‘Voices From the Front’: AIDS, Activism and Anger

“Voices From the Front” (at the NuWilshire Tuesday through Thursday) offers a thoroughly illuminating, comprehensive and wrenching study of AIDS activism in America.

Among the many groups involved in this cause, documentarians Robyn Hutt, Sandra Elgear and David Meieran focus on the activities of the controversial, high-profile ACT UP, revealing the knowledge that informs the organization’s acts of civil disobedience as it confronts the lethal foot-dragging and red tape in the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health and in various other bureaucracies that have been so agonizingly slow to respond to the plight of people with AIDS.

This film is a chronicle of hard-won victories and blunt truths. The film’s countless interviewees tell how, first of all, they’ve had to struggle to get the government and the public at large to view AIDS as much, much more than a “gay disease” and to get the media not to treat those who’ve tested positive for HIV merely as “AIDS victims.” They probe the close relationships between the FDA and the major pharmaceutical companies, and they argue for more emphasis on trying to control opportunistic diseases, the actual killers of HIV-positive people. They discover that women with AIDS are even more overlooked than men with AIDS.

Leading activist Vito Russo, one of 12 interviewees who has died since the film’s completion, saw clearly: that to conquer the AIDS crisis means “changing the system” of America itself. For showtimes: (310) 394-8099.

Open Look at Censorship: The UCLA Film and Television Archive and American Cinematheque’s Human Rights Watch Festival, presented in association with Amnesty International, begins Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. at the Directors Guild, 7920 Sunset Blvd., with Paul Yule’s “Damned in the U.S.A.,” an incisive, all-important documentary on censorship in the arts in America made for Britain’s Channel 4.

Yule covers the NEA controversy, the obscenity trial in Cincinnati over a museum exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe photos, the 2 Live Crew case in Florida, and the scary censorship tactics of the Rev. Donald Wildmon, who has, sure enough, sued to try to ban this documentary. Wildmon gets fair treatment from Yule, but the documentarian allows us to see and hear for ourselves precisely what Wildmon doesn’t want us to see and hear.

What emerges is a sharp, succinct portrait of an increasingly multicultural society upon which Wildmon and others are trying to impose their values. In the process, the documentary reveals a colossal and dangerous semantic breakdown. Wildmon seems unable to conceive that words and images can have meanings different from his own responses to them or that he’s assaulting the freedom of expression upon which this nation was built.

Playboy magazine’s Christie Hefner suggests that if Wildmon and his supporters really want to do some good they should concentrate their energies on improving sex education among the young, on intervention programs dealing with domestic violence and on helping runaways. Adding a welcome light touch is stand-up comedian Jimmy Tingle, who sends up the absurdities of censorship with sharp wit and raucous humor.

One of the highlights of the festival is a Marcel Ophuls retrospective, which includes the premiere of his “November Days” (Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at UCLA Melnitz), yet another brilliant documentary from a master of the form.

Combining his self-described “investigative sarcasm” with genuine compassion, he surveys the fall of East Germany from the euphoric crumbling of the Berlin Wall to its aftermath of uncertainty. What Ophuls reveals is the depth of bitterness of the average East German citizen, who feels betrayed by the privileged intellectual and political elite, members of which Ophuls interviews at length.

In the wake of reunification Ophuls gives us a sense not only of the enormous challenge in rehabilitating the economy of the former GDR but of the wrenching changes in the lives of its long-oppressed people. Information: (310) 206-FILM, (310) 206-8013.