FESTIVAL HIGHLIGHTS : AFI’s International House Party : World cinema, often invisible to regular moviegoers, has a solid annual showcase during the Los Angeles festival, opening Thursday

Whatever happened to foreign films?

Critics debate this question endlessly. Many audiences seemingly don’t care. Going to a new subtitled movie from France, Italy or Japan, a key cultural rite of the ‘60s and ‘70s, has fallen into disfavor in the ‘90s. And some would argue that foreign cinema itself is at fault, that we see so few good new international films in theaters because so few are worth screening.

But then there’s the great annual rebuttal: the American Film Institute Los Angeles International Film Festival.

Once again this year, as in the past five, the festival demonstrates that there is a vitality, excitement and range in today’s international cinema, of which most moviegoers are simply unaware. The festival opens Thursday with an invitational showing of Blake Edwards’ new sex-role comedy “Switch,” Edwards’ first film after his recent Life Achievement Award from the L.A. Film Critics Assn. It continues through April 26, with an invitational screening of Stanley Kubrick’s restored “Spartacus.” In between, the public can attend more than 200 films, many that are among 1991’s prime movie events.

This year’s lineup doesn’t equal 1990’s, but it’s no retreat. “Last year,” festival director Ken Wlaschin says, “we had some films that probably ranked among the greatest in film history: Theo Angelopoulos’ ‘Landscape in the Mist,’ and ‘The Travelling Players,’ Krzysztof Kieslowski’s ‘The Decalogue.’ This year, it’s more of a ‘cutting edge’ festival, more radical and innovatory.”

If that’s so, 60-year-old Jean-Luc Godard, of the cutting-edge ‘60s, probably hits the keynote. Godard’s offering, the dense, poetic “Nouvelle Vague” has the distinction of being temporarily killed for distribution by the New York Times’ Vincent Canby, who described it as “featherweight,” “perfunctory” and “pretty as a feature-length lipstick commercial.” Will local audiences agree? Whatever Canby may have felt, for me, “Nouvelle Vague” easily ranks among Godard’s best, most complex, work.

The festival features a new Federico Fellini film, a hair-raising documentary on post-colonial Africa by Werner Herzog and three by current critics’ pets Finland’s Aki Kaurismaki and Spain’s Pedro Almodovar.

There are retrospectives on two currently little-known directors: Czechoslovakia’s ebullient fantasist Juraj Jakubisko and Britain’s post-modernist Ken McMullen.

There is a special presentation of Charlie Chaplin’s poignant classic “City Lights,” accompanied by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. There are new films by Masahiro Shinoda, Margarethe von Trotta, Suzanne Osten and rarely seen early works by Wim Wenders, R. W. Fassbinder, King Hu and Jean-Marie Straub, numerous shorts, programs, seminars and remarkable documentaries, a healthy selection of American independent films, and work by African-American filmmakers, including the latest from Charles (“To Sleep With Anger”) Burnett.

Finally, conclusively proving it’s never too late or early to break into the new world, there is Portugal’s 82-year-old Manoel de Oliveira. He made most of his films after the age of 60 and won the Cannes Film Festival Golden Lion at 76. His AFI festival contribution--the gorgeous and stately new pacifist parable “Non! Or the Vain Glory of Command”--was made in 1989, when he was 80.

There has been a setback: The festival is no longer headquartered at the plush Cineplex Odeon Century City complex, whose corporation, say festival staffers, asked for about double last year’s rent. Los Angeles moviegoers will have to scurry among the Nuart, Laemmle’s Monica, the Music Hall and the AFI campus itself. But foreign-film devotees are used to those theaters and the films are worth it.

In its five years, the festival has shown more than 900 features from 50 to 60 countries--mostly premieres and in many cases with the filmmakers appearing to discuss their work--plus an additional 200 features in its off-season festivals, uncountable shorts and about 500 video programs in its yearly video festivals.

That’s an incredible volume of movies--and, according to Wlaschin, at least 30% to 35% of them have gone on to some kind of distribution (like recent art-house hits “Tampopo,” “The Funeral,” “My Twentieth Century,” “Apartment Zero” and “The Vanishing,” which were all introduced at the festival). If all of them aren’t good--if some have been pretty bad--some have been great. Without the festival, we would have missed the majority.

Is there a weak point in 1991 festival? Yes. If most of the new American independent fiction films being shown are any indication of work on lower budgets, there has been a big fall-off from the mid ‘80s, the exciting years of “Stranger Than Paradise,” “Blood Simple” and “She’s Gotta Have It.”

