L.A. Film Festival Comes of Age : From Friedkin to Donen and the whole world in between, the Fest list includes 200 films from 40 countries

If passion and enthusiasm are life’s blood for true movie lovers, there’s something to get passionate about in Los Angeles, beginning next week. The 4-year-old American Film Institute/Los Angeles International Film Festival--conceived in turbulence, born in confusion, weaned on controversy--has finally come of age.

Gone for now are the days of Icelandic documentaries on servicemen’s wives, of Czechoslovakian horror films about vampire automobiles, of Finnish fairy tales, Yugoslavian message movies. In the past, AFI / L.A. FilmFest, at its worst, has seemed like a kindly uncle who let every wide-eyed relative and vagrant into the door--tolerating almost any kind of misbehavior, especially from independent American movies without distributors. But the kindly uncle has grown more selective. At the same time, paradoxically, he’s opening up more rooms and lengthening his guest list.

Approximately 200 films from 40 different countries are on the bill this year, beginning with the gala Thursday opening of William Friedkin’s new movie, “The Guardian,” and ending May 3, with Stanley Donen’s great 1957 Fred Astaire-Audrey Hepburn-George Gershwin musical, “Funny Face.” So far, after more than 50 press screenings, the ardor is undampened. Quite the contrary.

What has happened? There’s been a radical alteration in the old format AFI / L.A. FilmFest inherited from its 15-year predecessor, Filmex. Gone almost totally are some of the elements that often made Filmex delightful: the classic revivals and historical programs, the Hollywood hoopla, the 50-hour marathons of musicals, Westerns, horror movies. In a period of dwindling revival houses, this is a sad loss. But director Ken Wlaschin and his fellow programmers are finally beginning to realize their dream: to make Los Angeles’ local film festival, in the back yard of Hollywood itself, a gathering place and forum for the rest of the world’s cinema.

To that end, AFI / L.A. FilmFest is holding seminars with the Eastern European filmmakers, with local independent and with independent black filmmakers based in Los Angeles, while at the same time staging tributes to some revered industry figures: musical legend Donen, producer David Wolper and cartoon pioneer Walter Lantz.

Serendipitously, the theme of this year’s festival is Hollywood Glasnost: a celebration of the new democratic reforms and movements in the old Eastern Bloc countries and of the new, less circumscribed cinema they’ve helped generate. Several films on the Glasnost program--Jiri Menzel’s “Larks on a String,” Hungary’s “The Agitators,” Czechoslovakia’s “Pictures of Old Times,” Romania’s “The Reenactment”--have been banned in their own countries for decades. And while the new outpouring isn’t uniformly good--freedom can breed chaos and license as well as creativity--we get startling glimpses of a Russia and Eastern Europe not much seen until recently: gray, sad, riddled with social inequities.

Positives, unfortunately, sometimes have negative inspirations. If AFI/L.A. FilmFest has had a number of excellent, unseen foreign films to choose from this year, it’s because foreign film distribution is collapsing in the United States--a sorry situation not even one excellent festival can cure.

How does the current festival cope in an era of vanishing screens, timid distributors, of college students who are apparently too sapped or dizzy to try to read subtitles? The following wrap-up, which partially covers the event’s first week, is an attempt to summarize its riches.

The recommendations of The Times reviewing staff--including Sheila Benson, Kevin Thomas, Peter Rainer, Chris Willman and this writer--leads off each category. All Eastern European films are shown at the Cineplex Odeon Fairfax; all others at the Cineplex Century Plaza. Information: (213) 480-2323 or 856-7707.

Theo Angelopoulos Retrospective

Highly Recommended: “The Travelling Players.””Landscape in the Mist,” “Days of ‘36,” “The Beekeeper,” “Alexander the Great,” “Journey to Cythera.”

Recommended: “The Reconstruction,” “The Huntsmen,”

Last year, my pick as the best of AFI / L.A. FilmFest was Theo Angelopoulos’ “Landscape in the Mist,” a spellbindingly beautiful Greek “road” movie, which went on to win the Felix as the best film released in Europe in 1989. This year, the festival brings back “Landscape,” and all of Angelopoulos’ other seven features--including his 1976 modern classic, “The Travelling Players,” selected in an Italian Critic’s poll as the best film of the 1970s, and in a British poll as the best film of the past two decades.

