AFI FESTIVAL : Master of the Long Take Delivers ‘Stork’

Following are The Times’ recommendations for today’s schedule of the American Film Institute International Film Festival, with commentary by the film-reviewing staff. All screenings, except where noted, are at Laemmle’s Monica 4-Plex, 1332 2nd St., Santa Monica. Information: (213) 466-1767.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED:

“THE SUSPENDED STRIDE OF THE STORK”(Greece; director Theo Angelopoulos; 4:15 p.m.). Special added screening: More astonishing film lyricism from Angelopoulos, the cinema’s modern master of the long take, its poet of Angst and alienation. The title refers to a one-legged stance from which you can either progress or retreat; set in a town near the Greek-Turkish border, the script--perhaps too symbolically--traces the dilemma of a journalist who believes a vanished politician has resurfaced as a refugee. There are three veterans of Antonioni’s “La Notte” here: actors Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moureau and co-scenarist Tonino Guerra. But the mood is pure Angelopoulos--even at the end, when a wedding scene on opposite riverbanks forces him, for a change, to use cross-cutting. The people, the soldiers, the countries themselves, seem lost under a cold sky--figures in a landscape who only delude themselves that they are masters of the Earth and their destiny.

“THE NOH MASK MURDERS”(Japan; Kon Ichikawa; 3:30 and 8:45 p.m.). All film buffs know of Kon Ichikawa, the 77-year-old director of classics like “Fires on the Plain” and “The Makioka Sisters”--but few have seen the string of recent mystery movies that are among his biggest Japanese box-office hits. Ichikawa, an impassioned admirer of Agatha Christie, co-writes them under the pseudonym Kurishiti, and they combine his immaculate technique and stunning narrative-pictorial sense with a bracing mix of playfulness and suspense. This tale--set in the ritualized world of Noh theater and revolving around multiple murders and a maze of rivalries and old scandals--is both a complex riddle and a subtle evocation of the conflicts between tradition and modernity. It’s a gem.

“THE FRONTIER”(Chile; Ricardo Larrain; 4 and 9:15 p.m.). One of the few Chilean films in decades to reach U.S. shores, this Berlin Festival Silver Bear winner is a picturesque mood-piece, backgrounded by sociopolitical upheavals. In it, a teacher, proscribed for anti-Pinochet politics, becomes involved in the daily routines of the isolated coastal community to which he is exiled--his priest-host, the idiotic police chief, a wildly dreaming diver, a rebellious woman and her demented father--as the primal landscapes inevitably alter his urban perspectives. The film has beauty and conscience--and it opens up a land closed to us cinematically for years.

“VENICE, VENICE”(United States; Henry Jaglom; 9:30 p.m.). Jaglom’s romantic, witty consideration of the chasm between real life and the movies; a beautiful French journalist (Nelly Alard) follows an independent filmmaker (Jaglom) from the Venice Film Festival to his Venice, Calif., home. The most visually ambitious, structurally complex of Jaglom’s films. In it, a chorus of women discuss their betrayal by movie make-believe in regard to love; this subtle and compassionate film serves as a corrective.

RECOMMENDED:

“ISLAND OF LONG EARS”(Czechoslovakia; Jozef Slovak, Jozef Heriban; 1 and 6:15 p.m.). For enthusiasts of Czech social comedy. The title has two meanings: It refers to its hero and his tendency to eavesdrop electronically--he’s a sound engineer in a Prague radio station--and to his dream of escaping the humdrum by visiting Easter Island. As a study of yuppie Angst and midlife crisis, the film is familiar and lacking in energy, but Marian Zednikovic has an irresistible deadpan comic presence as the hero.

“THE YEARNING”(Armenia; Frunze Dovlatian; 1:15 and 6:30 p.m.). A film of almost palpable anguish. Planned by the late Armenian filmmaker Henryk Malian as third of a trilogy, it was directed, from Malian’s script, by Frunze Dovlatian. The story is simple and folktale-ish: A stubborn, unlettered old peasant Armenian decides to return on foot to his Turkish homeland, precipitating a ruthless struggle for power within the Soviet state police, who arrest him on his return for “spying.” The hapless traveler is played, or embodied, by Armenian painter Rafael Atoyan; the film’s lyrical landscapes and grueling scenes of torture make a moving, grief-filled portrait of a displaced people.

“TECHQUA IKACHI”(Switzerland; James Danaqyumtewa, Agnes Barmettler, Anka Schmid; 1:30 and 6:45 p.m.). This film, a collaboration between Swiss documentarians and a 74-year-old Hopi filmmaker, has almost transcendent historical significance. It’s a portrait of the Hopi tribe from their idealistic inception, through early encounters with explorers and settlers, through the near-extinction of their ancient culture at the hands of the American government. The Hopi culture emerges as a unique system of philosophical, agricultural and religious beliefs; the film includes archival footage, interviews, raw 16mm films of recent events, re-creations of Hopi ceremonial dances--and enough rich historical data for three movies as good as “Dances With Wolves” or “Black Robe.” Shown with Tim Schwab and Christine Craton’s “Ghost Dance”: a poetic evocation of the Wounded Knee massacre.

“FOUR DAYS IN JULY”(Great Britain, 1984); director Mike Leigh; 1:45 and 7 p.m.). Leigh’s last film for the BBC before “High Hopes” returned him to theatrical features, it focuses on two couples, one Catholic, the other Protestant, who turn out to have little in common except impending parenthood and the crucial fact of living in Northern Ireland. (Kenneth Turan). (Wilmington concurs: “Leigh concentrates on the everyday routine of the opposite-number Protestant and Catholic couples. By shrewdly observing all the mundane, funny details of their lives, then demonstrating how the political gulf keeps them almost irrevocably apart, he comments, perhaps more stingingly than if he showed blood and chaos, on the ways in which prejudice and society divide people.”)

Others: “The Usual” (United States, Eric Tretbar; 3:45 and 9 p.m.). An evocative low-budget black-and-white indie, which boasts a superb central performance by Lisa Todd--as a rural girl torn between big-city lovers. (M. W.). “A War of Children” (United States, 1972; George Schaefer; AFI Goodson, 7 p.m.) Like “Four Days in July,” this Emmy winner, written by James Costigan, is a portrait of Catholic and Protestant families in Belfast.