But the rest of the world, fortunately, shows signs of ferment. The sections from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe are down from last year’s group, but the Latin American and British sections are up. We’ll be covering festival comprehensively, day by day, once it starts. Here, in the meantime, is a list of its retrospectives and highlights.

“Nouvelle Vague” (France-Switzerland: Jean-Luc Godard). Godard’s latest film is a romance of high finance at a Swiss estate where an unlikely intruder (Alain Delon) with two seeming identities acts as catalyst for a group of jet-set corporate movers. The servants speak poetry or philosophy, their masters are well-dressed boors; love and sex seem locked in muted combat. The reference points are movie-makers Godard loved in his 20s: Howard Hawks, Robert Aldrich, Nicholas Ray, Joseph Mankiewicz and F. W. Murnau. Working with his splendid art director Anne-Marie Mieville, he has fashioned his most physically beautiful film since the days of “Pierrot le Fou”: precise, allusive, mournfully graceful. A brilliant, difficult work, which demands, and repays, close attention. (Friday, 7 p.m., and Saturday, Nuart. April 17, 9 p.m., Town & Country.)

“Korczak” (Poland: Andrzej Wajda). The Holocaust is often treated in films, but rarely with the withering impact of Wajda’s fact-based portrayal of World War II’s Warsaw Ghetto--and of Janusz Korczak, a.k.a. Henryk Goldszmit, the famous author-psychologist who kept the ghetto’s orphanage and who, rather than leave his 200 children, accompanied them to Treblinka and extermination. Here, using the stark, black-and-white cinematography of his most famous films--the ‘50s “Generation” trilogy--Wajda steeps us in the sights and sounds of a way-station to death, filled with desperate victims and guards. As played, brilliantly, by Wojtech Pszoniak, Korczak becomes a genuine hero. At 65 and recently elected to the Polish Senate, Wajda claims this film will be his last. If so, it’s a fitting valedictory. He has never made a better one. (Next Sunday, 8:45 p.m., Fine Arts.)

“American Dream” (United States: Barbara Kopple). Sheila Benson reports: “Kopple’s toweringly fine, tragic Oscar-winning documentary watches as everything that hard-working Americans accept as part of their lives evaporates. Charting with empathy but fairness the five-year course of a meatpacker’s strike in Austin, Minn., Kopple records what happens as workers’ weekly paychecks shrink from $637 to $312, while their union, relying on confrontational tactics and a hired consultant, falters and fails them. Kopple gives the word depression a recognizable human face, one we may well be seeing in the mirror one day.” (Friday, 7 p.m., Saturday, noon, Monica.)

Juraj Jakubisko Tribute. Czechoslovakia’s Jakubisko, the preeminent living Slovakian director, will be a revelation to anyone who still gets a thrill from “Juliet of the Spirits.” He is a vibrant fantasist, specializing in juxtapositions of mad comedy and the terror of social convulsions. His frames are bustling, packed: sometimes resembling a Bruegel village scene, sometimes a Peckinpah Western, sometimes an Arthur Rackham storybook illustration. “Feather Fairy” (April 21, noon, Music Hall), a great 1985 children’s film from the Grimm Brothers, stars Fellini’s wife Guilietta Masina in the title role. The long-banned 1969 “Birds, Orphans and Madmen” (April 21, 8:30 p.m., Music Hall) is a comic tale of three war orphans. It is heavily influenced by the then-current Czech New Wave. “Sitting Pretty on a Branch” (April 23, 7 p.m., Music Hall), a 1988 film from last year’s festival, is a magically picaresque portrayal of World War II’s aftermath in the countryside. Perhaps Jakubisko’s masterpiece, the 1983 “The Millenial Bee” (April 22, 8:30 p.m., Music Hall) is a vast three-hour fresco of village life, showing, with prodigal detail, one family’s slow dissolution from the turn of the century though World War I. There is also a selection of shorts (April 25, 9 p.m., AFI Mark Goodson). Jakubisko will be present to introduce all his films.

