Glasnost Film Fest Mirrors Winds of Change

An enticing sampling from the Glasnost Film Festival, which commences a weeklong run at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences tonight at 8, suggests that more than a fresh breeze of freedom of expression is blowing through Russia. A strong wind is more like it. The series is composed of 17 short documentaries, and the five available for preview are all passionately personal works.

The centerpiece of the five is Joseph Pasternak’s 56-minute “The Black Square” (screening Tuesday), a thoughtful, provocative survey of Soviet avant-garde artists, who have endured decades of oppression and obscurity for daring to defy the official calendar art style glorifying communist progress. This comprehensive and painful study makes clear that although these artists can now sell their work abroad--the question of payment seems uncertain--they have yet to achieve real recognition at home.

The point of this film and others in the festival is that their subjects seem to feel quite comfortable sitting before a camera and criticizing life in the Soviet Union. Indeed, the young veterans, returning from Afghanistan, in Tatyana Chubakova’s 17-minute “Homecoming” (screening Thursday) sound exactly like their American counterparts back from Vietnam. They are filled with anger and fear of rejection for having fought in a losing war. That criticism does not necessarily mean change is quite clear in Nadezhda Khovora’s disturbing 28-minute “Are You Going to the Ball?” (screening tonight), a study of how a group of very young girls is being trained to become gymnasts under strict conditions and with little apparent regard to the physical toll exacted of their bodies and to their lack of opportunity for a real education. Providing a by-and-large grim perspective on these children are such former champion athletes as Olga Korbut and Lyudmila Turischeva.

Also screening tonight are Bako Sadykov’s thoroughly unsettling, long-banned allegory “Adonis XIV,” in which an especially handsome white goat with tinkling bells leads a mixed herd of animals quite literally to slaughter, and Nikolai Obukhovich’s 29-minute “Dialogues,” in which controversial saxophonist Sergei Kyryokhin leads a joyously eclectic jam session/concert incorporating everything from jazz, rock, punk and experimental music. (The unlikely site is a formal rococo ballroom in a Leningrad palace.)

The Glasnost Film Festival is a presentation of many organizations, including the academy, the American Film Institute, the International Documentary Assn. and the UCLA Film Archive. For full schedule and more information: (213) 278-8990.

Filmforum is presenting tonight at 8 at LACE the work of experimental San Francisco film maker Jerry Tartaglia. Among the offerings are “Four Elegies,” an early appreciation of shadow, light and texture; his latest work “Fin de Siecle,” a incantatory celebration of endings, personal and perhaps cosmic as well; and “A.I.D.S.C.R.E.A.M.,” an angry protest of the way in which hysteria over AIDS becomes an instrument with which to oppress gay culture. An earlier film “Lambda Man” (1980), offers an heroic vision of gays. For more information: (213) 276-7452 or (714) 923-2441.

Among the various offerings in the opening weekend of the UCLA Film Archive’s “Films on the French Revolution: A Retrospective” is Ernst Lubitsch’s enchanting 1919 German production of “Passion” (screening Sunday in Melnitz Theater at 8), which offers a sly boudoir view of history in which a radiant Pola Negri plays Madame Du Barry to Emil Jannings’ ungainly, petulant Louis XV. In the immediate wake of World War I the French were so taken aback by this sophisticated, though tragic, romp made by their recent enemies that they banned it for five years; in the meantime, stars and director proceeded to Hollywood and even greater fame and glory. For full schedule, which includes many silent rarities, especially on opening weekend: (213) 206-FILM, 206-8013.