‘El Lute’ to Open Cinema of Spain Exhibition

The Cinema of Spain, an unprecedented 29-film retrospective spanning the silent era to the present, begins Thursday at 8 p.m. at UCLA Melnitz with the first part of director Vicente Aranda’s remarkably engrossing “El Lute.” The second part will screen Friday at 8 p.m.

“El Lute” is a classic outlaw saga as rich and entertaining as “Les Miserables.” It is the true story of a merchero , a member of an ancient nomadic people who are traditionally tinsmiths, a trade increasingly at peril in the age of plastics. The incredible story of El Lute (Imanoel Arias) begins in 1965 with his arrest as a chicken thief, which gradually propels him into becoming a popular hero as a bank-robbing bandit who defies and eludes the Franco regime in its harsh final years. The second part is even more fascinating as El Lute and his family attempt to settle down in anonymous suburban middle-class comfort. Even so, he and his brother choose brides from among the Gypsies, a caste that appeals to their nostalgia yet elicits their condescension. “El Lute’s” incredible story reveals how medieval Spain remained under Franco.

Along with the Cinema of Spain, the UCLA Film Archive is also continuing its equally unprecedented Celebration of the Argentine Cinema on Saturday at 8 p.m. with Miguel Periera’s “The Debt” and Raul Tosso’s “Geronima.”

“The Debt” is a handsome film set in the north and centering on a dedicated young teacher’s paternal concern for a bright Indian youth, a descendant of the Aztecs. As time passes, “The Debt” subtly evolves into a criticism of the military junta, culminating in the Malvinas/Falklands War.

“The Debt” is a fine, although conventional, film that took the Silver Bear at Berlin earlier this year, but it is overshadowed by the calmly devastating “Geronima,” which incorporates tape recordings of a Mapuche Indian woman made in the ‘60s. It is a gritty, daringly stylized portrait of life lived at the bare subsistence level in the hardscrabble land of Patagonia.

Geronima (played with a smiling innocence by Luisa Calcumil, a Mapuche herself) and her four children have the tragic misfortune to come to the attention of a health department official. What ensues is a harrowing depiction of how a government bureaucracy, with all the best intentions in the world--and even kind concern--means to save an ill-fed, ill-housed family only to destroy it.

Any Argentine documentarian who attempts to survey his country’s turbulent political history invites comparison with Fernando Solanas’ monumental “La Hora de los Hornos” (“The Hour of the Furnaces”), one of most innovative documentaries ever made and a veritable definition of the concept of cultural imperialism. Miguel Perez’s “The Lost Republic, Part I,” which screens Sunday at 8 p.m., does in fact suffer in comparison as it surveys the political history of Argentina from 1928 to 1983. Straightforward reportage outweighs analysis for the most part, but the visual record, drawn from an astonishingly wide array of archival footage, stills and political cartoons, shows us a country in almost constant unrest with virtually every leader toppled in chaos as he struggled to hold in balance the economy and the military, the rich and the poor.

Perez doesn’t delve into the crucial implications of Argentina’s history of foreign dependency and exploitation to the extent that Solanas did, but both express a qualified admiration for Peron as an expression of popular rule. In any event “The Lost Republic, Part I,” is said to have played a crucial role in the downfall of the military junta in 1983. Preceding this film at 6 p.m. is Alfredo Barragan’s “Expedicion Atlantis,” a documentary on the five Argentine sportsmen and their 1984 crossing of the Atlantic on a raft. (213) 206-FILM, 206-8013.