Visual Richness at the Nuart

Peter Delpeut’s “Lyrical Nitrate” (at the Nuart Sunday through Tuesday) is a delightful, deft, 50-minute assemblage of footage from silent films from the years 1906 to 1918 that were found in the attic of an Amsterdam cinema. Delpeut not only celebrates the magic, charm and purity of the earliest cinema but also examines its techniques--the way, for example, in which a gifted silent actress, clearly understanding the new medium, uses her body as a mean of expression. Delpeut also suggests how the earliest films owe as much to opera as the theater in their acting style. This film shimmers with beauty and innocence as it summons a vanished world.

Also screening are two new 15-minute shorts from the Brothers Quay. One is “The Comb: From the Museums of Sleep,” in which a sleeping woman dreams of a broken doll on a spooky odyssey through a seemingly vast and endless catacomb; typically for the Quays, the world they envision with such disturbing imagination is as eerie as it is exquisite. “Animorphosis,” made with Robert Cardinal, re-creates 18th-Century experiments with perspective: A pen-and-ink landscape, when viewed from a certain angle, discloses a portrait of a king; another, a pornographic comic strip. These Brothers Quay films plus “Lyrical Nitrate” add up to an program of extraordinary visual richness.

Information: (310) 478-6379.