Angelopoulos may be the greatest living filmmaker still relatively unknown and unseen in the West. Despite the many international awards they’ve won over the last 22 years, no Angelopoulos film has received widespread U.S. release--not even his 1986 “The Beekeeper,” which starred Marcello Mastroianni. It would be a wonderful irony if Angelopoulos, 54 and at his creative peak, made his major U.S. breakthrough in Los Angeles.

A great “road” director, he has a predilection for oblique, despairing views of Greek history and politics; he’s also a master at conveying modern alienation. But the most striking elements of his style--other than his bewitchingly beautiful landscape scenes, usually shot near dawn or dusk in a wintry countryside--are his obsessions with minimal dialogue and the long take. “The Travelling Players” is over four hours long and contains only 80 shots, about one every three minutes. Despite this seeming austerity, the films bristle with tension.

Angelopoulos’ three masterpieces are probably “Landscape in the Mist” (April 27), the 1972 “Days of ‘36” (April 21, 22) and “The Travelling Players” (April 22). “The Travelling Players” is obviously his magnum opus. In it, a rag-tag Greek theatrical troupe criss-crosses the countryside from 1940 to 1952, experiencing all the social upheavals of World War II and its turbulent aftermath. Their play, Spiridonos Perisiadis’ hackneyed but popular pastoral romance, “Golfo the Shepherdess,” never changes--but offstage, their lives begin to take on the shape of a Sophoclean tragedy. “Days of ‘36,” centering on a prison hostage crisis which helps bring on the rise of the Metaxas dictatorship, is one of his most overtly anti-Fascist statements. “Landscape” is a seemingly simpler story in which two runaway children travel through modern Greece in search of their absent, far-off father: a father as mythological as the Greek gods. All of Angelopoulos’ previous work echoes poetically through it; the Travelling Players themselves reappear in one sequence.

The other films, if not quite as perfect, are often equally fascinating:

“The Reconstruction,” (Friday) , Agelopolous’ 1970 debut film, is a hard-edged, black-and-white true-crime story the seems to mix neo-realism, Brecht and the Hawks-Huston-Wilder gangster tradition: movies Angelopoulos loved as a boy.

In “The Huntsmen,” (April 23) a rebel Communist guerrilla, killed in 1949, is found frozen in the snow by a 1976 party of hunters; as his body thaws so does the entire history of an era.

“Alexander the Great” (April 24), a Grand Prize winner at Venice, is a dance-like fable of rebellion turning to despotism, set in a breathtakingly picturesque Macedonian mountain village.

“Journey to Cythera” (April 25) is an almost freezingly austere portrayal of a situation that might seem booby-trapped with sentimentalism: an old radical, returning to his mountain home after years of political exile in Russia, finds that he’s still a rebellious anachronism, that his world will cast him out again.

“The Beekeeper” (April 27), another road film and Antonioni homage, starring Mastroianni, is a definitive poetic portrait of an aging man, facing disillusionment and youth, becoming consumed and destroyed. Like all Angelopoulos, it’s hauntingly sad, mysteriously beautiful.

Krzyzstof Kieslowski Retrospective

Highly Recommended: “The Decalogue, Pts. 1-10,” “A Short Film About Killing,” “A Short Film About Love.”

Like Angelopoulos, Kieslowski has been a consistent international award winner. Like Angelopoulos, he has won the all-European Oscar equivalent, the Felix, in 1988 for “A Short Film About Killing.” Like Angelopoulos, he remains virtually unseen in the United States.

Unlike Angelopoulos, whose uncompromising approach can alienate unsympathetic viewers, Kieslowski’s virtues are more obvious and immediate: great ensemble performances, compelling visual style, dramatic immediacy, deep emotional and intellectual content--all wrapped up in taut narrative structures worthy of a first-class director of movie thrillers.

Kieslowski’s masterwork is the “Decalogue,” a 10-hour, 10-part Polish TV series, each part based on one of the Ten Commandments. In each story, Kieslowski and co-scenarist Krzysztof Piesiewicz examine a specific “sin” committed among the inhabitants of a drab, forbidding high-rise in Warsaw. Their conclusions vary; so does the tone. Some stories are tragic, some poignant, some seemingly moralistic. Some are unabashedly comic.

