MOVIES : The Good, Bad and Not-So Ugly : Past AFI Festivals emphasized quantity to showcase filmmakers. This year, will fewer films mean higher artistic quality?

The AFI Film Festival, which runs Thursday to July 7 at the Monica 4-Plex in Santa Monica, is about half the size as previous years--and that may well make it twice as good. In the past the festival, like its predecessor Filmex, has tended to blur the line between quality and quantity to give a showcase to as many filmmakers as possible. That’s an arguably noble sentiment, but the plain truth is that too many bad movies bring down the overall artistic level of any film festival.

“We’ll be showing about 70-75 feature films, and we’ll have eight or nine special programs,” said the festival’s director, Ken Wlaschin, in an interview at AFI headquarters in Hollywood. “This means that we’ll be able to have more repeat screenings so that people will have a greater opportunity to see the best films. We’ve decided that it’s very, very hard for the Los Angeles audience to cope with so many films, so we feel a smaller festival will actually make people more aware of what we’re showing. This has been primarily a philosophic decision, but it also helps economically--not having to bring in so many filmmakers, for one thing.”

The festival’s greatest vulnerability in the past has always been in its large offering of American independent films, many of which were so mediocre--or worse--that they never even had a prayer of finding distribution.

“We’ve raised the level of the bar over which the films must jump,” Wlaschin said. Judging from the films already previewed, this seems to be the case.

Yet streamlining does not mean that there won’t be something for everyone. The festival opens with the premiere of one of the summer’s major releases, “Wyatt Earp,” starring Kevin Costner, and closes with the American premiere of German producer Regina Ziegler’s “Erotic Tales Series,” six 30-minute vignettes made by Bob Rafelson, Susan Seidelman, Melvin Van Peebles, Ken Russell, Paul Cox and Indian director Mani Kaul.

There will be special tributes to actors Holly Hunter and Dennis Hopper, directors Henry Jaglom and Paul Verhoeven and television producer Frank von Zerneck. There will be a retrospective of the films of Andy Warhol protege Paul Morrissey; a repeat screening of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s landmark 10-part, nearly 11-hour “The Decalogue,” an investigation into the relevance of the Ten Commandments in modern life, and director Sergei Bondarchuk’s cut of his 1967 “War and Peace.”

“Cine Latino: A Tribute to the OAS/Americas Film Festival” will present in person Mexico’s Arturo Ripstein, Argentina’s Eliseo Subiela and Brazil’s Nelson Periera dos Santos. There will be screenings of Ripstein’s “The Beginning of the End,” a monumental family saga based on a novel by 1988 Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz; Subiela’s highly praised “The Dark Side of the Heart,” a parable about one man’s struggle against the forces of conformity from the maker of the extraordinary and distinctive “Man Facing Southeast,” and Periera dos Santos’ “The Third Bank of the River,” composed of five separate tales, and a 30th-anniversary screening of his “Vidas Secas,” a story of a family’s pilgrimage through Brazil’s rugged northeastern back-lands in search of a better life.

The UCLA Film Archive will join forces with the American Film Institute in presenting on July 2 an all-night “Comedies of Elegance,” in tribute to the AFI’s film catalogue for the 1930s.

For information, call Theatix, (213) 466-1767.

Selected Picks

“Black Harvest” (Friday, 1:30 and 6:30 p.m.). Danish director Anders Refn, whose similar 1978 first feature “The Baron” was shown at Filmex, once again takes us into the world of turn-of-the-century landed gentry.

“Black Harvest,” period perfect and exquisitely crafted, charts the decline and fall of an aristocratic family that is triggered by the wretched excesses of a cruel, tyrannical patriarch (Ole Ernst), a hard-drinking, womanizing reckless gambler with an ineffectual wife and four daughters, only one of whom (Sofie Graaboel) has enough gumption even to consider defying him. Just as “Black Harvest” threatens to go over the top in lurid excesses and unrelenting misery, it pulls together for a powerful finish at once quietly ironic and tragic.

“Johnny 100 Pesos” (Friday, 4:10 and 9:20 p.m.). Drawing on an actual 1990 incident, Chilean filmmaker Gustavo Graef Marino brings a tart, timely political dimension to this classic hostage standoff suspenser, alternating effortlessly between the comic and the tragic. Armando Araiza has the title role as a handsome but woefully naive 17-year-old student (and part-time petty thief) who throws in his lot with a group of veteran criminals to hold up an illegal currency exchange in a downtown Santiago high rise. The entire job is bungled from the get-go, with the bad guys taking five hostages.

Not only does Marino sustain the resulting stalemate with unflagging zest and imagination and take aim at familiar media excesses, but he also brings in the chaotic secretary of the interior’s office, which in democracy’s infancy has a vested interest in getting control of the situation so as to protect Chile’s newly refurbished image both at home and abroad.

