Two Anti-Fascist Films and Fellini’s Parting Shot

The Goethe Institute Tuesday at 7 p.m. presents Gunter Rucker and Gunter Reisch’s “The Fiancee” (“Die Verlobte”) (1980), another outstanding offering in its “Anti-Fascist Films From the GDR” series. Adapted by Rucker from a trilogy by Eva Lippold, “The Fiancee” is as harrowing as it is beautiful, a superbly articulated drama with an absolutely stunning performance from its star, Jutta Wachowiak. In elliptical fashion, we see Wachowiak caught up in some sort of highly dangerous clandestine activities not too long before World War II starts. She is deeply in love, but she and her fiance (Regimantas Adomaitis) are unable to be married before she has been betrayed and sentenced by the Nazis to serve a 10-year prison term.

We’ve all been subjected to test-of-the-spirit bleak prison dramas before, but Wachowiak, a gaunt beauty, brings such a burning intensity to her role that it becomes an entirely new and edifying experience as we watch her gradually make her way in harsh, brutal circumstances.

A film of eloquent structure and movement, “The Fiancee” reveals itself gradually as it proceeds to a fate we feel sure will be ironic in one way or another, for we know that the war will end before she can complete serving her sentence. There is a surprise twist at the climax, and we also experience a tragic awareness as we learn that she is a devout communist, sworn to support the Soviet Union, who has sacrificed her freedom and happiness for a form of government no more just than the Third Reich.

The series continues Thursday at 7 p.m. with Ulrich Weiss’ similarly themed and equally harrowing “Your Unknown Brother” (1982). Once again, the time is the ‘30s as Hitler’s grasp on Germany grows ever stronger. Uwe Kokisch stars as Arnold Clasen, a dark, bearded theater projectionist and secretly a communist who takes on risky missions for the Party, such as mounting a red flag on a factory roof and flooding its underpaid workers with inflammatory leaflets.

Working from Wolfgang Trampe’s script from Willi Bredel’s novel, Weiss manages to satirize Nazi excesses, which increase at the same rate as the danger of the clandestine activities Clasen and his cell undertake. “Your Unknown Brother” is a richly visual, somber, moody work, but that it flash-forwards its denouement only underlines the sense that it’s too long and too dragged out and would have been more effective had its running time been 90 minutes instead of 105.

Information: (213) 525-3388.

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The Italian Cultural Institute continues its “Recent Italian Films on Video” series with an unsubtitled version of 1989’s “La Voce della Lune” (“The Voice of the Moon”), Federico Fellini’s final film, a great valedictory that has yet to to be released in America. Arguably the most contemplative and philosophical of all of Fellini’s films, it is an allegory on the quest for the meaning of life filled with the maestro’s trademark flair for spectacle mixed with compassion for human folly.

The setting is a small Italian city preparing for a garish, gala gnocchi festival where two lost souls discover each other--Roberto Benigni’s wistful wayfarer who hears voices, which he believes are trying to tell him how to change the world, and an older man (Paolo Villagio), a city official retired against his will who is convinced that people no longer possess substance and are only playing roles, whether they realize it or not.

In an inspired climactic moment, involving a couple of peasants who succeed in capturing the moon via an immense threshing machine, Fellini suggests that what’s important is not ultimately understanding the universe. If you should succeed in that, where do you go from there?, he asks. What counts, he says, is always listening to the questions that life provokes; alas, it may well be the eccentrics, the crazies even, who are most likely to hear them in the first place.

Information: (310) 207-4737.

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Note: Beyond Baroque, the Venice literary/arts center, Saturday at 8 p.m. is presenting the landmark avant-garde 1926 Japanese silent, “A Page of Madness,” directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa (best known for the classic “Gate of Hell”) from an original script by Nobel Prize-winning author Yasunari Kawabata.

Information: (310) 826-3006.