Decalogue 10 on “Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor’s Goods” is a hilarious portrayal of two knuckleheaded brothers, a punk rock star and a “square,” who became obsessed with their late father’s stamp collection. Decalogue 6, about a voyeur and his obsession, is a near variation on Hitchcock’s “Rear Window.” Decalogue Five, “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” is a crime story of hair-raising force, perhaps the most powerful argument against capital punishment the movies have ever given us.

In sick, twisted green-gray perspectives, Kieslowski shows us a pointless, brutal murder; then, in equal terrifying detail, the murderer’s execution. In both cases, the victims, initially repellent, become sympathetic by virtue of their plight.

The 10 films are an interlocking whole: major characters from one episode appear in minor roles or as passers-by in the others, and one common character, a mysterious, silent observer, appears in all of them. The film proves that great art and television are not incompatible. It also proves that the wages of sin are never predictable.

“A Short Film About Killing” and “A Short Film About Love” are expanded versions of Parts 5 and 6 of the “Decalogue.”

Western Europe

Recommended: “3 Seats for the 26th,” “A Handful of Time.”

“Three Seats for the 26th” (April 20), a return to the musical for French director Jacques Demy and composer Michel LeGrand (“The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”) is, in many ways, a pretty, foolish little movie. Yves Montand returns to Marseilles for a stage show that presents his biography in song; Demy tries to reprise the era of MGM musicals, Donen and Minnelli. By comparison, Demy’s dances are wispy, his tunes frail, his colors cartoonish and his climax tasteless: it’s briefly suggested that Montand is seducing his own illegitimate daughter. Yet “Three Seats” so unabashedly loves musicals and Montand is so effortless a show-stopper, that there’s something giddy and delightful about it all. It’s like champagne in a plastic flute.

Sheila Benson found Martin Asphaug’s “A Handful of Time” (Friday) “an extremely assured Norwegian film” with “gorgeous exteriors” about a guilt-ridden old man coming to terms with harsh nature: inner and outer. Peter Rainer, on the other hand, thought Pupi Avanti’s “A Story of Boys and Girls” (Saturday) a comedy, set in 1936 at a 30-course family dinner, was allegedly “life-embracing” but actually “tedious.”

Andi Engel’s British-West German “Melancholia” (April 25) seems bent on producing the same feeling in its audience. Jeroen Krabbe, looking unhappy, is torn between a melancholy life as an art critic, mulling over joyless seductions, and another career as a melancholy man of action, conducting glum assassinations. It’s a dispirited movie. Benson considered West German director Bernhard Wicki’s “The Spider’s Web” (April 25) “big, opulent, almost operatic,” “played to the hilt” by Klaus-Maria Brandauer and Ulrich Muhe . . . but ultimately short of the mark. She and I were disappointed with Karl Francis’ “Angry Earth” (April 26), a Welsh social drama about the rise of the Labor Movement, recalled by a 110-year-old woman through a slow haze of bawdy joy, battered heads, bright sermons and labored sentiment.

Eastern European

Recommended: “Standoff,” “Time of Violence,” “That Summer of White Roses,” “Elysium,” “The Reenactment.”

Hungarian Gyula Gazdag makes surreal dramas and hilarious documentaries. “Standoff” (April 22) is a thriller, shot with the immediacy of life. In it, two Hungarian macho punks hold a girl’s dormitory hostage, demanding free passage to the West. The machinations around them, painfully plausible, drive a ridiculous situation toward realistic catastrophe.

“Time of Violence” (April 24), shot by the director of the Bulgarian film industry may arouse intense political and religious controversy. It’s a brutally effective historical epic about Christian mountain people under siege by fanatical janizaries bent on forcibly converting the entire village. Lyudmil Staikov has the temperament for this kind of epic; he likes big gestures, broad vistas, bold strokes.

Kevin Thomas says Rajko Grlic’s “That Summer of White Roses” (Saturday), set during the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia, has “one of Tom Conti’s best roles.” Erika Szanto’s “Elysium” (April 24) focuses sensitively on the dramatic turbulence around a children’s concentration camp and the fantasies that reign inside. Szanto’s other film, “Mission to Evian” (April 24), also has a Holocaust theme: it’s about a Jewish doctor’s desperate attempt to convince the Allies to ransom Jews after Austria’s collapse.

