SCREENING ROOM : Strindberg’s Demonic Duo in Landmark Production

“Strindberg on Film” continues Tuesday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Bing Theater at 8 p.m. with director David Giles’ splendid 1968 film of “The Dance of Death.” This priceless record of a masterful National Theater Company of Great Britain production stars Laurence Olivier and Geraldine McEwan, very much Olivier’s match in bringing to miserable life a couple who have been called “two of the most demonic characters in all literature.”

Playing with it is Alf Sjoberg’s astonishing “Karin Mansdotter” (1954), a romantic historical tragedy centering on the teen-age mistress (Ulla Jacobsson, in the title role) of the flighty 16th-Century King Erik XIV (Jarl Kulle). A straightforward adaptation of the play is bracketed by a prologue done as a silent melodrama and an expansive, eloquent epilogue in which Sjoberg imagines what Karin’s ultimate fate might be like.

Information: (213) 857-6010.

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The UCLA Film Archive and Visual Communications’ ninth annual Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film & Video Festival, the largest event of its kind in the world, opens Thursday at 7 p.m. at UCLA’s Melnitz Theater with Huang Jianxin’s terse, stunning “The Wooden Man’s Bride.” Also screening during the festival’s opening weekend is Zhang Yuan’s laconic “Beijing Bastards” (Saturday at 9 p.m. at Laemmle’s Grande). The first film, set in the 1920s, is as formal as the second is spontaneous, but both are equally outspoken.

Zhang’s film is in the stark tradition of the modern Chinese cinema of depicting the utmost suffering and hardship, so often directed toward women, in the most beautifully composed of images. A series of confounding events forces a young woman (Wang Lan) to marry her recently deceased fiance in effigy, represented by a carved wooden bust held during the wedding ceremony by a virile young retainer (Ku Paoming) of the bride’s family who has now become a member of her formidable mother-in-law’s household. It’s not hard to guess that attraction will set in between the two young people with dire consequences, but the surprise is the film’s bravura finish, into which you may read the most rebellious of political sentiments.

We’ve seen vibrant shoot-from-the-hip low-budget films of alienated young people adrift in big cities from filmmakers the world over, but “Beijing Bastards” is modern China’s first truly independent production. It deals with the young proprietor of a small club, trying to get his act together once his girlfriend, who has announced she’s pregnant, promptly cuts out, and it also unravels the struggles of a rock band that has never been granted official permission to perform publicly. Ironically, the film has an engaging immediacy, while its music, overly derivative of standardized Western rock, seems banal.

Information: (310) 206-FILM.

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Filmmaker Pratibha Parmar joined forces with author Alice Walker to make the sensitive, scary 54-minute documentary “Warrior Marks” (at the Nuart Saturday and Sunday only, at 11 a.m.), an informative, forceful protest against the ancient but cruel and dangerous tradition of female genital mutilation, still widespread in Africa, Malaysia and Indonesia. Through dance, individual testimony and on-camera interviews Parmar and Walker show the folly and oppressiveness of the often unsanitary and excruciatingly painful practices designed to destroy female sexuality to render women less threatening to men.

Information: (310) 478-6379.

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Mary Haverstick’s “Shades of Black” (Sunset 5, Saturdays and Sundays at 11 a.m.) is an exceptionally impressive debut feature. This persuasive psychological drama features superior portrayals by Jennifer MacDonald as a virginal 23-year-old photographer pursued by Trisha McComick’s seductive somewhat older woman, an artist whose formidable manipulative powers hide a dangerous mental instability.

Although a bit long, especially for a film with so abrupt a finish, “Shades of Black”--made entirely in and around deceptively benign and bucolic Lancaster, Pa.--is a powerful reminder of how vulnerable we can be to clever crazies.

Information: (310) 848-3500.