SPECIAL SCREENINGS : ‘Schtonk!’ Highlights German Fest

The American Cinematheque’s third annual “New Films From Germany,” to be presented Friday through Sunday at the Directors Guild, is a rich and varied eight-film retrospective attesting to the vitality and imagination of Germany’s current generation of filmmakers. Several are outstanding and deserve American distribution.

The highlight is unquestionably Helmut Dietl’s outrageous, hilarious satire “Schtonk! (Friday at 9 p.m.) involving a spoof of the shameless reporter (Gotz George) and forger (Uwe Ochsenknecht) who perpetrated the notorious hoax of Der Fuhrer’s diaries. While George plays the journalist as a handsome buffoon, Ochsenknecht comes across as an irrepressible, crafty nerd who can fake a Hitler portrait of Eva Braun in the nude. “Schtonk!,” which takes its title from Charlie Chaplin’s swear word in “The Great Dictator,” is so funny that you can dare mention Billy Wilder’s name in the same sentence with Dietl, who will appear at the screening.

Another strong entry is Doris Dorrie’s “Happy Birthday, Turke!” (Sunday at 5 p.m.), the latest from the maker of the 1985 hit comedy “Men . . .” Adapted from a best-selling novel, it’s a classic private eye caper with the twist that its Frankfurt detective (the charismatic Hansa Czypionka) is of Turkish descent. This fact is at once a source of humor--as an orphan raised by Germans he can’t speak a word of Turkish--and of biting commentary on the chronic and often virulent racism of Germans toward foreigners.

A traditional crowd-pleaser, Jo Baier’s “Wildfire” (Saturday at 6 p.m.) is a vibrant, sensual biography of Bavarian writer-poet Emerenz Meier (1874-1928), who is presented as a proud, sturdy peasant (played be Anica Dobra) who leaves her family’s farm to seek a literary career in the city of Passau only to pay a great price for her freedom and independence.

Among the established filmmakers represented in the survey are Werner Herzog and Poland’s Krzysztof Zanussi. “Scream of Stone” (Saturday at 4 p.m.) is yet another of Herzog’s extremes-of-human-experience sagas, telling of the conquest of a daunting Patagonian mountain peak and presented in an English-language version. The central figure is neither of the two competing climbers (Vittorio Mezzogiorno, Stepan Glowacz) but rather a glib sports journalist cum promoter, suavely played by Donald Sutherland, who could well be taken as an alter ego for Herzog, notorious for the demands and risks he places on his actors. Breathtaking visually, the film is marred by Mezzogiorno and Glowacz’s struggles with English while playing characters that are seriously underdeveloped.

Zanussi’s elegiac, provocative “Life for Life: Maximilian Kolbe” (Sunday at 7 p.m.) is similarly characteristic of its maker in its concern with moral questions--in this instance, the complex and paradoxical nature of sainthood. It centers on a young man (Christoph Waltz), a Silesian insurgent, who escapes from Auschwitz knowing full well that in return the Germans will starve to death 10 men. A Franciscan priest, Maximilian Kolbe (Edward Zentara), offers to take the place of the least stoic of the men selected for slow but certain death--and is eventually beatified for his sacrifice. In intercutting the stories of the Silesian and Kolbe, Zanussi suggests that the two are forever linked.

Christa Ritter and Rainer Langhans’ “Snow White/Rose Red” (Friday at 5 p.m.) documents the hectic life of a pair of identical twins, Jutta and Gisela Schmidt, international celebrity-chasing party girls and art world dilettantes of the ‘60s and ‘70s--Gisela even married the ill-fated J. Paul Getty III. The rich and the famous attest to their sheer fabulousness, but we don’t really get to see what’s so special about them. However, they do come across as survivors who’ve learned something from their glittery roller-coaster existence--but who are still caught up in the complex relationship typical of identical twins.

Hermine Huntgeburth’s “The Terrible Threesome” (Saturday at 8 p.m.) is a minor but lively dark comedy about a grandmother (Ruth Heilberg), a daughter (Karin Baal) and a granddaughter (Barbara Auer) who form an irrepressible trio of deadly con women but whose everyday relationships with each other are like those of a perfectly normal family. Playing with it is Soenke Wortmann’s “Acting It Out,” a comedy about three young men trying to make it into acting school; it was unavailable for preview.

Information: (213) 466-FILM.