Lucian Pintille’s “The Reenactment” (April 24) is a long-banned Romanian film, a darkly jovial absurdist comedy about the charades of totalitarian justice. Ivan Nichev’s “Ivan and Alexandra” (April 22) parallels Bulgaria’s descent into repression with a fitfully sprightly coming-of-age romance. According to Peter Rainer, Karen Shaknazarov’s “Zero City” (Saturday) has a “creepy ‘Twilight Zone’ premise” that leaves us “caught in a Stalinist time warp.” Another Soviet film, “Commentary on an Appeal for Mercy” (April 26), directed by Sergei Primak and Inessa Tumanian, is a “walk” film, a kaleidoscopic and over-obvious tour of modern Moscow by a bureacratic criminal on his last day and night of freedom.

Asian / African / Australian

Highly Recommended: “City of Sadness,” “An Enemy of the People,” “A Terra-Cotta Warrior,” “Birth.”

Recommended: “Don’t Let Them Shoot the Kite,” “Rikyu.”

Hou Hsai-hsien’s “City of Sadness” (April 23), the first Taiwanese film ever to take a major festival award--grand prize at the Venice Film Festival--is remarkable in many ways. It has the density of a good novel, compressing years of frenzied social history--from the end of World War II to the Chinese Revolution--into the experiences of one family. Involved in the local underworld, this family slides dizzily down to disaster; meanwhile, their country careens through one social convulsion after another. The movie’s view is calm and ironic, even during the most horrendous events. It’s so packed with life, incident and rich detail, it can barely be assimilated on a single viewing.

“Birth” (April 22), the story of an old villager waiting in vain for the return of a son arrested in an anti-government rally, marks the directorial debut of noted Indian cinematographer Shaji. Sheila Benson worries “that harried Americans can’t (won’t) slow their pulses down to the tempo of this fine, moving and heartfelt film.” Peter Rainer consider’s Satyajit Ray’s first film in four years, “An Enemy of the People” (April 21), adapted from Henrik Ibsen’s play about plague and principle, “a beautiful transcription . . . one of the most cinematically expressive ‘filmed plays’ ever made.”

From Hong Kong, where they know how to make action movies, “A Terra Cotta Warrior” (April 21), directed by Ching Siu Tung, is the slambang fantasy-romance of your dreams: an Indiana Jones-style adventure about a faithful 3,000-year-old warrior. The major pure-fun movie of the festival, it features unusual collaborators: the special effects are by Tsui Hark, director of “Peking Opera Blues,” and the male star is Zhang Yimou, mainland Chinese director of 1988’s arthouse hit, “Red Sorghum.”

After a 17-year absence, Japan’s Hiroshi Teshigahara, director of “Woman in the Dunes,” returns to fiction features with “Rikyu” (April 24), in which the legendary Buddhist priest and master of the tea ceremony clashes with his hot-tempered warlord employer. Kevin Thomas finds it “an exquisite historical tragedy . . . reminiscent in theme of ‘A Man for All Seasons.’ ” Thomas also recommends Turkish director Tunc Basaran’s “Don’t Let Them Shoot the Kite” (Friday, Saturday), a film about a little boy incarcerated with his mother in a women’s prison.

“Island” (May 3), by Australian director Paul Cox (“Man of Flowers,” “Vincent”), is about three women of different nationalities philosophizing about life on a Greek isle. It’s a beautifully shot, but enervated drama, enlivened mostly by the fiery performance of Irene Papas.

The South African “Jobman” (Friday, Saturday), directed by Darrel Roodt, is an exciting, unsurprising action fable in which a mythical black hero and his white boss and former playmate head toward inevitable, murderous collision.

Eros Djarot’s “Woman of Courage” (April 23), based on the Dutch wars and the career of rebel-heroine Tjoet Nja ‘Dhien, is one of the most lavish productions in Indonesian history. That money has bought a lot of nobility, sacrifice, betrayal, capering clowns, scowling villains, cynical go-betweens, stirring sermons and glorious defeats. It still wasn’t well-spent.

