A Blend of Cultures in ‘Algerian Cinema’ Program

The UCLA Film Archive’s presentation of “Liberation and Alienation in Algerian Cinema,” the first festival of its kind to tour the United States, is composed of nine films focusing on three major subjects: the country’s eight-year struggle for independence from France, post-liberation bureaucracy and urban alienation, and the status of women.

Most filmgoers know of the Algerian cinema, which was born in the revolution, only from Gillo Pontecorvo’s classic 1965 “Battle of Algiers,” a co-production with Italy. The two films previewed among the four being shown this weekend in Melnitz Theater are an exciting blend of Mideastern vitality and European sophistication and marked by accomplished performances. Director Merzak Allouache’s subtle yet immensely popular debut comedy “Omar Gatlato” (1976), which screens at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, introduces us to a lean, handsome young man (Boulem Bennani), a minor Algiers office worker whom we follow on his daily routines.

Quite early on we cannot help but notice the near-absence of women from his life apart from his mother and sisters, who seem to spend their lives at home watching TV. Women are not to be seen in the theaters and cafes Omar and his buddies frequent; you can scan an immense jampacked soccer stadium and not glimpse a single woman. Omar boasts proudly that “Virility is all that counts,” yet he is actually terrified of women, so unknown are they to him outside his family. It’s not for nothing that gatlato translates idiomatically as “machismo killed him.” Following “Omar Gatlato” is Brahim Tsaki’s 1983 “Story of an Encounter,” about a friendship between two teen-agers, one the daughter of an American oilman, the other a peasant youth, but both unable to speak or hear.

Serious and more complex than “Omar Gatlato,” Ali Ghalem’s “A Wife for My Son,” which screens Sunday at 7:30 p.m., is similar to Allouache’s film in its simplicity of style; in both instances it’s the people that count. This film is the other side of the coin from “Omar Gatlato,” telling what it’s like to be a young woman caught between tradition and change in an Arab society. Fatiha (Samia Begga), a young woman of a good middle-class family, dutifully goes through an arranged marriage, complete with ceremonial defloration, to Hocine (Rahim Lalloui), a somewhat older man she has never met. He is a Paris construction worker who has come home to Algiers to marry at the express wish of his parents, eager to become grandparents.

“Sewing is fine, studying is useless,” says Fatiha’s new mother-in-law (Keltoum), a traditionalist to the core who expects Fatiha to become her uncomplaining full-time servant. She has a point because the education Fatiha has received only heightens her unhappiness at her utter lack of freedom. In adapting his own novel, Ghalem reveals himself not only to be a feminist sympathizer but a critic of Algerian society in general for its various inequities. A compelling storyteller, he soon has us wondering whether Hocine will be able to find a job in Algiers or, if not, whether he will take Fatiha with him if he must return to Paris. In the meantime we wonder just how much Fatiha will be willing to take from her mother-in-law.

Together, both films show us the negative effects upon men and women trapped in a society in which the sexes remain so strongly segregated and women in so subordinate a position. “A Wife for My Son” suggests, however, that no matter how painful, change is inevitable; in the same film we see women still wearing the veil and others wearing bikinis at the beach. “A Wife for My Son” will be followed by Ahmed Rachedi’s “The Opium and the Baton” (1970), a chronicle of village life during the Algerian War.

Information: (213) 206-FILM; (213) 206-8013.

Among the many films screening over the opening weekend of the 13th annual “Black Talkies on Parade” festival at the Four Star are Josephine Baker’s two key French films, “Princess Tam-Tam” (1935) and “Zou-Zou” (1935), and the important, rarely shown 1970 documentary “Jack Johnson,” which refutes the view offered by “The Great White Hope” that Johnson was a tragic figure and argues persuasively that the boxer was in fact an indomitable, ever-smiling survivor in the face of racism and adversity.

Information: (213) 737-3292, (213) 733-9511.