MOVIE REVIEWS : Social Themes Dominate Film School’s ‘Women’s Works’

Amid the usual round of spring student films comes a slightly different grouping with “Women’s Works,” screening at 7:30 tonight at UCLA’s Melnitz Theater. Billed as the first official roundup of advanced and thesis films from women directors at the UCLA Film School, tonight’s crop includes three provocative short films dealing not unexpectedly with social, feminist and/or racial themes, plus two adventuresome attempts to capture dance on celluloid.

Of the five, Zeinabu Davis’ “Cycles” is the one most likely to inspire love or hate, depending on how viewers approach its celebration--deification, really--of female physicality. (It’s dedicated “to the goddess in us all.”) The story is nothing more than that of a black woman meticulously performing household drudgery while waiting for her period to begin. But beyond the menstruation theme there is an interesting exploration of the African-American experience as a collective unconscious: The woman’s solitary waking hours are represented by still photos and blues records, but her dreams have quick time-lapse photography of frolicking friends and the African music of Miriam Makeba.

Jeanne Slater’s “Double Exposure” is the only conventional narrative among the five films. It’s a story of a married female photographer discovering latent lesbian desire for one of her models. The soapy treatment falls well short of the similar coming-out saga in John Sayles’ “Lianna” (which was hardly perfect itself). And making the heroine’s husband an insensitive oaf who’s virtually a wife-rapist stacks the deck a little too neatly.

Hiroko Yamazaki’s “Juxta” has a fascinating subject: the adjustment of children born to the Japanese-American marriages spawned by overseas wars. But amateurish line readings and far too slim a story to fill out even half an hour undercut the potential emotion of a grown “mixed child” rediscovering the racism of her parents’ era.

Dancer-director Belinda Starkie’s brief “Isadora’s Dress” has its film maker attempting to recreate the spirit, if not the letter, of the art of Isadora Duncan, while indeed wearing one of the great dancer’s dresses. Duncan herself was only captured with still photos, never on film, and in light of that, much of this tasteful short uses series of time-exposed stills in a dissolve pattern.

Certainly the most technically accomplished of the lot--and probably the best--is “For Dancers,” an omnibus of four disparate dance sequences directed with welcome variety and tremendous grace by Bridget A. Murnane. First, Fred Strickler does a delightfully charged tap in an empty restaurant to the incongruous strains of Benjamin Britten; next up are two ballet-style pieces with Iris Pell on a wooden floor and Louise Burns in a number of outdoor L.A. locations, both using only ambient sound, and finally, a seated Susan Rose turns in a spasmodic avant-garde dance to a tribal rhythm.

Admission to tonight’s screening is free. For reservations or information, call (213) 654-3854.