Czech Animator Offers ‘Faust’ at Nuart

Veteran Czech animator Jan Svankmajer’s eerie “Faust” (at the Nuart one week starting today) imagines that a perfectly ordinary middle-aged man (Petr Cepek), living in a seedy Prague apartment, follows a strange-looking map that leads him to a theater dressing room, where he ends up as Faust in a puppet show production of the Gounod opera.

Like Polish animator Walerian Borowczyk, Svankmajer, whose film is a Kafkaesque nightmare, seems to see the world as a whimsical Rube Goldberg mechanism that--with remorse but not without bleak humor--grinds humanity down. Steeped in folklore, Svankmajer is prodigiously imaginative, blending the quaint and the macabre in unsettling jaunty ways, but his “Faust” film itself tends to be mechanical, impressing us rather than involving us emotionally. Yet there’s no question that he is an important and highly original artist. (310) 478-6379.

Arthur Elgort’s graceful and appealing 76-minute “Colorado Cowboy: The Bruce Ford Story” (Sunset 5, Saturdays and Sundays at 11 a.m.) takes us into the world of rodeo champion Ford and captures the excitement and rhythms of a man attempting to ride a bucking horse.

Ford, 39, lives a hard life on the road as well as in the arena but is firmly anchored by a rock-solid family and Christian faith. In his quiet way, Ford, who has an authentic Marlboro Man look, is a cowboy of dignity, integrity and courage, a professional to the core and clearly a fine husband and father.

Ford’s values and timeless way of life make real the mythical code of the Old West. Ford, who also raises horses, hopes for one more season of experiencing the thrill of a “150-pound man dominating a 1,200-pound animal,” as we follow him on his circuit that concludes with the National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas.

Tony Guzman’s highly theatrical adaptation of the Marquis de Sade’s “Philosophy in the Bedroom” (Sunset 5, Fridays and Saturdays at midnight) manages to combine triple-X dialogue with no literal depictions of sex. Much of the Marquis’ views on sex and liberty ring a contemporary note, but they’re undermined by his penchant for degrading women. Guzman has caught much of the humor in the Marquis, thankfully, but his 87-minute movie is often talky to the point of tedium. The cast is no more than competent, but Daniel Spector in the De Sade alter ego role is considerably more than that.

Janis Lundman and Adrienne Mitchell’s “Talk 16” (Sunset 5, Saturdays and Sundays at 11 a.m.) follows five Canadian teen-age girls from New Year’s Eve, 1989, to Christmas, 1990, by which time they will have all turned 16. The standout is Helen, a bright, lively, talented Korean Canadian pianist with strict but loving parents--her father, in fact, is a Pentecostal minister. None of the other girls is very interesting, unfortunately, not even the articulate but wayward Astra. By the end of the documentary, which belongs on PBS rather than in a theater, we haven’t really seen or heard anything about female teen-agers we didn’t already know. (310) 848-3500.