International Film Series Continues at Melnitz Theater

“The Cutting Edge II,” a series of distinctive films from Europe, Asia and the Soviet Union assembled by the International Film Circuit, continues Tuesday at 8 p.m. at UCLA’s Melnitz Theater.

Yuri Illyenko’s “The Eve of Ivan Kupalo” (1968) was inspired by the same story with which Nikolai Gogol launched his career. The Ukrainian Illyenko was the cinematographer of Sergei Paradzhanov’s lush folk tale “Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors.” His “Eve of Ivan Kupalo” was banned for nearly 20 years, reportedly because it failed to show proper regard for the dictates of socialist realism. Like the films of Paradzhanov, who had a similarly difficult career in pre- glasnost Russia, it is astoundingly sensual and mesmerizing, even when it proves elusive to the American viewer. You don’t have to be able to understand all the nuances of this shimmeringly beautiful film to be enchanted by it.

By coincidence, its basic situation is the same as Paradzhanov’s recent “Ashik Kerib”: a poor young man (Boris Khmelnitsky) pursues a rich man’s daughter (Larisa Kadochnikova). Sharing that film’s visual lushness and poetic elements of supernatural and folklore, “The Eve of Ivan Kupalo” is different both in the direction its story takes and in the style with which it’s told. The film quickly develops into a Faustian tale of temptation and redemption and unfolds as dynamically as a ballet, in contrast with the exquisite tableaux of Paradzhanov. One gorgeous yet deliberately naive image follows another; at one point, a dark meadow is suddenly inundated with balls of fire. Most elusive, yet certainly dazzling, is Pidorka’s climactic journey to Kiev, which becomes an Impressionist trek through Ukrainian history.

A presentation of the UCLA Film Archive, “The Cutting Edge II” continues Thursday at 8 p.m. with Swiss film maker Clemens Klopfenstein’s “Macao, or Beyond the Sea” (1988), a jaunty and unexpectedly romantic fantasy. A middle-aged Swiss named Max (Max Ruedlinger) boards a plane from Zurich bound for Stockholm, then finds himself regaining consciousness after his plane crashes inexplicably along the shore of an island off Macao. He and the pilot, apparently the only survivors, gradually realize that they cannot leave the island or communicate with the outside world. Max’s initial resistance to the kindly islanders is often comical, but the film, which is as plain as the homely Max, develops into a fable of tenderness and poignancy. It also has, of all things, a heroine (Christine Lauterberg) yodeling in longing for her missing husband.

“Marin Karmitz and MK2,” the UCLA Film Archive’s tribute to the noted French producer and his company, continues Saturday at 8 p.m. in Melnitz Theater with Alain Tanner’s “No Man’s Land” (1985) and a revival of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Every Man for Himself” (1980).

In the moody “No Man’s Land,” Tanner focuses on three restless people stuck in a remote French provincial village hard by the Swiss border. Paul (Hugues Quester) smuggles people and goods across the border but dreams of emigrating to Canada. Madeline (Myriam Mezieres) runs a disco but dreams of escaping to Paris to become a singer. Louis (Jean-Philippe Ecoffey), a local farm youth, is a trained clock maker whose conflicting desires make him the focal character. There is virtually no action, but there is plenty of interaction, and Tanner makes the beautiful but isolated locale highly expressive of his trapped people’s thoughts and emotions.

A key film by a major film maker, “Every Man for Himself” is the Godard masterwork that marked a second beginning for him. In it, he delineated the death of feeling and the flowering of an aggressive self-absorption in contemporary life with both amazing beauty and much humor. The Karmitz series concludes at 8 p.m. Sunday with “Melo” (1986), Alain Resnais’ elegant but terrifically demanding film of the 1929 Henry Bernstein play, and “Le Bon Plaisir” (1984), a tedious tale about the president of France (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and his ex-mistress (Catherine Deneuve) coping with an amateur blackmailer.

Information: (213) 206-8013, 206 FILM.