Kurosawa Series Continues; Curtiz Films, 3-D Fest on Tap

There is an abundance of alternative film offerings this week.

The comprehensive Kurosawa retrospective continues at the Little Tokyo Cinemas, as does the survey of Iranian cinema of the ‘80s at UCLA, where a 34-film Michael Curtiz series commences tonight with his 1921 Austrian silent “The Way of Terror.” There’s even a three-month 3-D festival starting Friday at the Vagabond, with the 1953 “House of Wax.” Director Andre de Toth and star Vincent Price are expected to appear.

Meanwhile, LACE will present “Ten to Eleven: Television by Alexander Kluge,” a 90-minute presentation of recent work for TV by the spiritual father of the New German Cinema. The program will screen continuously during gallery hours from today through May 20.

“Ten to Eleven” finds Kluge at his most playful, freely associating and reprocessing images from 20th-Century popular culture to create fresh and often amusing meanings. One whimsical segment imagines the kidnaping of the Eiffel Tower, its relocation to an Arizona canyon and eventual magical return to Paris. Not surprisingly, there are many references to World Wars I and II, and Kluge even includes a newsreel on currency reform in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Throughout these videos, Kluge makes connections between popular culture, current events and economics.

One delightful segment deals with vintage advertisements, with Kluge reducing a silly Nazi gymnastics rally--the gymnasts form a swastika a la Busby Berkeley as a finale--to the level of a commercial. Through a bit of judicious editing, Kluge turns an actress in an old movie--she is almost certainly Leni Riefenstahl--into endorsing a product in the midst of a love scene. Best of all is Kluge’s “100 Years of Tango,” which intermixes shots of the Battle of the Marne to the cooling towers of a nuclear plant, with homages to the tango’s greatest stars, Rudolph Valentino and Argentine singer Carlos Gardel, both of whom suffered untimely deaths. Information: (213) 624-5650.

Also commencing today is “Amerikanism,” a series of films presented at the County Museum of Art in association with the Goethe Institute, which explores the role of America in Weimar culture after World War I. Opening the retrospective in the Bing Theater at 8 p.m. is Fritz Lang’s final silent, “Woman in the Moon” (1929), a film so prophetically accurate and technically dazzling that in 1937 the Gestapo confiscated not only all models of its spaceship but also all foreign prints of the picture.

Though Lang was honored for the film years later by the Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala., he always gave major credit to his good friend, pioneer rocket enthusiast Dr. Willy Ley, who collaborated with Hermann Oberth (later a rocket designer for the Nazis) in designing for the film a two-step rocket model along with other elaborate paraphernalia of space travel.

Based on a novel by Lang’s then-wife and co-scenarist Thea von Harbou, “Woman in the Moon,” apart from its stunning visuals, is a typically exaggerated silent melodrama, a kind of vintage “Star Wars” played straight and involving an eternal triangle between two men and a woman. While Lang did not take the film’s plot seriously, he was always proud of the film, especially for his inadvertent invention of the countdown to dramatize visually the spaceship’s takeoff, a special challenge in the silent cinema.

Performance artist and avant-garde composer Christine Baczewska will perform a live sound track for the film, using her voice as the primary instrument and supplementing it with synthesized tracks.

Friday’s 8 p.m. program will be F. W. Murnau’s “Sunrise” (1927) and Walter Ruttmann’s “Berlin: Symphony of a City” (1927). For full schedule, call (213) 857-6010.

This month’s Temp’theque program at the Directors Guild is “The Divine Garbo.” If you missed “A Woman of Affairs” last January at UCLA, you will have another chance Saturday at 7 p.m. Greta Garbo is at her most transcendently beautiful and subtle in this 1928 silent version of Michael Arlen’s “The Green Hat.” It’s followed at 9:15 by “Love,” a 1927 version of “Anna Karenina.”

Friday’s 7 p.m. double bill includes her first two MGM features, “The Torrent” and “The Temptress” (both 1926), followed at 9:45 by one of her finest, “Flesh and the Devil” (1927). For full schedule: (213) 466-FILM.