Von Praunheim’s Stylishly Camp ‘Anita’

Rosa Von Praunheim’s “Anita, Dances of Vice” (at the Nuart today and Friday only) combines the gay West German film maker’s familiar camp outrageousness and pathos with a dazzling command of style that’s quite unexpected from an artist whose films have always had a ragged, home-movie look.

A plump, elaborately gowned elderly woman (Lotti Huber) starts muttering to herself as she wanders the streets of Berlin. Suddenly, she announces to passers-by that she is Anita Berber, “the greatest nude dancer in Germany”--and starts trying to prove it. Hustled off to a mental institution, she begins reliving her gaudy past.

Von Praunheim makes of her memories no less than an homage to the silent Expressionist films of the German cinema’s Golden Age in the ‘20s--even to the jagged, slashed lettering of the intertitles and the plaintive, jangly Weill-like score.

Von Praunheim’s grand prize is Huber, a 75-year-old life force with the intense eyes of Brigitte Helm in “Metropolis” and a dancer whose own life has been almost as colorful--though not as self-destructive--as that of the determinedly uninhibited Berber. Huber is as hilarious as she is gallant and adorable.

The old woman’s memories, which are in color to contrast with the grayness of her present, also take the form of an exotic modern ballet performed by Ina Blum, as the young Berber, and her partner-lover Sebastien Droste (Mikael Honesseau). Berber’s existence is of the utmost headiness, epitomizing Weimar experimentation and decadence. Berber, who loved her cocaine, and Droste, a sort of sinewy, epicene Conrad Veidt, are flamboyantly bisexual.

Berber’s costumes and dances echo everything from the nautches of Mata Hari, the eccentric movements of Valeska Gert, the exoticism of Ruth St. Denis and the Neo-Grecian romps of Isadora Duncan.

“Anita, Dances of Vice” concludes as a tantalizing enigma: Is the exuberant old woman actually one Frau Koslowski, who merely imagines she’s Anita, who is supposed to have died of TB in 1928 at the age of 29, or is she somehow really Anita? Does she herself really die at the end of the film, only to be resurrected? Finally it doesn’t matter, for “Anita, Dance of Vices” is a celebration of the indomitability of the truly free human spirit. (213) 478-6379, 479-5269.

UCLA Film and Television Archives’ “The Angry Young Men,” a retrospective of the new British cinema of the ‘50s and ‘60s, commences at 7:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday in Melnitz Theater with two programs of the short films of the Free Cinema movement, launched in the ‘50s as a protest against the genteel British cinema of the time.

For the most part these films are not really documentaries in the usual sense but rather are highly personal, graceful and sensitive impressions of everyday life. Lindsay Anderson’s “O Dreamland” (1953) and “Every Day Except Christmas” (1957) screen Saturday, along with his “Wakefield Express” (1953), in which a traditional industrial community is seen through the columns of its local paper. The latter film was not available for preview.

“O Dreamland” is a study of grim-faced, lower-middle-class types supposedly having fun at a seedy old amusement zone, whose exploitation of its customers is underlined by the hollow laughter of a mechanized clown. By contrast, “Every Day Except Christmas” is a warm record of 24 hours at the 300-year-old produce and flower market at Covent Garden amid its jovial, hard-working porters and sellers. (You’re left wondering whether today you would find such a strong sense of community.)

Richard Lester’s 11-minute “Running, Jumping, Standing Still Film” (1959) is 11 minutes of delicious, Mack Sennett-like silliness shot in a country field and featuring Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and other graduates of the fabled “Goon Show.” It screens on Sunday, followed by Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson’s “Momma Don’t Allow” (1956), which follows a young butcher’s helper, a pretty dental assistant and a young train charwoman to a north-of-London jazz club for an evening of exuberant dancing and fun (shared, by the way, with some affluent types apparently slumming). “Momma Don’t Allow,” which reminds us that in the U.K. of the ‘50s American jazz was widely regarded as being as depraved as then-burgeoning rock ‘n’ roll, has been called one of the first records of the emerging youth culture.

Unavailable for preview: Reisz’s “We Are the Lambeth Boys” (1959), a portrait of the members of a London youth club, which was the director’s first solo effort. For full schedule: (213) 206-8013.