German Film Series Studies Ironies of Life in the East

“Recent Films From Germany”--an American Cinematheque presentation in association with New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the German Film Export Union and the Goethe Institute--offers some outstanding works that might not be picked up for American distribution in these perilous times for foreign film exhibition. From Friday through Sunday, five features and a pair of shorter films will be screened at the Directors Guild, 7920 Sunset Blvd.

Among those available for preview, the hands-down standout is Roland Graf’s “The Tango Player” (Sunday at 5 p.m.), a relentless and compelling study of life in what was East Germany. The time is 1968, and the Soviets, backed by East Germans, are preparing to march on Prague. A middle-aged Leipzig history professor (Michael Gwisdek, an actor of intense introspection) has just been released from prison after serving 21 months for merely providing the piano accompaniment--he was in fact subbing for the regular pianist at a student cabaret--for a song deemed a defamation of the state by STASI security agents. Doubtlessly, the professor should heed the advice of a colleague, who tells him to forget the past and look to the future. Stunned and enraged by the absurdity and injustice of events, the professor threatens to become his own worst enemy in his waning struggle to rebuild his life. This terse, rigorous film, however, ends on a note of darkly amusing--and deeply satisfying--irony.

“Bronstein’s Children” (Friday at 8 p.m.), directed by the Polish veteran Jerzy Kawalarovicz, offers an equally ironic and critical look at life in East Germany. This time the year is 1973, the place East Berlin. A handsome young Jewish student (Matthias Paul), is caught up in a love affair with an aspiring actress. He discovers that his widowed father (Armin Mueller-Stahl) and his lover’s father and another man, all of them concentration camp survivors, have imprisoned a former camp guard (veteran character star Rolf Hoppe) in Mueller-Stahl’s cottage in the country. But what are they to do with him? A fine film, “Bronstein’s Children” would have been even stronger had the romance been more secondary. What is implicit is a strong criticism of East Germany’s insistence that its creation in the postwar era absolved it from coming to terms with the horrors of the Third Reich.

Another fine film is Margarethe von Trotta’s “The Return” (Sunday at 7:30 p.m.), a contemplative study of two women (Barbara Sukowa, Stefania Sandrelli) in love with the same man (Sami Frey). Offering some lighthearted respite from an otherwise serious program is Michael Bergman’s charming and ingenious comedy of the supernatural, “My Lovely Monster” (Friday at 9:30 p.m.), in which a young woman (Nicole Fischer) accompanies a vampire (Silvio Francesco) to Hollywood. There, none other than Forrest J. Ackerman, renowned collector of vintage horror and science-fiction memorabilia, helps return him to his celluloid reality; the film would be a nifty midnight movie offering. The most exhaustive--and exhausting--film in the series is surely Werner Schroeter’s harrowing French-language film “Malina” (Saturday at 9 p.m.), a surreal study of the disintegration of an obsessive and self-destructive Viennese writer (Isabelle Huppert, in what has to be the most demanding and flamboyant role of her career). Based upon the late Ingeborg Bachmann’s autobiographical novel, the film is best left to admirers of Schroeter’s madhouse movie “Day of the Idiots.” Information: (213) 466-FILM.

Black Pioneers: The UCLA Film Archive’s “Oscar Micheaux and Spencer Williams: Pioneer African Filmmakers” begins Friday at 7:30 p.m. at UCLA’s Melnitz Theater with Micheaux’s “Body and Soul” (1924). Atypical among the determinedly upwardly mobile filmmaker’s 30 films, it deals with racial misery and decay; Paul Robeson stars. The second feature is Micheaux’s “The Exile” (1931), the first talkie made by a black film company. It is awkward and amateurish in every aspect yet communicates the pain of an upright young man (Stanley Torrence) who tries to reject a beautiful young woman so that she might pass for white. There’s a forthright grappling with black values and aspirations, characteristic of Micheaux, that are rarely dealt with in Hollywood films.

Information: (310) 206-FILM, (310) 206-8013.