Ann Arbor Fest Still on Cutting Edge

Filmforum will present selections from the 31st annual Ann Arbor Film Festival of independent and experimental 16mm work Wednesday and Thursday at the Beverly Cinema . Judging from the films available for preview, the festival, the longest-running showcase of its kind, remains on the cutting edge.

The work in animation is especially fresh and imaginative this year. Kim Thompson, in “All the Great Operas,” using whimsical cut-out figures to counterpoint her narration, manages to compress the librettos of 11 of the most famous warhorses into a mere 9 1/2 minutes to point up in amusing fashion their relentlessly lurid content. In the six-minute “Milk of Amnesia,” Jeffrey Scher’s lovely sketches capture the rhythms of everyday life--to a tango beat. In recounting the painful breakup of a love affair over the course of a year in the 10-minute “Since Our Status Changed,” Laura Margulies attests to the power of the visual with her elegant, graceful figures, which contrast so vividly and effectively with the deliberate banality of the narration, written by Kathy Bernard. No wonder Joan Gratz won a short animation Oscar this year for her “Mona Lisa (Descending a Staircase),” in which she surveys some of the landmark paintings in Western civilization by miraculously dissolving one famous image into the next--all in a mere seven minutes.

Among the live-action offerings, Brian Gardiner’s 24-minute beautiful “Flying Over Water” is among the longest and most demanding--and also is oddly dated. As a surreal vision of an apocalypse, evolving from creation to destruction, it recalls countless similar works inspired as a protest to the Vietnam War. Overlong, unduly repetitive, “Flying Over Water” nonetheless has some striking images, keyed by Gardiner’s fascination with two steel structures designed to support swimming pool diving boards, which become metaphysical “jumping off places” for human experience--even a symbolic Jacob’s Ladder.

In her provocative 16-minute “She’s Just Growing Up,” Julia Tell juxtaposes fragments of a sappy 1950s’ educational film on female puberty with recollections of incest. One of the most ambitious films, also 16 minutes, is “Seven Lucky Charms,” in which 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 that it’s impossible to imagine any abused woman--or any man or woman for that matter--not being able to connect with it.

The other three live-action films are all humorous. Jessica Yu’s four-minute “Sour Death Balls,” which records a group of adults and children eating the treacherous candy of the film’s title, suggests that kids are more honest in their reactions than their hammy elders. Lisa Doyle’s seven-minute “Did You Do the Napkin Tops?” is a jaunty yet rueful rap on the woes of waitressing. Michael Majoros and Jim Kaufman’s often hilarious, sometimes touching and occasionally just plain weird 27-minute “Tips for Living”--which could well be the festival’s most enjoyable, accessible film--is just that: a collection of people giving advice on everything on how to make up a corpse for a funeral to how to rob a bank.

Information: (213) 663-9568.

The ‘It’ Girl: When popular British novelist “Madame” Elinor Glyn descended upon Hollywood in the mid-’20s, she famously pronounced that Clara Bow possessed “It.” Madame Glyn was forever redefining this quality, which was sex appeal with a little something extra. The irrepressible Bow had sex appeal in abundance plus vulnerability and spontaneity. Indeed, few stars have ever shone with such quicksilver radiance.

Inevitably, Bow would appear in a picture simply called “It,” based on a story by Glyn, who also appears briefly in the 1927 movie, which will screen Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Silent Movie.

Directed by Clarence Badger with a breezy, throwaway charm, the effervescent “It” is the quintessential shopgirl fantasy with Bow, a department store lingerie saleswoman, setting her cap for the store-owner’s handsome son (Antonio Moreno).

Co-starring are William Austin, a gifted light comedian--and father of Silent Movie proprietor Lawrence Austin--and Priscilla Bonner, the only one of the film’s principals still living. Playing with it is another Clara Bow feature, “Capital Punishment” (1925).

Information: (213) 653-2389.