Cine Latino

This section, usually one of the strongest at AFI / L.A. FilmFest, gets no recommendations from Times reviewers. Kevin Thomas considered the Brazilian “Better Days Ahead” from Carlos (“Bye Bye Brazil”) Digues “a major disappointment,” and its tale of a Rio actress dreaming of Hollywood stardom “too wan for us to take seriously any of the implications, cultural, political or otherwise.” Chris Willman, thought Arturo Ripstein’s cynical romance, “White Lies” (April 22) a “nicely shot and utterly bleak Mexican psychodrama...strong stuff, but mostly for diehard anti-romantics.” Peter Rainer found Beda Docampo Feijoo’s Argentinian “Loves of Kafka” (April 22) a “dreary oddity” and thought Jorge Marrale, the actor playing Kafka, bore “an unfortunate resemblance to Albert Brooks.”

Los Angeles Black Independent Cinema

The meat of the L.A. black independent film selections--including Charles Burnett’s superb “Killer of Sheep”--turns up in the festival’s second week. Meanwhile, Billy Woodberry’s “Bless Their Little Hearts” (Saturday), scripted by Burnett, is a sympathetic Cassavetes-style look at lower-class black family life in Watts. Wendell Harris’ “Chameleon Street” (Friday), a film about an agile, amoral impersonator, won the grand prize at the U.S. Film Festival in Park City, Utah, but Sheila Benson demurs: “It overreaches fatally, in direction, writing, in the director’s egocentric central performance and in the film’s erratic tone.”

U.S. Independent Features

Recommended: “Water and Power.”

Pat O’Neill’s “Water and Power” (April 25) is a genuinely inventive film: chockful of ideas, witty, surprising, occasionally poetic. It’s a many-leveled portrait of Southern California, that uses multiple images, “Koyaanisqatsi”-style time-lapse photography, snatches of TV shows and Sternberg movies, a bright jazz score and ironically fractured wisps of narration to drag us onto a floating tour of the state’s body and soul.

Documentaries

Highly Recommended: Seminar with Michael Moore and “Roger & Me.” (AFI Mark Goodson).

Recommended: “I Went to the Dance,” “The Long Way Home,” “Berkeley in the ‘60s,” “Preston Sturges: The Rise and Fall of an American Dreamer,” “Hollywood Mavericks.”

Among the highlights of this strong section is an appearance by Michael Moore, with his controversial “Roger & Me” (Saturday.) Les Blank’s “I Went to the Dance” (April 22) is so rich you can taste it, a flavorsome gumbo of a movie that spreads out a host of joyous Cajun music makers, zydeco stylists and such geniuses as late accordionist Clifton Chenier. Michael Apted’s mordant “A Long Way Home” (April 26, 27) has a priceless subject which it reveals with dispassionate skill: the rocky road of the idolized underground Leningrad band, Aquarium, after well-meaning Americans sign them to record in the West.

Sheila Benson believes Kenneth Bowser and Todd McCarthy’s “Preston Sturges” (Saturday), about the great Hollywood comedy writer-director, “captures the savor of the man for everyone not fortunate enough to know him, or his work, well.” Benson, who lived just across the Bay at the time, found “Berkeley in the ‘60s” (April 25, 27) “outstanding . . . a careful, balanced job on a complex, many-layered period,” but thought “To Protect Mother Earth” (April 21, 24), with Robert Redford narrating the plight of Shoshones theatened by government encroachment, “unthrilling, dogged stuff . . . no matter how good its heart.”

“Hollywood Mavericks” (Friday) is probably only for hard-core movie buffs, but they’ll enjoy the chance to hear people like Martin Scorsese and Alan Rudolph talk about John Ford, Erich Von Stroheim and Orson Welles. Chris Willman was sympathetic to the intentions of “Teatro” (April 21,22), about a Honduran acting troupe directed by an American Jesuit, but thought it was ultimately, “an interesting subject, haphazardly handled.” Two more competent but uninspired works are Jeff B. Harmon’s “Afghan Trilogy” (April 26, 27) and Adam Horowitz’s “Home on the Range” (April 25, 26). The first follows the bizarre attempts of the old residents of the Kwajalein Atoll, now a nuclear test center, to reclaim their island. The second takes an idiosyncratic look at the participants in a surprising war, including the local Ismaeli Defense Chief, whose favorite song is AC / DC’s “Highway to Hell.”