‘New Chinese Cinema’ Focuses on Revolution

Among this week’s films in the UCLA Film Archive’s “New Chinese Cinema” series in Melnitz Theater are two set against the Cultural Revolution, Xhang Nuanxin’s 1985 “Sacrificed Youth” (Tuesday, following the 7:30 p.m. screening of “Bloody Morning”) and Zhang Zemin’s 1986 “Swan Song” (Sunday at 2 p.m.).

A gentle, beautiful film of much poignancy, “Sacrificed Youth” is misleadingly titled, for when its young heroine (Li Fengxu) is sent to live and work in a remote village of the Dai, an ancient tribal people in Western China, she discovers an idyllic way of life in a Garden of Eden setting.

“Swan Song” has similarly ethnographic concerns, for it deals with an elderly composer (Kong Xianzhu) of the Cantonese Opera, a folk musician intent on preserving the music of the Guangdong Province in Southern China yet effectively silenced by the Red Guard. A bon vivant who became a father well into middle age, he and his rich, plaintive music are not appreciated by his son (Chen Rui) until after his death.

“Swan Song” is followed by Chen Kaige’s highly stylized, awesomely beautiful 1991 “Life on a String,” a parable on what is here quite literally blind faith; its hero (Liu Zhongyuan) is the sightless master of the sanxian , the classical three-string Chinese banjo, who believes that once he has broken 1,000 strings, a compartment in his instrument will open that contains the secret that will bring him sight.

Information: (310) 206-FILM.

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Filmforum Offerings: Also screening Tuesday at 7 p.m. at the Central Library as part of Filmforum’s “Scratching the Belly of the Beast” alternative L.A. cinema survey is Kent MacKenzie’s “The Exiles” (1961), an unforgettable cinema-verite portrait of a group of impoverished Native Americans living in the faded, now-demolished Victorian neighborhood of Bunker Hill; playing with it is Arlene Bowman’s unsparingly honest 40-minute “Navajo Talking Picture” (1986) in which Bowman reveals how little she knows or understands of her ancestral culture when she attempts to film her Navajo grandmother.

Information: (213) 663-9568.

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Forgotten Story: Two years before the landmark “Ben-Hur” (1926), its director, Fred Niblo, and its star, Ramon Novarro, teamed with “Thy Name Is Woman” (at the Silent Movie Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m.), a film as forgotten as “Ben-Hur” is enduringly famous.

It’s a dragged-out stage-bound, way-over-the-top melodrama, the kind of emotionally extravagant silent movie that’s easily parodied, yet it offers a rare opportunity to see in a major role its legendary leading lady, the ill-fated Barbara La Marr, a great beauty of genuine talent whose scandal-ridden life ended with a drug overdose at the age of 29 in 1926. (The film’s producer, Louis B. Mayer, appropriated La Marr’s last name for his later Viennese import, Hedy Kiesler; La Marr herself was born Rheatha Watson.)

The film is being shown in a pristine print, which shows to best advantage the contributions of cameraman Victor Milner and art director Ben Carre, the man who invented his craft.

La Marr plays the unhappy wife of an impotent old smuggler (the appropriately dastardly William V. Mong), headquartered on a remote parapet in the Pyrenees overlooking a pass along Spain’s border with France. For five years, Mong has been promising her that they will soon be living comfortably in Seville. Presently, he orders her to divert Novarro’s naive, wet-behind-the-ears frontier guard while he and his henchman clear the cellar of contraband. As seductive as La Marr is, she does not come on to Novarro as an ordinary vamp, for he quickly perceives her misery. Just as quickly, however, they fall in love.

“Thy Name Is Woman” is one of those films that seem to reverberate with its stars’ private lives. You feel the emotion between the wife and the guard is genuine, yet you don’t sense any chemistry. The world weariness, the pervasive sadness that La Marr brings to her role seems palpably real, especially in her single, startlingly revealing close-up.

On the other hand, the shyness and reserve of Novarro’s virginal caribinero seems equally authentic; on screen, Novarro was a popular Latin lover, but in private life he was gay; decades later he was murdered by a pair of hustlers. You have to wonder what he thought when he read the intertitle in which his guard proclaims, “I have never had anything to do with women.”

Information: (213) 653-2389.