Finding Meaning From the Holocaust

Abraham Ravett’s 58-minute “Everything’s for You” (1989) and his 22-minute “Half-Sister” (1985), which Filmforum presents at 8 tonight at LACE with the filmmaker present, utilize a wide range of experimental techniques to wrest fresh emotions and meanings from the Holocaust experience.

There’s an appropriate sense of fragmentation and discretion to both films, especially the first, in which Ravett attempts both to honor and to come to terms with his late father, a survivor of the Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz. In this film, suffused with pain and beauty, Ravett struggles to understand a parent who was at times apparently brutal and distant.

The key to both films are the few precious old photos that attest that Chaim Ravett (1905-1979) lost his first family, a wife, son and daughter to the Holocaust, people Ravett yearns to know about but which he realizes is a subject of unbearable pain for his father. “Half-Sister,” indeed, imagines what her life might have been had she survived.

Information: (213) 663-9568.

The American Film Institute is presenting at 7:30 tonight in its Mark Goodson Theater three films from Appalshop, a media center established in 1969 in Whitesburg, Ky. (pop. 1,500) that is dedicated to the empowerment of the people of Appalachia through their art and culture.

Opening this delightful program of heartland Americana is Andrew Garrison’s “Fat Monroe,” which in less than 15 minutes and pinpoints the moment in which a child loses his illusions about adults. William Johnson plays a nice 9-year-old rural boy who gets not only a lift from a local man (Ned Beatty, never better) but also a dose of teasing that borders on the abusive and obscene. Beatty suggests that this jerk is not really evil, just an insensitive type with a considerable amount of hostility that he unconsciously works out on a helpless, albeit resilient child.

Anne Johnson’s 29-minute “On Our Own Land” calls attention to the widespread abuse of Kentucky’s century-old “broad-form deed,” which was intended to apply only to deep mining. However, it enabled mineral interests to strip-mine land without its owners’ permission, resulting in the hideous destruction of vast stretches of natural landscapes, not to mention the loss of homes and farms.

On a happier note, Johnson, who came to Kentucky to help Barbara Kopple make the Oscar-winning coal miners’ strike documentary “Harlan County, USA” (1977) and stayed, shows how Kentuckians learned to organize and defeat the hated deeds through a constitutional amendment.

Information: (213) 856-7600.

“Rewind: A Video Retrospective by Gary Glaser,” screening Tuesday at 8 p.m. in the Barnsdall Artists Cafe, is highlighted by the 42-minute “Bombing L.A.” and the 30-minute “Justiceville.”

Both deal with local phenomena: graffiti artists and the homeless. The first implicitly poses the question of whether kids for whom virtually every blank surface in the city is a canvas are artists or merely vandals. Glaser is non-judgmental, perhaps to a fault, but he does leave us to consider making a distinction between those calligraphic murals that beautify otherwise ugly walls and the mindless, random scarring of public places.

More incisive is “Justiceville,” a provocative and disturbing study, three years in the making, of the rise and fall (and aftermath) of a highly publicized Skid Row shantytown erected by the homeless but destroyed by the city.

Information: (213) 485-4581.