Filmforum to Screen Visions From Women

“Illicit Response,” Filmforum’s 8 p.m. program tonight at LACE, is composed of five recent experimental films by women that express via indirect and often challenging means some of their major concerns today.

In the most ambitious of the films, “Seven Lucky Charms,” Cal Arts graduate--and current Filmforum projectionist--Lisa Mann evokes powerfully the psychology and the unjust plight of the abused woman through a bold mixture of symbols, images and voice-over narration; so effective is this film it’s impossible to imagine any abused women--or any man or woman for that matter--not being able to connect with it.

Equally potent, Greta Snider’s “Mute” counterpoints a male’s voice-over declaration of his overwhelming attraction to a 15-year-old, unable to speak, with her interior thoughts expressed via subtitles. At the same time, Snider juxtaposes seductive images of male and female nudity with sensual vistas of Morocco. The overall effect is as erotic as it is disturbing.

In “Knucklebones,” Caroline Koebel creates a veritable nightmare expressing a woman’s profound fear of abuse and abandonment. Her strong images are only slightly undercut by some pretentious accompanying statements printed across the screen intermittently.

The most accessible of the evening’s offerings is Jennifer Montgomery’s Super-8 “Home Avenue,” in which the filmmaker retraces in illuminating fashion the events surrounding her rape 10 years earlier and its traumatic, still-lingering aftermath.

Rounding out the 65-minute program is another Super-8 film, by Julie Murray, the title of which is unprintable. Nevertheless, it is a vivid collage of reprocessed found footage, accompanied by industrial music, and involving images of violence between men and women from which alternating images of tenderness gradually disappear entirely. Information: (213) 663-9568.

The Griffith Touch: “The Love Flower” (1920), which screens Wednesday at the Silent Movie along with some Chaplin shorts, may be minor D.W. Griffith, but it is Griffith all the same. It tells of a father (George MacQuarrie) dogged by misfortune and his adored near-grown daughter (Carol Dempster) on the lam in a remote South Sea island paradise.

Their story is predictable and melodramatic, but the film, shot in the Bahamas by the great G.W. Bitzer, is suffused with naked emotion: the near-incestuous love between father and daughter, a veritable Mary Pickford-like child-woman, mirroring Griffith’s own unabashed and deep adoration of Dempster, who had the impossible task of following Lillian Gish as Griffith’s favorite actress.

It’s as if Griffith were so thunderstruck he couldn’t actually direct Dempster, who needed all the help she could get. Instead, she is left to prance around aimlessly until it’s time for her to emerge as a woman, a moment more stated by Griffith than expressed by Dempster. Often maligned, Dempster did, however, improve and was a delightful foil to W.C. Fields in Griffith’s “Sally of the Sawdust” (1925). “The Love Flower” actually has a leading man, Richard Barthelmess, as a young seafarer, but his role is decidedly secondary. Information: (213) 653-2389.

Stories From Durango: The UCLA Film Archive’s “Contemporary Mexican Film” continues Sunday at 7:30 p.m. with Juan Antonio de la Riva’s “Wandering Lives” (1985) and its sequel “Timber Town” (1990); both are set in the rugged timberland of the mountains of Durango.

The first is a sweet-natured and subtle story of an itinerant film projectionist (Jose Carlos Ruiz) and his young assistant (Ignacio Guadalupe), who travel from one logging community to the next showing movies; that the films they screen are all classics becomes an homage to the Mexican cinema. The vicissitudes and aspirations of the projectionist, who dreams of building his own theater, represent those of both the Mexican people and its ever-struggling cinema.

“Timber Town,” which is equally subtle, follows Guadalupe to a small village and takes place in the course of one summer. This is one of those films in which little out of the ordinary happens, yet we come to realize that for some of the community’s citizens, nothing will ever be the same.

Information: (310) 206-FILM.