“Night Sun” (Italy: Paolo and Vittorio Taviani). Kevin Thomas reports: “In the ravishing ‘Night Sun,’ a leisurely, poignant meditation on the paradoxical nature of saintliness, the Taviani brothers (“Padre, Padrone,” “Night of the Shooting Stars”) transpose Tolstoy’s short story ‘Father Sergius’ to Italy. Julian Sands is splendid as a romantically idealistic young 19th-Century nobleman who begins a harrowing odyssey of spirit and self-discovery. This English-language version of the Italo-Franco-German co-production has been made with such care--using Sands’ speaking voice--that it is probably preferable to an Italian subtitled version.” (April 20, 6:45 p.m., Nuart.; April 24, 7 p.m., Town & Country.)

“Sting of Death” (Japan: Kohei Oguri). An implacable story of a disintegrating marriage, told with the utmost economy by Kohei Oguri (“Muddy River”), this film is a Cannes Festival Grand Prize and International Critics Prize winner. Thomas found the performances--by Keiko Matsuzaka as a wife raging at the infidelity of her maddeningly impassive husband and by Ittoku Kishibe as the understated spouse--awe-inspiring. The source is a novel by eminent Japanese writer Toshio Shimao, but the subtitles don’t quite make clear a crucial point: the story’s mid-’50s time-frame--which makes “Sting of Death” a penetrating commentary on the tormented character of the Japanese people a decade after the war. (K.T.) (April 20, 9 p.m., Music Hall.)

Ken McMullen Tribute (Great Britain). Like fellow Britons Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman, McMullen is a painter turned movie-maker, with a taste for high aesthetics and political subjects: the French Resistance, the Paris Commune, the peregrinations of two feminist commandos in modern London. His early shorts (next Sunday, 6:30 p.m., AFI Warner) and first two films, the often maddening “Resistance” (April 15, 9 p.m., AFI Goodson) and “Ghost Dance” (April 15, 7 and 9 p.m., AFI Goodson), were heavily influenced by Godard and Jacques Rivette. But exquisite Tarkovsky-style long takes dominate his later work: “Partition” (next Sunday, 8:45 p.m., AFI Warner), in which India’s lunatic asylums must be partitioned with the rest of the country, and “Zina” (Saturday, 4:30 p.m., Nuart; April 16, 6:45 p.m., AFI Warner), about the psychological malaise of Trotsky’s daughter. “1871” (Saturday, 6:45 p.m., Nuart; April 16, 9 p.m., AFI Goodson) is McMullen’s best film. An intensely theatrical piece, entering on a famous actress-courtesan who joined the Paris Communards, it becomes a piquant mix of political tragedy, philosophic discourse and romantic comedy. (McMullen will introduce all his films.)

“Step Across the Border” (Switzerland-Germany-Great Britain: Nicholas Humbert, Werner Penzel.) A brilliant fusion of film and subject: A black-and-white look at Fred Frith, a British blues composer and performer who’ll play anything, including water tumblers and the pencils on your desk. Even sitting on a train between gigs, he is fascinating. Directors Humbert and Penzel follow Frith from Zurich to London, Leipzig, Tokyo and New York, as he meets and plays en route with like-minded avant-garde musicians, as well as filmmakers Robert Frank and, briefly, Jonas Mekas. I absolutely loved it. What fun! (S.B.) (Friday, 9 p.m., Saturday, 2:15 p.m., Nuart.)

Jamaa Fanaka Tribute. The heart of the Jamaa Fanaka Tribute is his raw and dynamic “Penitentiary” (Friday, 8:45 p.m., AFI Warner), made in 1979 with Leon Isaac Kennedy as boxer-convict Too Sweet, who gradually evolves into a mythical figure: the wronged, oppressed black man who overcomes injustice. The tribute includes the 1976 “Emma Mae” (Friday, 8:45 p.m., AFI Warner) and the world premiere of his new action drama “Street Wars” (K.T.) (Saturday, 9 p.m., Monica).

Hollywood Salutes Hong Kong. The festival’s biggest crowd-pleasers have often been the Hong Kong action films, especially the rousing, hell-for-silk-and-leather thrillers of Tsui Hark. This year, King Hu, dean of Hong Kong action, is represented by the rarely screened “Raining in the Mountain” (next Sunday, 6:15 p.m., Music Hall) and “Legend of the Mountain” (April 18, 8 p.m., Nuart): two Buddhist martial-arts epics, both shot in 1979, amid gorgeous scenery and hordes of leaping, tumbling, kicking, body-flipping priests and warriors, enmeshed in non-stop intrigue, warfare and somersaults. Hu’s best movies, though shallow, play like an improbable mix of Sergio Leone and “Siddhartha”--and these films, and “Touch of Zen,” are his best. (Hu will attend the “Raining” screening, with Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Woo.)