‘STARTING FROM FREEDOM’ OPENS GERMAN SERIES

The Goethe Institute launches its fall season of films with “Starting Toward Freedom: The German Experience 1945-1950,” another of its extraordinary offerings. It is amazing to realize how exhaustively documentary film makers recorded Germany’s struggle to rebuild itself in the ruins of the Third Reich. It is not surprising to see issues tackled that still haunt Germany today, most notably the longing for reunification and the need to acknowledge and never forget the horrors of the concentration camps.

Indeed, the first film in this fascinating and comprehensive series is “Death Mills,” perhaps the most wrenchingly graphic expose of the concentration camps ever made and shown in movie theaters all over Germany in January, 1946.

Much is familiar: the piles of corpses, looking like Giacometti sculptures and the piles of possessions stripped from the victims. What is hardest to take is not the dead but the nearly dead, the walking skeletons who have been liberated but who, we are told, are too emaciated or diseased to be saved. The images in this terse film serve as a perspective for all the depictions of suffering and hardship that follow, never letting us forget what the Germans did to bring about their own fate.

Like a number of the films in the program, “Years of Decision” (1953), which was made for the Social Democratic Party, is unabashedly propaganda but in this instance the sentiments ring particularly true. It calls for reunification, is aggressively anti-Soviet, and time has only proved its basic argument: that citizens of East Germany do not have the freedom or the standard of living enjoyed by the citizens of Western Germany. “Between East and West” (1949) records the tense, harrowing days of the Berlin blockade and courageous airlift. Other documentaries concentrate on the rebuilding and democratization procesess--e.g., Gunther Schnabel and Herbert Korosi’s “3/4/7” (1948), one of the most visually striking films in the series, is a study of the assimilation of some of the 30,000 miners who flocked to the Ruhr. One of the most powerful of the documentaries is Rudolf Werner’s “Sanctuary” (1949), which records the heartbreaking plight of refugees from Soviet-occupied territories of Germany attempting to enter the British zone, which at the time this film was made had already accepted 4 1/2 million refugees and could let in only the best-documented applicants and those most in danger from the Soviets for political reasons.

“Starting Toward Freedom” has been assembled at the Federal German Archive at Coblenz, and is being presented in Southern California by professor Michael Meyer of the history department at Cal State Northridge, where the films will screen tonight. The English subtitles are concise and easy to read. For information, call (818) 885-3566. Further screenings will be at UC Santa Barbara (Thursday and Friday), (805) 961-3535; the Goethe Institute (Oct. 5-7), (213) 854-0993; UC Irvine (Oct. 8-11), (714) 856-5386; and Occidental College (213) 259-3296, 259-2837.

Meanwhile, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences commences its outstanding Contemporary Documentary series Tuesday at 8 p.m. in its Samuel Goldwyn Theater with Alison Nigh-Stich’s “Debonair Dancers” (1986) and Brigette Berman’s “Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got,” the 1986 winner in the feature-length documentary category. If you’ve missed Berman’s film in previous screenings, here’s your chance to catch up with a real treat. With all due respect to the title, clarinetist-composer-bandleader Artie Shaw has had more than time, he’s had--and still has--everything: talent, good looks and intellectual brilliance, and this film suggests how difficult it has been for him to make the most of his gifts.

Born in poverty to immigrant Jewish parents, Shaw craved fame and fortune only to discover how much he hated celebrity and show business. He has always had a far stronger public image than such contemporaries as Woody Herman and the late Benny Goodman, but more for marrying many beautiful and famous women than for his political courage and intellectual accomplishments. Among those paying homage is the wife who probably understood and appreciated him best, Evelyn Keyes, who speaks of him with affection and respect, while lamenting that they expected too much of each other for their relationship to last. This is a portrait of an admirable, exacting man who has aged well without mellowing. “Debonair Dancers” is a portrait of John Soiu and his wife, who have devoted themselves to reaching out to the brain-damaged, and enriching their lives through ballroom dancing. There’s an unexpected twist here, which only adds to the film’s heart-warming poignance. Information: (213) 278-8990.