A Showcase for Radical Innovator Michael Snow

Compared with the average Hollywood film, the works of Canadian Michael Snow have been seen by only a relative handful. Enthusiasts have to catch them at odd times in offbeat venues: like Filmforum, which presents three Snow works tonight at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE).

Yet, in his special world, Snow reigns supreme: Like Jean-Luc Godard, he’s a radical innovator in image and sound. Snow’s 1966 “Wavelength,” which consists of one unbroken 45-minute forward zoom shot, is in some ways, the “Citizen Kane” of experimental films.

He’s no conventional storyteller. Of the films tonight, “New York Eye and Ear Control,” (1964) consists mostly of scenes with a makeshift feminine cutout posed against seascapes, forests and city streets; “Au Revoir/See You Later” (1988) simply shows, in one shot, a man rising up from his desk, putting on his coat and leaving an office: 30 seconds worth of action stretched, by extreme slow motion, to more than 18 minutes. And in “Seated Figures” (1988), a series of tracking shots of the ground--pavement, rocky plain, seashore and daisy-filled grass--are taken by a camera apparently attached to the tailpipe of a moving car.

Do the films sound like shallow minimalist stunts? Snow’s mastery of composition and rhythm make them play compellingly. In “Figures,” the topography from a few inches above becomes fascinating. So does the way Snow, like Mel Brooks in the classic short, “The Critic,” slyly pulls the “audience” reactions--coughs, chairs scraping and people obviously leaving--into the film itself.

“New York Eye and Ear Control” is notable also for the brilliant jazz ensemble Snow assembled for the sound track: including Albert Ayler and Don Cherry, “free jazz” specialists who take the intense experiments of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy to a far extreme of melodic and harmonic fury. Information: (213) 276-7452.

George Cukor may seem Snow’s opposite: an old-line studio movie maker who directed from 1930 to 1981, specializing in plush “women’s pictures.” And, in the 1954 “A Star Is Born”--shown in its restored 176-minute version Friday in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s “Restorations, Rarities and Request” series--he made what may be his masterpiece.

“A Star Is Born” is the quintessential “Rise and Fall in Hollywood” story: A drunken matinee idol (James Mason) guides his discovery (Judy Garland) to fame and heartbreak. It’s a fairy-tale done by sophisticates: producer David O. Selznick, and writer Dorothy Parker in the 1937 original and, here, Cukor and Broadway’s Moss Hart.

The film--which contains Garland’s finest performance, and two others just as good by James Mason and Jack Carson--is something rare in big studio movies. Not a musical comedy, it’s closer to a musical tragedy, or a dramatic romance with musical interludes. In it, Cukor, his actors and technicians converted the usual stuff of Hollywood dreams into something bittersweet and terrifying, with moments--Garland’s hair-raising after-hours rendition of “The Man That Got Away,” and Mason’s indelible inflections of alcoholic joy and self-loathing--that stir the senses and haunt the mind. Information: (213) 857-6010.

The movies were in their infancy when Georges Melies made his charmingly pasteboard and artificial 1902 “A Trip to the Moon.” So it seems inevitable that they would eventually help record images of the real moon--as in Al Reinert’s remarkable “For All Mankind,” shown Tuesday as part of the UCLA Film Archives’ documentary series at Melnitz Theater. Composed of footage of the Apollo moon voyages, Reinert’s 1989 film takes us through the journey that Jules Verne only dreamed: from the earth, through space, to the surface of the moon--and safely back again. Information: (213) 206-3456.