‘Holy Bunch’ in Gay, Lesbian Film Festival

The outstanding 10th edition of the Los Angeles International Gay and Lesbian Film and Video Festival continues today at the Directors Guild, 7920 Sunset Blvd., with the 7:30 p.m. screening of Heinz Emigholz’s “The Holy Bunch.”

It’s a tantalizing, confounding but always impressive multilayered film centering on a group of highly creative young people, whose mutual friend, an esteemed literary editor (Klaus Behnken) has died, leaving them to contemplate their own mortality. Emigholz’s thicket of Godard-like aphorisms and proclamations emerge against a deliberate contrast between the fragility of the human body and the permanency of monumental architectural landmarks, thankfully not without some dry humor.

Frank Krom’s “To Play or To Die” (screening Tuesday night, following the 7:30 showing of the tedious 45-minute Israeli film “Time Off”) is a subtle, hypnotic 50-minute drama from the Netherlands in which a slight, studious youth (Geert Hanaerts) is confronted with his true nature in devastating fashion, for he is hopelessly drawn to the class bully (Tjebbo Gerritsma) who also happens to be remarkably handsome. The psychological insight, the details and nuances, the superb acting and the exquisite sense of style that characterize this film make it a small-scale masterpiece.

When the actor-singer who calls himself Georgette Dee is giving one of his Dietrich-ish performances, Bettina Wilhelm’s “All of Me” (Tuesday at 9:30 p.m.) comes alive, so world-weary yet vibrant an entertainer is he. Offstage, the film rambles hit-and-miss style as Dee’s Orlanda honeymoons in Warsaw, where he has a theatrical engagement and where both he and his silly bride (Mechtild Grossmann) become enamored of a young man (Miroslaw Baka).

The most publicized film in the festival, Christopher Munch’s elegant, discreet “The Hours and Times” (Wednesday at 9:30 p.m.) envisions with fully persuasive psychological validity that Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein was able to consummate his love for John Lennon during a 1963 vacation in Barcelona. There’s no way of knowing for sure whether the two men became lovers, even if only briefly, but Munch makes it entirely believable that Lennon, in a moment of loneliness and compassion, did acquiesce to Epstein’s unrequited love. David Angus’ Epstein is sophisticated, well-mannered but tormented while Ian Hart’s Lennon is willful, canny and sometimes petulant.

Fifty years ago, a UCLA professor of psychology was persuaded by one of her students to pursue the study of the lives of homosexuals with the result that her efforts decades later culminated in the American Psychiatry Assn. eliminating homosexuality from its official list of mental disorders. Richard Schmiechen’s “Changing Our Minds: The Story of Dr. Evelyn Hooker” (Thursday at 7:30 p.m.) traces the life of this extraordinary woman, now 84, whose pioneering research has affected the lives of gays and lesbians so profoundly by demonstrating scientifically that normal and homosexual are not contradictory.

Hooker tells her own story modestly, and her words are intercut with amazing archival material that ranges from such happy moments as her friends W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood dancing at a garden party to “educational” films on the savage and ineffectual treatment of homosexuality via castration, lobotomy and other misguided methods.

Shun’Ichi Nagasaki’s “The Enchantment” (1989), featuring a truly bizarre and kinky folie a trois, screens Thursday at 9:30 p.m. Pratibha Parmar’s lively, crackling “A Place of Rage” (Friday at 7:30 p.m.) documents the impassioned words and deeds of several prominent African-American activists--Angela Davis, poet-essayist June Jordan, novelist Alice Walker--plus documentarian Trinh T. Minha.

In revival are Roger Vadim’s campy “Barbarella” (1968), with Jane Fonda, and Harry Kumel’s elegant horror picture “Daughters of Darkness” (1971), starring the late Delphine Seyrig. The festival runs through Saturday. Information: (213) 650-5133.