‘TALKING FILMS’ IS FILMFORUM FINALE

‘James Irwin: ‘Talking Films,’ ” the Filmforum’s final program before its summer hiatus, screens tonight at 7:30 at the Wallenboyd Center with Irwin, a San Francisco film artist, present.

“Hat Boxing” (1986), one of Irwin’s most recent and accessible films, plays like a blueprint for a Paul Bartel movie--or a spoof of an old radio show. With a pack of Mexican loteria cards, a series of sketches in ‘40s comic-book style and a clutch of homely props, quickly glimpsed, Irwin “illustrates” the mini-drama which we are listening to actors recite and which concerns the fate of a man who has killed his wife so that he may dress up in her lingerie. “Hat Boxing” is not only funny but represents a clever kindling of the viewer’s imagination.

The remainder of the program is considerably more taxing, composed of a series of silent shorts so similar it’s hard to tell where one leaves off and another starts. In essence, they consist of symbols and reprocessed images strung together with sentences painted directly on the film and flashed on the screen one word at a time, which is a real test of the viewer’s powers of concentration.

In “By the Lake” we glimpse a gathering of farmers, which is accompanied by a written exchange in which Irwin expresses concern for their economic plight--and describes himself to them, saying “I make art that does not hang on the wall.” The most accessible of this group is “My Day,” which Irwin outlines from the time he gets up, through his boring job as an office temp, to his stint as a stand-up comedian at a nightclub; again, his narrative is written out one word at a time, and it is punctuated by stroboscopic flashes of such familiar images as a milk bottle or a cereal bowl.

Irwin is witty and ingenious in his explorations of the resources of the medium, but after more than an hour of watching his “flashed word” technique, the effect is fatiguing rather than stimulating, an instance of too much of a good thing. The Wallenboyd Center, 301 Boyd Street, is in downtown Los Angeles. Information: (213) 276-7452.

Les Blank’s half-hour “Gap-Toothed Women” and Geoffrey Dunn and Mark Schwartz’s hourlong “Miss . . . or Myth?” which screen Tuesday only at the Nuart, are a pair of documentaries that challenge traditional concepts of female beauty. The second is the more provocative and serious film; in 1985 Dunn and Schwartz covered what was to be the last Miss California contest held in Santa Cruz, which since the late ‘70s had been protested by feminists with a counter-pageant, “Myth California.” Dunn and Schwartz gained the trust of participants and officials of both events and proceeded to make an evenhanded film.

You come away with the feeling that even though some of the protesters might seem to be involved for the wrong reasons or even, in some instances, expressing their anger in the wrong way, that they have the right idea. They are right to call attention to the fact that beauty contests over the decades have created and perpetuated a very narrow, decidedly Caucasian ideal of female beauty and that the pageants, for all their vaunted emphasis on handing out scholarships to the winners, are scarcely altruistic enterprises.

The more lighthearted “Gap-Toothed Women” interviews a wide array of women with a space between their two front teeth, virtually all of whom have come to accept it and even like it. While such a gap merely sets off the stunning perfection of Lauren Hutton (who participated good-naturedly) it really can be unattractive if too wide or if the individual’s teeth are poor in the first place; the film makes this clear. Although several of the women tell with horror of their dentists wanting them to resort to braces, no one mentions that the gap is in fact caused by an outsized frenum muscle, which in childhood is easily cut, allowing one’s teeth to grow together naturally. Information: (213) 478-6379, 479-5269.