‘MACARIO’ AND ‘YANCO’ TO SCREEN

Cinema Mexico continues Tuesday at the Nuart with two more classic folk fables--Roberto Gavaldon’s “Macario” (1960), which the mysterious B. Traven, author of “Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” adapted from a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, and Servando Gonzalez’s “Yanco” (1960), which is virtually without dialogue.

In the first, Macario (Ignacio Lopez Tarso), a chronically hungry peasant, is rewarded with the power to heal for his shrewdness in an encounter with Death (Enrique Lucero); in the second, an Indian boy’s sensitivity to sound reveals his passion for music and extraordinary gifts as a violinist. Both films are permeated with an inevitable sense of tragedy in which their intense, poetic beauty becomes only a momentary redemption from a dark and implacable fate.

Following Cinema Mexico at the Nuart on Wednesday and Thursday will be the local premiere of Albert and David Maysles and C. Zwern’s “Islands,” a fine and fascinating study of the artist Christo’s struggle to wrap Paris’ Pont Neuf and West Berlin’s Reichstag in cloth. (213) 478-6379, 479-5269.

“Before Hollywood: Turn-of-the-Century Film From American Archives” continues Thursday at the County Museum of Arts Bing Theater at 8 p.m. with a program of seven shorts, which include two Griffiths and a Sennett, presented under the collective title “Domestic Life.” Looking at these quaintly endearing comedies and morality plays, one comes away amazed at how matter-of-factly Americans at the beginning of the second decade of the 20th Century accepted the precariousness of the individual’s financial security and social status, no matter how modest. How quickly too were the pioneer film makers prepared to depict poverty with a Jacob Riis-like realism, no matter how melodramatic their plots. The most ambitious and captivating of the group is Robert Vignola’s “The Vampire” (1913), which stars Harry Millarde as a country boy undone in New York by a cigarette-smoking (!) adventuress (Alice Hollister). (213) 857-6010.

Raymond Bernard’s ravishing “Tarakanova” (1929), one of the highlights in the UCLA Film Archive’s outstanding “Homage to the Cinematheque Francaise,” screens Thursday at 5:30 p.m. in Melnitz Theater, followed at 7:30 p.m. by the charming “Wind’s Prey” (1926), a most uncharacteristic Rene Clair film.

An exquisite, romantic tragedy, “Tarakanova” takes its title from a beautiful Gypsy (Paule Andrai) who is led to believe that she is the legitimate possessor of Catherine the Great’s crown--and who beguiles the Empress’ favorite (Olaf Fjord, a perfectly cast Errol Flynn type), whose mission is to betray her. In its scale, worldly tone and awesome visual elegance, “Tarakanova” brings to mind the Cinematheque’s recently restored “Casanova.” Andrai is a remarkable presence, as expressive a silent actress as Lillian Gish but as sensual as Gish is ethereal.

Charles Vanel, star of “The Wind’s Prey,” made his first movie in 1912, the same year Gish made her film debut, and like her is still active 75 years later. Unlike Clair’s early experimental films or his later innovative classics, “The Wind’s Prey” is unexpectedly conventional, a romantic mystery, yet it has an easy visual flair which reveals Clair already in confident control of his medium. Vanel plays a commercial flier who crash lands on the grounds of a Czechoslovakian castle, the refuge of a group of political exiles. Short, stocky and strong-featured rather than handsome, Vanel, then 34, has a masculine yet tender presence as a straightforward fellow who falls in love with his elegant but enigmatic hostess (Lillian Hall Davis, who subsequently starred in Hitchcock’s “Easy Virtue”). (213) 825-2345, 825-2581.

Lino Brocka’s “My Country: In Desperate Straits” (1984), which opened UCLA’s “Transitions: 1987 Asian Pacific American International Film Festival,” will be repeated Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at Melnitz in place of his previously announced “Jaguar” (1979). Brocka will be present to discuss “My Country,” one of his characteristically powerful dramas of social protest, about a man driven to crime to support his family in Fernando Marcos’ Philippines. Allen Fong’s new film, “Just Like the Weather,” which screens Sunday at 7:30 p.m., was unavailable for preview. Following it will be Fong’s warm, amusing and highly autobiographical debut film, “Father and Son,” in which a dreamy, rebellious Hong Kong youngster (Lee Tu-Tin) chronically clashes with his strict but loving father (Shek Lui), an office worker held back by his lack of education, who can only regard his son’s growing passion for the cinema with alarm.