“Total Balalaika Show” (Saturday, 1:20 p.m.; repeats next Sunday, 1:20 p.m.). Not surprisingly, Finland’s sly, whimsical Aki Kaurismaki had a hand in bringing together the Leningrad Cowboys--a goofy but endearing Finnish rock band favoring pointy shoes with matching pointy hair, unicorn style--and the thundering, sober, richly uniformed Alexandrov Red Army Chorus and Dance Ensemble for a concert held last year in Helsinki’s Senate Square that attracted a crowd of 70,000.

The result provided a perfect concert film for Kaurismaki--a sweet, alternately hilarious and poignant cross-cultural experience, and no small landmark in detente. It’s also a nifty follow-up to Kaurismaki’s “Leningrad Cowboys Go America.”

“The Wedding Gift” (Saturday, 6:30 p.m.; repeats July 1, 1:30 p.m.). One of the festival’s most widely appealing films, this British production, directed deftly by Richard Loncraine, is an exceptionally touching and mature love story starring Julie Walters as a witty middle-aged housewife, struck down by a mysterious debilitating disease, and Jim Broadbent as her almost overly devoted husband.

They are two people who have long put each other first but are now confronted with challenges that threaten to overwhelm them. Walters and Broadbent are immensely skillful, with the result that the film, based on a true incident, is genuinely poignant.

“Out of Sight” (Saturday, 7 p.m.). David Sutherland’s engaging, in-depth documentary in which for once we’re able to see a woman’s blindness as but one aspect of her overall life and personality. Feisty Diane Starin wonders whether “America is ready for a blind girl who isn’t a goody-two-shoes.”

Stubbornly independent, self-assertive and promiscuous, the 34-year-old Starin is a Northern California horse rancher caught up in a tempestuous relationship with a weathered, macho Marlboro Man type old enough to be her father.

“Love After Love” (June 28, 1:20 and 6:40 p.m.). Diane Kurys’ wise, elegant film is a consideration of how difficult it is for a couple, even sophisticated Parisians, to sustain a longstanding, open relationship into the competitive, disillusioned ‘90s.

“Love After Love” unfolds in the year between the 35th and 36th birthdays of its heroine, a successful novelist (Isabelle Huppert, at her most beautiful and poised) who for 20 years has lived with an equally successful architect (Bernard Giraudeau).

“Exile” (June 29, 3:50 and 9 p.m.). A beautifully articulated romantic fable from Australia’s Paul Cox about a young man (Aden Young) who, in the mid-19th Century, is punished for stealing some sheep by being banished to an uninhabited island, where in time his fate attracts a young woman (Beth Champion) with whom he creates an idyllic existence.

Cox effectively suggests how out of touch with nature society is in general and religion in particular, but he mars his notable effort by recurrent appearances of the ghost of a priest (Norman Kaye), uttering predictably sage and totally redundant remarks; you wish that the priest could be edited out of the film entirely.

“From the East” (“D’Est”) (June 29, 4 and 9:10 p.m.). Demanding but luminously beautiful film from Belgium’s ever-venturesome Chantal Akerman, who literally--and slowly--pans her camera all the way from East Germany to Moscow in an attempt to record public life (with several glimpses of private lives interspersed) before change inevitably occurs. Her journey spans summer to winter, ending in a long survey of Moscow, where most citizens seem frozen in endless queues.

As always, Akerman’s sense of composition, camera placement and movement is eloquent. “D’Est” quietly celebrates the continuity of life beyond political systems.

“Helas Pour Moi” (“Oh, Woe Is Me”) (June 29, 8 p.m., Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences). Gerard Depardieu stars as a businessman whose body is briefly inhabited by God, which is but a point of departure for Jean-Luc Godard’s beautiful but complex contemplation of our longing for spiritual redemption. (It is quite possible to conclude, disturbingly, that Depardieu’s experience is ultimately of no consequence.)

Chock-full of Godard’s trademark plethora of quotations, chapter headings and aphorisms, it is as difficult as it is beguiling, a testament to one of the great filmmakers of our time’s continuing capacity for growth and experimentation, and his ability to elicit an array of emotional and intellectual responses from the most elliptical means.

“Women From the Lake of Scented Souls” (July 2, 4:10 p.m.). Xie Fei’s stunning feminist work stars Wu Yujuan, whose sturdy heroine, although unglamorous, brings to mind Joan Crawford in “Mildred Pierce.” In rural Northern China the quality of her sesame oil is so fine that she attracts Japanese investors. While successfully running her mill she is, however, burdened with a drunken, oafish husband (to whom she was sold at 7, married at 13) and above all with trying to marry off her sexually frustrated, mentally retarded son.

The point that Xie makes with the impact of revelation--and not an ounce of preachiness--is how oppressed women can be tempted into helping oppress yet another generation of women.

“Handgun” (July 5, 4:10 and 9:20 p.m.). Whitney Ransick’s smart, funny debut feature is an endlessly inventive heist picture in which everything that possibly could go wrong does. Treat Williams, an ex-con, and Paul Schulze, who sells fake burial plots, are brothers eager to get their hands on the half-million their father (Seymour Cassel) has just stolen.

More credible and less violent than the more radical “Reservoir Dogs,” to which this film will inevitably be compared.