SPECIAL SCREENINGS : A Potpourri of Lesbian, Gay Films in Festival

Filmforum continues its presentation of selections from the first Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival tonight at 8 at LACE, 1804 Industrial St. A true potpourri, it commences with James Broughton and Joel Singer’s “Devotions” (1983), an idyllic vision of a gay paradise in which men make love rather than war.

Highlights of the 70-minute showing are two very brief but intensely erotic films by Tom Chomont, “Oblivion” and “Razor Head,” which solarize--and thereby distance--some leathermen rituals, and “You Can’t Die From Sleeping,” a study of homeless women made by a women’s film-making collective. This is a real stunner and is admirable in the way the film makers avoid invading their subjects’ privacy by not connecting the women’s stories with their faces as the camera roams a Manhattan shelter.

Some of the films are so abstract that only the film makers could tell you what they mean. In “L’Amico Fried’s Glamorous Friends” (1976), Roger Jacoby reprocesses images of gaudily costumed entertainers in a way to suggest that he might be intending some lighthearted comment on artifice and role playing (but who can say for sure, except Jacoby?). And only Abigail Child could possibly know what she had in mind with “Covert Action” (1984), a jaunty reprocessing of ‘30s home movies that look as if they might have been taken during a summer holiday at a Catskills resort and which are accompanied by a fragmented dialogue track.

Andrea Kirsch’s “An American Poem” is composed solely of lesbian poet Eileen Myles reciting a work inspired by someone remarking on her resemblance to the Kennedys; the point of her poem is that everyone should enjoy the status of a Kennedy. (213) 276-7452, (714) 923-2441.

As its contribution to the industry-wide “A Celebration of the Argentine Cinema,” the UCLA Film Archive is presenting a series of 32 films that constitute the first local major retrospective of the Argentine cinema, which has flowered since the restoration of democracy in 1983.

Launching the series Thursday at 8 p.m. in Melnitz Theater is Carlos Sorin’s impassioned 1985 “La Pelicula del Rey” (“The King’s Movie”), in which the largely comic vicissitudes of film making take on an increasingly dark tone as a young director (Julio Chavez) becomes as obsessed, in the face of mounting adversity, as the hero of his grand and tragic historical adventure, a 19th-Century Frenchman who declared himself King of Araucania and Patagonia. (It’s as if Werner Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo” had been intercut with Les Blank’s documentary on the making of that film, “Burden of Dreams.”) “La Pelicula del Rey” is a rarity in that the film within it is so intriguing you wish it existed as a movie unto itself.

In the light of her subsequent “Camila” (1984) and “Miss Mary” (1986), both worthy--if occasionally ponderous--period political allegories, Maria Luisa Bemberg’s 1981 “Senora de Nadie” (“Mrs. Nobody”) (Saturday at 8 p.m.) comes as quite a surprise. Working in the present allows Bemberg to trust the viewer to get her points about machismo and women’s lib without feeling the need to underline them. With simplicity--and an unexpected spontaneity--Bemberg depicts the plight of a beautiful, dutiful young wife and mother (Luisina Brando), who’s so stunned to discover her husband’s long-term infidelity she leaves him. Her story is, of course, familiar but is made fresh by the tenderness (and humor) with which Bemberg depicts a sustaining bond of friendship she develops with a young homosexual (Julio Chavez, who’s so different in this film you may not even recognize him as the star of “La Pelicula del Rey”). Second feature: “Camila.”

Also screening are revivals of Eliseo Subiela’s remarkable and challenging “Man Facing Southeast” (Friday at 8 p.m.) and Fernando Solanas’ sensual and elegiac “Tangos: The Exile of Gardel” (Sunday at 8 p.m.). (213) 206-FILM, 206-8013.

Note: Andrei Tarkovsky’s rarely seen 1960 debut film, “The Violin and the Steamroller,” which was written with Andrei Konchalovsky, screens Sunday only at the Nuart along with his great 1966 epic “Andrei Roublev.” (213) 478-6379, 479-5269.