MOVIE REVIEW : Modern Silent Movie Re-creates Genre of ‘20s : Film: UCSD Professor and artist Eleanor Antin has created a 1920s-style Eastern European film that is as strong, if not better, than the originals.

On one level, Eleanor Antin’s “The Man Without a World” is an imaginative gag, a cinematic practical joke.

The credits suggest that it’s a long lost film by a turn-of-the-century Soviet director named Yevgeny Antinov, but it really is not. Antinov is a fabrication, and the silent film, which screens Sunday at 7 and 9 p.m. at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla, was produced in 1991, not 1920.

The 90-minute feature is Antin’s creation, a black-and-white silent film that has all the trappings of a moving picture produced in Eastern Europe in the 1920s, complete with jerky, blurry images, melodramatic story lines and strong ethnic themes.

As an artistic device, using the invention of Antinov is only a little more interesting than a novelist writing in first person. Antin, a conceptual artist who also is a professor at UC San Diego, has employed the Antinov persona before, most recently in a silent film in the same vein called “The Last Night of Rasputin.”

In “The Man Without a World,” the opening credits give lengthy details about Antinov’s fictional life and his having been exiled from the Soviet Union for producing a film with decadent sexual themes and a “friendly reference to Trotsky.”

Although these notes are cute and help to further the overall illusion, the gimmick is only slightly relevant to the final product. And it’s really unnecessary. The work stands on its own as a fascinating creation, an authentic-looking silent film that includes all the nuances and styles that continue to make many early films a pleasant diversion in the age of “Star Wars” and “Backdraft.”

In fact, after originally intending to screen the film primarily at art museums, Antin now plans to release it on the independent cinema circuit, which is entirely appropriate. “The Man Without a World” is not a parody nor a sendup of the silent film genre; it’s a tribute that honors not only the often-overlooked artistic quality of early films, but also the whole genre of Yiddish films that sought to chronicle the persecuted Jewish communities of Eastern Europe.

“It ran away from me and became a real film,” Antin said of the film’s development from an art film into one worthy of wider release.

The man of the film’s title is Zevi, a young poet in Poland who forsakes his Jewish roots and family when a Gypsy troupe comes to his village. Bewitched by a ballerina (portrayed by Antin), he joins up with the Gypsies while his girlfriend weeps, his mother dies and his crazy sister retreats into a catatonic state.

The story takes place in a village of Zionists, anarchists and capitalists who are frequently visited by the Angel of Death. It is a doomed community, moving toward the specter of the Holocaust, and signs of past, present and future prejudices are everywhere. With the pogroms a recent memory, Jews are forbidden to own bakeries and other businesses and are widely ridiculed, the frequent butt of jokes.

In one dream sequence, two sailors on a boat are caught in a torrential downpour.

“What a storm,” one says.

“There must be a Jew aboard,” the other replies.

The words are delivered in the classic method of silent films: simple placards displaying the dialogue. Antin takes to the rhythm of the technique like a budding D.W. Griffith, using it sparingly and allowing the visuals to convey much of the interaction.

Most of the film was shot on sets constructed on the UCSD campus, and the actors are generally amateurs. But Antin and her crew do an amazing job of creating the look of a silent film, if not the look of an Eastern European village. The simple scenes in such locales as a tavern and a cemetery are the equal of any 1920s back-lot set, and help give the film the slightly rustic, amateur look which is completely appropriate for a silent film.

Instead of hampering her effort, Antin seems to relish in the cinematic devices of the era. Dream sequences are viewed through blurry, round windows. Close-ups are the primary means of expressing emotion. Yet there is none of the campy, melodramatic posturing--the heroine leaning back, eyes skyward, as she places the back of her wrist to her forehead--that characterized far too many silent films.

In fact, Antin has created an Eastern European silent film in the genre of the 1920s that is as strong, if not better than the classic Eastern European silent films of the 1920s. She has done it without using modern stylistic techniques, but by incorporating the best that the 1920s had to offer.

“The Man Without a World” is such an authentic-looking period piece that Antin better hope that Ted Turner, mistaking it for an old MGM classic, won’t try to colorize it.