2 Moving Portraits of Elders

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ “Contemporary Documentary Series” continues Tuesday at 8 p.m. at UCLA’s Melnitz Theater with a remarkable pair of deftly drawn portraits of older individuals.

Young filmmakers are forever turning their cameras on their grandparents, often giving the impression that they never really thought about them until realizing they would be good subjects for a documentary. To his credit Brett J. Love tells us up front that he figured that making his 50-minute “Emil and Fifi” would be a way for him to get to know his grandfather, who turns out to have lived an extraordinary life.

Today Emil Synek, an elegant Old World charmer nearing 90, lives anonymously in Paris with his second wife and enjoys taking strolls with his beloved black poodle Fifi. Once he was a major player in the cultural and political life of his native Czechoslovakia--an eminent playwright, novelist, filmmaker, journalist and politician who in 1932 married a beautiful star of the Czech stage.

In noble appearance and manner, Synek resembles the late Fritz Lang, proud but unsentimental, at once crotchety and affectionate, with a sophisticated survivor’s wry view of the world. His grandson is as impressed with Synek’s stand against Hitler, who put him on his condemned list, as he is dismayed at his ambiguous role in the early years of Czechoslovakia’s postwar Communist government as one of its representatives in Paris.

By the end of this witty, poignant film its maker has learned not to judge his grandfather, to accept that he will never know the full measure of Synek’s complex and harrowing life, and instead to love this worldly, strong-willed old man.

In 1981, William A. Whiteford began recording the daily existence of Grace Kirkland, a Bethesda, Md., housewife who about five years before was diagnosed as having Alzheimer’s disease. The 58-minute “Grace” spans a decade of an aging woman’s gradual deterioration; as such, it is surely valuable as a medical study. Luckily, “Grace” is much more, a moving love story of how Grace’s husband, Glenn, a Johns Hopkins physicist and a devoutly religious man, cares for her with an imperturbable calmness, kindness, ever challenging her relentlessly diminishing capacities.

When we meet Grace she is subject to constant mood swings and short-term memory loss but is still capable of enjoying life and connecting, albeit erratically, with her family and friends; by the end of the film she is mute and barely able to walk. Yet throughout the film one feels that Grace senses and appreciates her husband’s steadfast devotion. “Grace” would be hard to watch were it not permeated with love.

Admission is free.

Information: (310) 206-FILM.