Silents, Rare Talkie Shorts Still Golden

This is a great week for fans of silent movies. Tonight at 8 p.m. the Silent Movie will present a wonderful Lon Chaney double feature, “Mockery” (1927) and “Outside the Law” (1921). On Thursday, you have a choice between “Lady Windemere’s Fan” (1925) and “Salome” (1922) at 8 p.m. at Beyond Baroque, 661 Venice Blvd. and the classic Harold Lloyd comedy “The Freshman” (1925), which will be presented at 8 p.m. at Royce Hall with organ accompaniment by Gaylord Carter, preceded by selected shorts and even a Fanchon and Marco-type revue.

On Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. the Silent Movie will present an evening of short comedies. As if all this weren’t enough, Rouben Mamoulian’s “Applause” (1929), starring Helen Morgan and generally regarded as the first artistically successful talkie, also screens Thursday at UCLA, at 7:30 in Melnitz Theater along with some rare talkie shorts.

Danish director Benjamin Christensen is best-known today for the overrated “Haxan/Witchcraft Through the Ages” (1922), but the elegant and romantic “Mockery” and other films he made during his stint at MGM are far better. Set against the Russian Revolution, “Mockery” is a typical Chaney vehicle of sacrificial, unrequited love in which Chaney’s crude Siberian peasant risks his life to protect a beautiful countess (Barbara Bedford) only to be snubbed by her in favor of the dashing Ricardo Cortez. “Outside the Law,” directed and partly written by Chaney’s best collaborator, director Tod Browning, is a complicated crime melodrama in which Chaney plays peripheral but pivotal roles as an evil gangster and a noble Chinese; the central figures are a young couple (Priscilla Dean and Wheeler Oakman).

Information: (213) 653-2389.

Leave it to Ernst Lubitsch to replace successfully Oscar Wilde’s verbal wit with his own visual wit; his “Lady Windemere’s Fan,” starring May McAvoy and Ronald Colman, is a stylish masterpiece--poignant, elegant, acutely aware of the utterly merciless rules that govern high society. Adapted by its star, Alla Nazimova, from the Wilde play, “Salome,” with its Aubrey Beardsley-inspired sets, is bizarre and highfalutin, with an aura of stylized, decadent chic that anticipates such later experimental filmmakers as Kenneth Anger.

Information: (213) 822-3006.

A highlight of the Asian American Pacific Film Festival, which concludes this weekend at UCLA’s Melnitz Theater, is “California Originals,” composed of four independent features. Traditionally denied opportunities in Hollywood, Asian Americans, as are other minorities, are making radical, challenging experiments in alternative cinema.

For his “American Verite” (Saturday at 5 p.m.) documentarian Wood Lam puts some 20 foreign-born individuals in front of the camera, asks them “What is America?” and then leaves them alone in the studio to answer his question in their first language, taking as much time as they want. This is about as minimalist and unmanipulative as a documentarian can get; the price of such authenticity is that some people run on and on, making the film a sometimes tedious 128 minutes. Some of the responses are predictable--America is paternalistic, materialistic, conformist but open-minded in the arts; the one person who finds the question impossible to answer is the one person who is U.S.-born, an African American from Detroit.

Jon Moritsugu and Jacques Boyreau’s “Hippy Porn” (Saturday at 8 p.m.), which Moritsugu has described as “sort of the French New Wave goes to hell,” is about as adventuresome as feature filmmaking gets. Three disaffected young people sit around, wander about, spouting manifestos, complaining about boredom, wondering about what to do with themselves, protesting everything and, thankfully, mocking themselves. The filmmakers create a vision of San Francisco as bleakly beautiful and arid as that of Los Angeles in the films of Gregg Araki.

But Moritsugu and Boyreau’s young people, in their poses and heavy-duty intellectualizing, are more like those in the films of Godard--never mind that the filmmakers trash the Nouvelle Vague hilariously--than those in Araki’s films.

“Hippy Porn” (despite the title, there is no sex) is wearying in the demands it places upon one’s attention span but is relieved by considerable humor. Most important, there is always the sense that you’re experiencing a fresh, utterly uncompromising vision. Roddy Bogawa’s “Some Divine Wind” follows “Hippy Porn”; Sunday schedule: Rico Martinez’s “Desperate” at 5 p.m., Ann Hui’s “Song of Exile” and Mike Newell’s “Soursweet” at 7:30 p.m.

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