VIDEO REVIEW : Society’s Outsiders Get Their Say in AFI National Festival

The world of video is actually two worlds.

Of highest profile is the well-endowed world of commercial TV with its global satellites, laser discs, high-definition television and expensive special effects.

Then there’s the other world, where independent videomakers live, scrounging by on limited budgets fed by pinched grant sources and pure willpower. The annual American Film Institute National Video Festival is a kind of haven for independents, and it’s only natural that the theme of the forgotten outsider runs through the 1993 edition (tonight through Sunday at various locations at the AFI campus, 2021 N. Western Ave., Hollywood).

At its worst, this theme can perpetuate the poor-me, victim role--a weakness of political activist video. Marlon Riggs’ “Je Ne Regrette Rien” (part of African-American Videos 1, 7 p.m Friday; 12:15 p.m Saturday) comes close to this as he records the feelings of a group of HIV-positive black men.

But the Video Latino program (7 p.m. Friday; 10 a.m. Saturday) takes different directions. Lourdes Portillo’s work with the irreverent comedy troupe Culture Clash, “Columbus on Trial,” is a nutty, technically superb staging of a courtroom battle between Columbus (Herbert Siguenza) and an American Indian lawyer (Ric Salinas) that nobody really wins.

Pilar Rodriguez’s “The Idea We Live In” depicts a house as a mental universe, while works by Dan Boord and Luis Valdovino try to displace the viewer from the subject: “Terra Nueva” stumbles through an absurdist tale of Argentines meeting failure in Oklahoma; “Una Historia” succeeds as an off-the-cuff compilation showing various videos (by Craig Baldwin and Juan Downey, among others).

As usual, the 1992 winners in the Visions of U.S. competition (7 p.m. tonight; 12:15 p.m. Saturday) hide neither their inexperience with the art form, nor their opinions. Kevin Adams’ “Can’t Take That Away From Me” begins with images of loving, kissing men and ends with a silent, disturbing account of gay bashing. Mary Stark’s “Through the Eyes of a Child” and Christopher Shank’s personal music video “Blood Is Thicker Than Water” both celebrate children and family as bonds for African-Americans.

The Documentary Explorations program (9:15 p.m. tonight; 10 a.m. Saturday) offers a space for nonfiction work without a home on the tube, such as Joel Katz’s continuously engrossing “Corporation With a Movie Camera.”

It is a more meaningful use of video’s possibilities than the Visual Explorations program (7 p.m. tonight; 2:30 p.m. Saturday), weighted down with works like Barbara Hammer’s “Vital Signs” and Diane Nerwen’s and Les LeVeque’s “Pre-Existing Conditions.”

Fresh from its appearance at the Sundance festival, Santa Monica videomakers Bill Day’s and Terry Schwartz’s “Saviors of the Forest” (double-billed with “Greenbucks: The Challenge of Sustainable Development,” at 7 tonight; 2:30 p.m. Sunday) may be the most unexpectedly entertaining work at AFI, as it turns eco-reportage on its head.