Cameron’s Experimental Imagery

Experimental filmmaker Donna Cameron will be present at Filmforum’s presentation of her work at L.A. Contemporary Exhibitions tonight at 8.

For 13 years she has been working in paper emulsions, gluing photographs and other visual fragments onto chemically treated translucent acetate.

The result is a series of vibrant, sensual films notable for their dynamic, entrancing interplay of pattern, rhythm and texture, reprocessing such familiar images as the Brooklyn Bridge or paper money.

Also on the program is a 10-minute documentary by Mike Kuchar showing how Cameron makes her films.

Information: (213) 663-9568.

Jews in Germany: In association with the Martyrs Memorial and the Museum of the Holocaust, the Goethe Institute, 8501 Wilshire Blvd., is presenting “Being Jewish in Germany,” beginning Tuesday at 7:30 p.m.

Screening as part of the opening-night program, Harry Raymon’s 43-minute “They Were Our Neighbors” follows a German-Jewish high school student, Peter Wirtz, as he makes a field trip with two Gentile classmates through Lower Fraconia in search of traces of Jewish life. Very Germanic in its thoroughness and formality, it is nonetheless impressive in its willingness to confront the past, becoming informative and consciousness-raising in the process.

Wirtz and his friends explore the remains of an ancient Jewish mikvah under a Catholic church in Wurzburg, a once-magnificent synagogue whose rich interior was destroyed during Kristallnacht; speak to Wirtz’s parents, who reveal they feel their current secure status in the community could change; visit an elderly German couple, who insist that neither they nor their neighbors knew what was happening to the Jews as World War II drew near, and have a long chat with the vibrant Anja Rossmuss-Wenninger, whose attempts to get at the truth about her hometown, Passau, and its attitudes toward Jews during the Third Reich were dramatized in “The Nasty Girl.”

Screening Nov. 19, Deborah Lefkowitz’s “Intervals of Silence: Being Jewish in Germany” is as striking and original as “They Were Our Neighbors” is rigorously conventional. An American Jew who married a German Gentile (who grew up knowing no Jews), Lefkowitz records her thoughts on the soundtrack in English as she goes about interviewing the citizens of her husband’s hometown, who speak only German. Since she neither films nor identifies her interviewees, recording only their voices, she elicits comments of remarkable candor and emotional resonance--yet there are also those disturbing silences which give the film its title.

She makes the English subtitled translations of their words a deliberate part of her visual design, the letters a bright white against scraps of black that become part of the overall pattern of fragmented images of the town and its life that compose the film.

In general, the Jewish voices we hear express a certain uneasiness about living in Germany, no matter how deep the roots. Yet it also becomes clear that the more Jews and Gentiles have contact with each other, the better it is for one and all. As for Lefkowitz, she admits that as warm and welcoming as her husband’s family has been to her, she doesn’t feel at home in Germany. For full schedule and more information: (213) 854-0993.

Artes de Mexico: “Mexicanos ‘91,” the latest of the many Mexican film series keyed to the citywide Artes de Mexico celebration, commences Friday at L.A. County Museum of Art, the site of the ongoing “Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries” exhibition.

Among the films, all of them of recent vintage, being screened during the opening weekend is Luis Estrada’s “Bandidos” (Friday at 2:40 and 9:40 p.m.), a kind of junior division “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and an homage to the American Western.

Set during the 1910 Mexican Revolution, it tells of a quartet of boys, separated from their families, who become full-fledged bandits in their struggle for survival. There’s much good-natured humor in their exploits and adventures, but also an underlying poignancy: This is a world in which men will shoot a child as easily as an adult.

“Bandidos” has a great sepia look and is of wide appeal (but could use tighter editing); it is yet another example of the vitality and variety of the contemporary Mexican cinema, so undeservedly all but unknown in the United States. Presenting “Mexicanos ‘91” is Chicanos ‘90, a national organization of Chicano and Latino media professionals.

Information: (213) 857-6010.