Program of Gay Films at LACMA

In addition to the Filmforum’s presentation of selections from the first Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival on Monday at LACE--with another program scheduled next Monday--other films by or about gays screening this week include “Orpheus” (1949) and “Les Enfants Terribles” (1950).

They will be shown in a double-feature today at 1 and 8 p.m. among the weekend offerings in the County Museum of Art’s ongoing Jean Cocteau retrospective.

Also on view is Jack Hazan’s tantalizing nonfiction “A Bigger Splash,” (1973), in which painter David Hockney reenacts the painful breakup of a love affair. It will be shown at the EZTV Video Showcase, 8547 Santa Monica Blvd., at 10:30 p.m. Saturday.

Despite their status as screen classics, “Orpheus” and “Les Enfants Terribles” are infrequently shown. The belief that life is a necessary sacrifice in love and art informs “Orpheus,” as it does most of Cocteau’s work. In his contemporary reworking of the Greek legend, Cocteau presents Orpheus (Jean Marais) as a celebrated poet who is pursued by Death in the form of a beautiful woman (Maria Casares) who loves him. Death drives a Rolls, and her messengers are leather-jacketed motorcyclists; the Underworld is entered by stepping through a mirror.

A masterpiece of elegance and simplicity, “Les Enfants Terribles” remains a powerful tragedy of the perverse, a work so deeply admired by Francois Truffaut that he saw it at least a dozen times. Nicole Stephane and Edouard Dermithe are the “terrible infants,” a teen-age brother and sister locked into a destructive incestuous passion. For all its fetid, hothouse atmosphere, “Les Enfants Terribles,” which was directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, evokes a timeless sense of pity and terror. It leaves us with a renewed sense of the overwhelming power of the forces that shape our lives--of how events that would seem to liberate us from our pasts actually serve only to make inescapable the fate that has long been determined by our character and circumstances. LACMA: (213) 857-6010; EZTV: (213) 657-1532.