Filmforum’s Friedman Program at LACE

An hourlong program of work by Adele Friedman, who taps the remarkable expressive power of silent black-and-white cinema while bringing to it an acutely contemporary sensibility, will be presented at LACE by Filmforum tonight at 8. Progressing from her earlier short works of landscapes, cityscapes and portraits, Friedman gradually introduces narrative in such films as “Abduction” (1986) and “Untitled” (1978), revealing a concern with attractions between individuals, often two women, expressed in shifting relationships between time and space. Her pacing is stately, yet her work is exhilarating in its intense beauty and emotion. (213) 276-7452. (714) 923-2441.

“The Films of Alexander Kluge,” a UCLA Film Archives/Goethe Institute retrospective of the work of the New German Cinema pioneer, continues Tuesday at 8 p.m. at UCLA’s Melnitz Hall with “Artists Under the Big Top: Perplexed” (1967) and “Occasional Work of a Female Slave” (1973).

The first is one of the most confounding films imaginable, its meanings ultimately elusive, perhaps even to those well-versed with the political upheavals experienced by West Germany in the late ‘60s. The key setting is a circus, and the principal figure is one Leni Peickert, an attractive young trapeze artist who dreams of owning her own circus but who ends up studying for a career in TV. Clearly, the circus is a metaphor, but for what it’s hard to say--perhaps for artistic aspiration and frustration or, more likely, for the artist’s confusion as to what his or her role should be in society. Tedious and obscure, the film leaves you with the feeling that Kluge knows what he’s doing--even if you don’t.

“Occasional Work of a Female Slave” is a more rewarding experience altogether. A feminist work, it has a strong Brechtian flavor, with gritty documentary-like sequences punctuated with highly idiosyncratic quotes from literature, philosophy, music and old films, all of which give the film its richly sardonic flavor. Kluge’s sister Alexandra plays a care-worn 29-year-old Frankfurt mother of three who supports her family by performing illegal abortions while her male chauvinist husband remains the perennial student. Gradually, she becomes an activist, and Kluge extends and maintains the utmost compassion for his beleaguered but dauntless heroine while finding within her plight an absurdity that borders on the comic as often as it does the tragic. (213) 206-FILM, 206-8013.

The annual Asian Pacific American International Film Festival, sponsored by various organizations in addition to the UCLA Film Archive, commences this weekend at Melnitz Theater and provides another opportunity to see two films from the recent AFI Film Fest, Huang Shuquin’s “Woman Human Demon” (Saturday at 7:30 p.m.) and Fred Tan’s “Rouge of the North” (Sunday at 7:30 p.m.). “Rouge of the North” is followed by Li Yu-ning’s “A Taxi Driver’s Last Fall” (1988), a Taiwanese film of much raw power based on an actual 1982 incident. The film is slow getting under way, underlining repeatedly the hardships of a middle-aged taxi driver (Sun Yueh) and his neighbors living a marginal existence in a claustrophobic Taipei slum. An hour into the film, the taxi driver attempts a bank robbery, apparently Taiwan’s first, so that his friends, particularly the pretty daughter of a neighbor, a recent bride, might have a better life. The film explodes at this point, becoming an unsparing depiction of horrendous police brutality, which emerges as a criticism of a heavily bureaucratized society indifferent to the fate of its hard-pressed working class. “Woman Demon Human” is preceded on Saturday by the late Stephen Ning’s 48-minute “Freckled Rice” (1983), which dramatizes a boy’s coming of age and coming to terms with his Chinese-American heritage.

Screening Thursday in Melnitz Theater at 5:30 in the French Revolution and the Cinema series is a genuine curiosity, “Captain of the Guard” (1930), a fanciful operetta version of the life of the composer of “La Marseillaise,” Claude Joseph Rouget de l’Isle (dashing John Boles). It’s as static and self-conscious as most early talkies, but Laura La Plante, in a dark wig, is charming as the composer’s true love.

Reminder: The 1925 Lon Chaney “Phantom of the Opera,” complete with a rare Techinicolor sequence, will screen at the Orpheum Thursday at 8 p.m. accompanied by Korla Pandit on the Mighty Wurlitzer and preceded by the Beverly Hills Cotillion Dancers. (213) 239-0939.