‘Love’ and ‘Caress’ on Filmforum’s Lineup

Filmforum will present videos by the 20-year-old award-winning Milwaukee-based Sadie Benning and by John Lindell at 8 tonight at the Hollywood Moguls, 1650 N. Hudson St. Benning’s diary-like shorts are witty, joyous works by a young woman at once exploring her lesbian identity and the endless visual possibilities of her chosen medium.

She has a deft way with narrative--she’s just as quick to use quirky intertitles as the spoken word--and she frequently turns the camera on herself in tightly composed, boldly cropped images. One of her funniest, sweetest videos is “It Wasn’t Love,” a fantasy about how she and her lover will head for Hollywood, or rob a few banks and “lie low in Detroit”--but actually wind up “making out in the parking lot of the fried chicken place.”

Most of Lindell’s videos celebrate the blunt language of gay male sex; by contrast his “Caress” is a gentle, discreet portrayal of two young men making love.

On Saturday, Filmforum will join with KAOS Network in screening at 8 p.m. at the Vision Complex in Leimert Park Edward O. Bland’s 1959 “The Cry of Jazz,” a succinct definition of jazz and its history filmed against black life in Chicago and with jazz groups in performance. The film is framed by awkward, self-conscious yet telling and prophetic attempts by three young African-American men to explain jazz and its moral, cultural and political implications to several ultra-square ‘50s young white people; these scenes are frequently unintentionally funny, but their sentiments are right on target.

Information: (213) 663-9568.

The Goethe Institute, 5700 Wilshire Blvd., will present “Anti-Fascist Films of the GDR” commencing Wednesday at 7 p.m. with Wolfgang Staudte’s “The Murderers Are Among Us” (1946), the first film produced by the newly established DEFA company, headquartered in the hallowed UFA studios outside Potsdam--and, in fact, the first film produced anywhere in Germany after the war.

This harrowing, uncompromising film recalls Roberto Rossellini’s masterful “Germany--Year Zero” (1947) with its setting in the actual ruins of Berlin and climate of moral chaos. A young woman (Hildegarde Knef), just out of a concentration camp, returns to her apartment in a war-damaged but still habitable old building only to find it occupied by an intense doctor (Ernst Wilhelm Borchert) who drowns his bitterness and sorrow in drink.

Through these two people, the relationship that develops between them, with the doctor having to face a terrible secret in his past, plus the stories of the other apartment house residents, Staudte confronts his audience with the terrible toll that World War II exacted of the German people and their need to acknowledge and take responsibility for their actions. “The Murderers Among Us” has stunning, highly atmospheric high-contrast black-and-white imagery and is a taut work of both style and courage.

Gerhard Klein’s 1961 “The Gleiwitz Affair” (screening Thursday at 7 p.m.) lives up to its description as the most stylized film ever to be produced in East Germany. A re-creation of the bombing of a German radio station within the bitterly disputed “Polish Corridor” by the Nazis as a pretext to invade Poland and thus precipitate World War II, it takes on a darkly comic absurdist tone as we watch the nefarious plan unfold with a Germanic passion for precision and much Nazi smugness.

Opening just a few days after the building of the Berlin Wall, the corrosively satirical “The Gleiwitz Affair” was reportedly misunderstood and widely attacked.

Information: (213) 525-3388.