Filmforum Highlights Bay Area Experimenters : Movies: Elsewhere, the ‘Anti-Fascist Films of the GDR’ series comes to a close, and Frank Capra’s first directing effort is also comic Harry Langdon’s finest film.

Tonight’s weekly Filmforum offering at the Hollywood Moguls, 1650 N. Hudson, is composed of five experimental works by San Francisco-area filmmakers.

The best of the five are Alfonso Alvarez’s beautiful, richly hued “La Reina,” a surreal celebration of the Virgin of Guadeloupe that perceives the human spirit and nature as one, and Craig Baldwin’s 40-minute tour de force “O No Coronado!,” which makes inspired, darkly comic use of clips from old movies to decry the evils wrought by the European conquistadors of Mexico and the American Southwest.

Greta Snider’s “No-Zone” offers brief vignettes of contemporary life, alternating between Angst over pollution--the specter of nuclear waste pervades the entire program--and other modern-day ills with such joyous respites as skateboarding. Bill Daniels’ “Maceba” offers a brief, strobed, glimpse of a Butthole Surfers concert, while his (and Elizabeth House’s) “Cement City Expedition” is a Super 8 meandering over derelict areas of West Dallas.

Information: (213) 663-9568.

*

Series Conclusion: The Goethe Institute, 5700 Wilshire Blvd., concludes its highly impressive “Anti-Fascist Films of the GDR” Tuesday at 7 p.m. with Siegfried Kuhn’s “The Actress” (1988), which stars the formidable Corinna Harfouch in the title role. Like several other films in the series, it is set in the ‘30s and reflects the terrifying rise of Nazism.

Harfouch plays an actress at a clearly prestigious repertory theater in a large but unnamed city. Talented, beautiful and versatile, Harfouch’s Maria Rheine, soon emerges as a star but is chagrined to be declared the embodiment of the Aryan ideal--especially as she is in love with a Jew (Andre Hennicke) who has been forced to leave the company and join a Jewish theater group in Berlin that the Third Reich has sanctioned as a sop to its growing reputation abroad for anti-Semitism.

Torn between love and career in increasingly perilous times, Maria makes a dramatic gesture that is as foolish as it is romantic yet rings with psychological validity for her temperament as an actress. (Various well-known real-life actors in her predicament came up with far more practical solutions.) Adapted by Regine Kuhn from Hedda Zinner’s novel “Arrangement mit dem Tod,” “The Actress” shows off Harfouch’s talent to maximum advantage for not only do we believe her Maria but also glimpses of Maria’s performances as Mary, Queen of Scots, in Greek tragedy and especially as Joan of Arc.

Information: (213) 525-3388.

*

Capra’s Debut: “The Strong Man” (1926) plays the Silent Movie, 611 N. Fairfax, Wednesday at 8 p.m. Not only is it comedian Harry Langdon’s best picture, it also marks the full-fledged directorial debut of one of Hollywood’s greatest directors, Frank Capra. It also remains perhaps the best film--or best surviving film--of its featured comedienne, the versatile, underappreciated Gertrude Astor, who had a special knack for finding the humor in brassy gold-diggers.

This time the diminutive, ever-dainty Langdon, whose pasty, woebegone countenance had the look of a baby with a hangover, plays an inept Belgian solider who winds up after World War I in Manhattan, standing on a corner along Broadway hoping to encounter his pen pal (Priscilla Bonner). Instead, he crosses paths with Astor’s tall blonde floozy, who hastily sticks a a thick roll of bills in Langdon’s pocket as a cop approaches her. Thus begins the first of several long, superbly sustained comic sequences, this one involving much inspired knockabout comedy, which at one point requires Langdon to carry the seemingly prostrate Astor up a slippery marble staircase.

This is but a prologue to Langdon’s inevitable chance meeting with Bonner, in a small town overridden with vice. That Bonner proves to be blind is to Langdon’s painfully obvious advantage--anticipating Chaplin and Virginia Cherrill in “City Lights” by five years. Langdon and Bonner’s discovery of each other is as succinct as it is poignant; right from the start Frank Capra was a master of the sentimental.

Information: (213) 653-2389.