An Engaging Documentary From Talking Heads’ Byrne

The Talking Heads’ David Byrne’s “Ile Aiye: The House of Life” (at the NuWilshire through Wednesday) is surely a most illuminating study of candomble to date. We discover how this African religion informs the lives of Bahia’s blacks, who managed to preserve it despite slavery, accommodating it to the Christianity forced upon them by their masters.

“Ile Aiye” is also a terrific entertainment, infused with infectious dancing and music whose influence on popular culture has long been worldwide. At the heart of candomble are the women whose ecstatic trances are the way in which they communicate with the gods of the Yoruba people, their West African ancestors.

Throughout this most engaging of documentaries, Byrne, who makes dynamic use of archival footage and the split screen, makes clear the connections between candomble and every aspect of the Bahians’ daily existence, even their diet and folk medicines. Playing with it is Philip Haas’ “The Giant Woman the Lightning Man,” an informative but conventional ethnographic study of Australian Aboriginal art, notable for seeming in its stylized, abstract qualities simultaneously so ancient and so contemporary. Showtimes: (310) 394-8099.

More Surprises: The 1926 “Tell It to the Marines” (at the Silent Movie Wednesday at 8 p.m. only) is full of surprises. At first it seems simply an exceptionally genial, knockabout service comedy in which playboy William Haines is shaped up by veteran Marine Sgt. Lon Chaney, whose gruff manner hides the familiar heart of gold.

It develops into a romance in which Chaney and Haines vie for lovely Navy nurse Eleanor Boardman, only to take on an unexpected epic scale as all three end up in a bloody battle with a Chinese warlord (Sidney Toler, later famous as Charlie Chan) that brings the film and its love triangle unexpected emotional depth. Carmel Myers also stars as a South Seas vamp who momentarily distracts Haines from his true love.

Directed by the little-known George Hill from a story and screenplay by E. Richard Schayer, “Tell It to the Marines” is one of those pleasing, unpretentious entertainments Hollywood has all but forgotten how to make.

Playing with it is Frank Lloyd’s 1922 version of “Oliver Twist,” starring an adorable Jackie Coogan in the title role. It plays as a standard silent melodrama, but Coogan is irresistible, and Chaney brings a humorous sense of the macabre to his wicked, fawning Fagin. Bob Mitchell will provide organ accompaniment. Information: (213)653-2389.

Films of Sokurov: Screening Saturday at 7:30 p.m. in UCLA’s Melnitz Theater as part of the UCLA Film Archive’s “The Films of Alexander Sokurov” is the Russian director’s latest release, “The Second Circle” (1990), a starkly beautifully, awesomely impressive--and ferociously demanding--exercise in purely visual cinema shot through with the subtlest streak of bleak absurdist humor. A poor young Leningrad student (Pytor Alexandrov) goes to a remote Siberian village, where his father has been found dead in his squalid apartment.

From start to finish the student is ceaselessly engaged in a harsh, incredibly petty bureaucracy in a struggle to get his father’s corpse taken care of properly. “The Second Circle” invites various levels of interpretation as we learn the student, although bound by a sense of duty and swept over by conflicting emotions, was in fact estranged from his father, a prison camp guard; therefore, the student can stand for the new Russia as his father stands for the old.

To see this film, at once remarkable and formidable, is to understand what Sokurov meant when he reportedly remarked that “the purpose of art is to prepare people for difficult circumstances in life.” Information: (310) 206-FILM, 206-8013.

Other Films: “The Lubitsch Touch” continues at LACMA Friday at 1 and 8 p.m. with “The Merry Widow” (1934), starring Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier, and “Angel” (1937), starring Marlene Dietrich. Saturday at 8 p.m. “Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife” (1938), with Claudette Colbert and Gary Cooper, and “The Shop Around the Corner” (1940), with Margaret Sullivan and James Stewart. Full schedule: (213) 857-6010.