VIDEO REVIEWS : Breakthrough TV: A Thinking Person’s Festival : AFI’s 4-day program of videos, among them Peter Greenaway’s imposing ‘TV Dante,’ expands the art form.

It seems only natural that one of the highlights of the American Film Institute’s National Video Festival--Peter Greenaway and Tom Phillips’ “TV Dante”--has been described as “a thinking person’s pop video.”

That’s a glib label for a rich, unprecedented work, but it points to an overwhelming impression left by the festival. Since venues for the exploding field of video works are absurdly few, the need for a thinking person’s MTV is greater than ever.

If what AFI has amassed is any indication, a programmer for this MTV of the future would have no shortage of choices. Even a casual visit to the festival will suggest the quantity of work that you won’t see on PBS or cable. This is AFI’s 10th annual video survey, running Thursday through Sunday at various locations on the AFI campus in Hollywood. Even though all events are free and most have repeat screenings, it doesn’t lessen the absurdity that you have to leave your house to see such great television.

On the other hand, it’s a chance to experience television in a public setting, sometimes with the videomakers in person (guests include Beth B., whose “Belladonna” screens Saturday at 9 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m., and Norman and Bruce Yonemoto, whose “Made in Hollywood” plays Friday at 7 p.m. and Saturday at 10 a.m.).

Other events include opening ceremonies honoring winners of the Robert M. Bennett Awards for outstanding local television productions (Thursday, 6 p.m.); a tribute to the great film and video experimentalist, Ed Emshwiller (Thursday, 9 p.m.); and a panel discussion with “Twin Peaks” co-creator Mark Frost and Harley Peyton, one of the show’s writers, on the program’s impact on alternative TV (Friday, 9 p.m.).

Though the festival devotes much of Thursday and Friday to the recent and not-so-recent past--surveys of Eastern European work and Cold War-era TV from the Peabody Collection (see Howard Rosenberg’s column)--its heart and soul is new work. While that means that the genuinely visionary sits alongside the insistently polemical and the pretentiously fashionable, it’s also clear that video has replaced film as the medium of choice for independent moving-image artists.

Even so, if the festival has a star, it’s film director Greenaway (“The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover”), represented not only by “TV Dante,” (Saturday, 7 p.m.; Sunday, noon) but by a chilling, funny, profound look at history and mortality, “Death in the Seine” (Friday, 4:45 p.m.; Saturday, 9 p.m.).

“Seine” contemplates what might have happened to 23 of 306 people who drowned in the Paris river at the height of the French Revolution. Greenaway, using records kept by meticulous morticians (wittily played by Jean-Michel Dagory and Jim van der Woude), creates a macabre tone poem on death’s inevitability and a poignant, humanizing study of victims of social upheaval.

“TV Dante” is a delirious celebration of video art and a genuinely post-modern examination of Dante’s “Inferno.” This first of Dante’s three-part “The Divine Comedy” was divided into 33 cantos, or sections. Greenaway and Phillips’ work-in-progress is up to Canto 8 (each about 10 minutes long), but it’s already a landmark in how video can interact with and enrich texts.

Actors Bob Peck (Dante) and John Gielgud (Virgil) utter the verse in stark head shots as frames within frames of images rush by, including experts--among them, naturalist David Attenborough--amusingly placed on screen as visual footnotes explaining Dante’s endless allusions. Greenaway and Phillips expand on the poet’s subtle critique of his society by layering in their own critiques of society of the video age.

Gianni Toti’s “Squeezeangezaum” (Friday, 7 p.m.; Sunday, 10 a.m.) intends to be an abstract reverie on the ideas of Soviet poet Vladimir Chlebnikov. More heat than light is shed on those ideas, which dwell a lot on wordplay, but, at its best, “Squeezeangezaum” is a wild, unique marriage of Italian Futurism and 1920s Soviet modernism.

Marianne Trench’s “Cyberpunk” (billed with Mark Rappaport’s predictable love tragedy, “Postcards” on Saturday, 12:15 p.m.; Sunday, noon) is a tantalizing, incomplete guide to the underground computer movement of the same name.

Los Angeles is known as a hotbed of videomaking, but a festival centerpiece, the L.A.-based Yonemoto brothers’ “Made in Hollywood,” proves to be a shallow, ersatz soap opera on the evils of Tinseltown. More interesting gems can be found in two programs covering Southland artists, “L.A. Freewaves Preview” (Friday, 7 p.m.; Saturday, 12:15 p.m.) and “Open Channels 6,” curated by the Long Beach Museum of Art (Thursday, 8 p.m.).

Nothing in the festival is as private yet as universal as David Larcher’s complex memoir of his dying grandmother, “Granny’s Is” (billed with the pretentious “The In-Between” on Friday, 9 p.m.; Saturday, 4:45 p.m.). In a sense, Larcher’s may be one of the most artful home videos ever made.

A mother’s death is also at the center of one of the best in the New Works category, Janice Tanaka’s gorgeous “Memories From the Department of Amnesia” (Saturday, 2:30 p.m.; Sunday, 10 a.m.). Tanaka, in shifting styles and moods, reflects on survivors of wartime Japanese-American internment camps, and two other works focus on Japan itself: Louis Alvarez and Andrew Kolker’s marvelously droll “The Japanese Version” (Saturday, 9 p.m.; Sunday, 10 a.m.) observes how Japan appropriates products of American pop culture, while the hidden anti-materialistic Japan is uncovered in Edin Velez’s atmospheric survey of Butoh dance, “Dance of Darkness” (Friday, 4:45 p.m.; Saturday, 9 p.m.).

Things hidden in general--culturally and historically--become a running concern of the festival. Laura Kipnis’ rather silly “Marx: The Video” (Saturday, 9 p.m.; Sunday, 2 p.m.) tries to understand Karl Marx through his decaying physical condition, and Paris Poirier’s loving but bland “Last Call at Maud’s” (Saturday, 9 p.m.; Sunday, 10 a.m.) tells how a San Francisco lesbian bar became the gathering spot for a movement.

The finest video histories are vividly contrasting. Barbara Kopple’s “Out of Darkness” (Saturday, 4:45; Sunday, 10 a.m.) becomes a passionate ode to the American mine worker and any labor movement that battles horrible odds; John Jeremy’s superb “Swing Under the Swastika” (Saturday, 4:45 p.m.; Sunday, 4 p.m.) stylishly profiles another set of heroes--German lovers of swing jazz who risked imprisonment and death under the Nazi regime.

MTV with brains also means music videos with a mind, and that’s nowhere better exemplified than Rob Nilsson’s personalized document, “Words for the Dying” (Friday, 7 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m.), about how John Cale and Brian Eno recorded Cale’s symphonic work, “The Falklands Suite.” As with so many of the festival’s entries, Nilsson makes us aware of the camera (Eno is terrified of it) and of video’s responsibility to its subjects.

Now, when was the last time you saw that on television?

Festival information: (213) 856-7773 . The AFI campus is at 2021 N. Western Ave., Hollywood.