Screening Room : Wolf’s ‘Nineteen’ Screens Today at Goethe Institute

“The Films of Konrad Wolf” continues at the Goethe Institute, 5700 Wilshire Blvd., with two more outstanding pictures.

Wolf’s autobiographical “I Was Nineteen” (today at 7 p.m.) captures beautifully, even poetically, the aura of uncertainty surrounding the last days of World War II as Russian forces commenced conquering Germany.

Wolf’s alter ego is a likable, well-meaning 19-year-old Russian army lieutenant (Jaecki Schwarz), Moscow-born son of a German immigrant father and a Russian mother. His ability to speak German finds him ultimately charged with trying to persuade, via loudspeaker, German soldiers to surrender.

The film eloquently expresses the awkwardness, danger and occasionally amusing aspects of the lieutenant’s challenging experience while expressing a tragic view of war and a belief in Soviet-German solidarity.

Based on the novel by Lion Feuchtwanger, Wolf’s gorgeous, richly hued 1971 “Goya” (Thursday at 7 p.m.), the most ambitious Soviet-East German co-production ever, is an epic yet intimate account of the Spanish painter that is also one of the great film biographies of an artist, who in this instance happened to be a court painter at a time when the Inquisition was in full sway.

Donatas Banionis, who bears a striking resemblance to Paul Sorvino, is superb as the larger-than-life Goya, at once a devout Catholic and an irrepressible philanderer who had a notorious affair with the Duchess of Alba, and a man who gradually realizes he cannot ignore the injustice and oppression of the times in which he lived. Wolf has said that what interested him in Goya was “his hard road to awareness,” and his film is a glorious cry for freedom of expression.

Information: (213) 525-3388.

* A Western Classic: John Ford’s 1946 “My Darling Clementine,” which plays the Monica 4-Plex Wednesday through June 23, is as much a love story as a Western. Between the murder of James Earp by cattle rustlers, opening the film, and the final confrontation with his killers in the legendary gunfight at the OK Corral, Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) agrees to become marshal of the wide-open Tombstone of 1882.

He establishes a friendship with the complex, hard-drinking, tubercular Doc Holliday (Victor Mature, one of the most underrated stars of the 1940s and ‘50s), becomes smitten with Doc’s proper Bostonian fiancee (Cathy Downs) while a fiery saloon entertainer (Linda Darnell) dreams of Doc making an honest woman of her.

Ford, who embraced all of Tombstone’s raffish citizenry, brings to the classic confrontation between the good guys and the bad guys a detached compassion. The expressive power of this great film is overwhelming: its effortlessly yet magnificently composed images, some of them of astonishing depth, all attest to an affirmation of human worth and dignity. This film leads into the Monica 4-Plex’s second annual Classic Western Round-Up.

Information: (310) 394-9741.

* Life After HIV: Kermit Cole’s vital and touching “Living Proof: HIV and the Pursuit of Happiness” (at the Nuart, Friday through June 23) documents the lives and thoughts of HIV-positive subjects of photographer Carolyn Jones, who has an ongoing photo history project of the same name. The virtue of both undertakings is twofold: first, to show that there can be life after a positive diagnosis and, second, to show the wide spectrum of people who have tested positive, demonstrating that everyone, not just gay males, is at risk.

While everyone, of course, wishes they had tested negative, everyone also tells us how their HIV status has transformed their lives in an affirmative way. The cruel irony with at least one of Jones’ subjects is that, as a drug addict since age 11, she discovered that her life was worth living only when she faced the possibility of losing it. Information: (310) 478-6379.

* Korean Cinema: Among the films in “South Korea: Ten Years of Cinema” (at the Monica 4-Plex Friday through June 23; the Korean Community Cultural Center, June 24-30) is Im Kwon-Taek’s superb “Sopyonje,” a stark tale about a hard-drinking, hard-driving master of the plaintive pansori music who wanders the countryside with his two foster children.

As painful as it is profound, the 1993 film reveals the virtually limitless sacrifices an art form can demand of its practitioners.

Information: Sandy Yi, (213) 624-0945.