‘Spanish Cinema’ Retrospective at USC Accents Family, Gender

“Spanish Cinema: The Politics of Family and Gender” is a provocative USC retrospective running Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays at 7:30 p.m. through Nov. 19.

The films have been selected by the late Katherine Singer Kovacs, an authority on Spanish films, and by Marsha Kinder, professor of critical studies, to reveal the ways in which family and gender express important political issues in Spanish history.

The series begins tonight in Room 108 of the George Lucas Cinema and Television Center with Manuel Gutierrez Aragon’s well-known “Half of Heaven” (1986), a beautiful and subtle feminist fable starring Angela Molina. Saturday brings (again in Room 108) some true rarities. Segundo de Chomon’s five-minute “Hotel Electric” (1905) is a delightful, comical curtain-raiser with intimations of the mechanized world of “Modern Times” and set in a hotel where suitcases unpack themselves and brushes polish shoes unaided. Florian Rey’s “The Cursed Village” is a 1929 silent feature of astonishing pictorial beauty and dramatic power that surely places it among the greatest of silent films.

Set in a Castilian village with stark, primitive architecture, it is the kind of harsh melodrama Lillian Gish turned to pure gold. At a time when crops are ruined by torrential rains, and while her husband is imprisoned for striking the village patriarch, a young mother (Florencia Decauer) in desperation goes to Seville to seek work and becomes a prostitute. When she returns after three years her husband, in a display of extreme puritanical machismo, insists that she neither touch nor even look at their young son.

Sunday’s offerings (in Norris Theater) are no less fascinating. The 1941 “The Spirit of a Race” is of all things a film from a novel by then-dictator Francisco Franco glorifying (greatly) his own family, tracing the destinies of two generations of the proud Churruca family from defeat in the Spanish-American War to triumph in the Spanish Civil War. The family’s grandiose self-importance and feverish patriotism verges on parody and leans to the ponderous, but the film is a sleek, lushly photographed propaganda piece and was amazingly effective and influential in its time.

Lorenzo Llobet Gracia’s 1948 semi-autobiographical, introspective “Life in Shadows” deals with the impact of the Spanish Civil War on an impassioned film maker; as a conscious celebration of cinema as an art form, it anticipates France’s New Wave by a decade. Fernando Fernan Gomez, still one of Spain’s best-known and most gifted actors, stars. Information: (213) 743-6071.

As a Halloween treat, the Workman and Temple Family Homestead Museum in the City of Industry and the Silent Society will present an original tinted Kodascope print of “The Lost World” (1925) on Saturday at 7 p.m. It is a quaintly amusing period piece notable as a precursor to “King Kong,” especially in the remarkable special effects by Willis O’Brien, who worked on both films.

“The Lost World” hasn’t the timeless erotic charge, pathos and multilayered symbolism that makes “King Kong” so timelessly potent, but it’s impressive for its large scale and for O’Brien’s array of surprisingly lifelike dinosaurs.

Also on the bill are two comedy shorts, “Koko’s Earth Control” (1927), featuring Koko the Clown, and the jaunty “Haunted Spooks” (1920), which stars Harold Lloyd and his future wife, Mildred Davis, and features interiors shot in the long-gone Bradbury Mansion on Bunker Hill.