ dashing river-boat gambler Gaylord Ravenal; in the second, the Edna Ferber saga of the settling of the Oklahoma Territory, Dunne, in only her second film, is extraordinary, creating a very proper, aristocratic Victorian woman who is warm, sympathetic and strong--and who over the years outgrows the bigotry and puritanism of her class and generation.

Saturday (at 8 p.m.) brings Miss Dunne’s two classic screwball comedies, “The Awful Truth” (1937) and “Theodora Goes Wild” (1936). Phone: (213) 857-6201.