Speaking Volumes : Czerny is riveting in indie version of ‘Notes From Underground.’

Go along with the first half-hour of Gary Walkow’s ambitious and uncompromising adaptation of Dostoevsky’s “Notes From Underground,” opening a one-week run today at the Grande 4-Plex, where it launches a new cycle of American independent pictures. You may be surprised at the wallop it packs. Henry Czerny gives a tour-de-force portrayal--to use an overworked but here entirely appropriate phrase--as a man turning a video camera on himself to tell us about a pivotal incident in his life that occurred 12 years earlier.

What makes “Notes” so tough at first is that Czerny’s never-named “underground man” is so glum, though of clearly superior intellect. For reasons we know not for sure, but apparently having to do with not being able to handle pressure, he’s dropped out of law school to become a bureaucrat from hell, a city building permit clerk who works out his frustrations by denying permits for the most petty reasons.

He’s so clenched and relentlessly blunt yet so desperate for friendship that he latches on to a gathering of old schoolmates, successful attorneys all. As crass and condescending as these men are, they begin to gain sympathy in the face of our hero’s insufferable priggishness, no small accomplishment.

Social situations rarely get uglier than this one, but it leads to the clerk’s cataclysmic encounter with a pretty prostitute (Sheryl Lee, also splendid), fresh from Minnesota and new to the business. Their meeting evolves into an opportunity for the clerk to redeem his entire life. “Love is everything,” he acknowledges, but will he be able to transcend his towering self-absorption, pathetic self-importance and total lack of humor? What makes the clerk involving is his self-awareness, which in turn allows us to see in him our own most unattractive, self-destructive tendencies.

The video-recording device allows for a heavy dose of voice-over narrative on the part of the clerk, and perhaps without it, it may not have been financially feasible for Walkow to make this film, set largely--but thankfully not exclusively--in the clerk’s dismal cinder-block basement apartment. It would be good to see what Walkow, who has a sense of the cinematic, can do minus such narration. (213) 617-0268.

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The Jewish Cinema series continues at the Music Hall with the one-week run, starting Friday, of Michael Verhoeven’s “My Mother’s Courage.” An 80th birthday celebration at the historic UFA/DEFA studios outside Berlin for playwright-director George Tabori becomes an occasion for him to look back on his mother (Pauline Collins) facing deportation along with Hungary’s some 760,000 Jews. Much is familiar in Verhoeven’s film, but its style and the sheer, incredible uniqueness of Mrs. Tabori’s story and Collins’ winning portrayal of her will sweep you along. (310) 274-6869.

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The UCLA Film Archive’s “The Art of the Hubleys,” a 7:30 p.m. Saturday program in the James Bridges Theater, Melnitz Hall, takes us into the enchanting, free-spirited universe of the celebrated animators Faith Hubley, her late husband, John, and their daughter Emily. The Hubleys are masters of the maximum effect with minimal means and the art that disguises itself. They work in a most painstaking form, yet their films have the giddy feeling of having been casually tossed off, their exquisiteness a happy, inspired accident.

Among the films are two early works that established John and his subsequent partnership with his wife, “Moonbird” (1959) and “Windy Day” (1967). Both are amusing evocations of the joys of childhood and both have the quality of sketches combined with a splash of watercolor.

In the first, we hear the voices of two little boys, the Hubleys’ sons Mark and Ray--or Marky and Hampy as they were then called--caught up in a nighttime adventure in which they try to catch and make a pet of a “moonbird,” which looks to be a pelican. “You can live in our room but you have to be quiet,” one little Hubley cautions.

Equally charming, “Windy Day” features the voices of the two Hubley daughters, Georgia and Emily, as they devise plays on a deck along a beach. What’s so inspired here is that when they concoct a typical fairy tale involving a medieval prince and princess they become those characters but when their attention wanders, as it will with children, they revert to being themselves.

One of the best-known of John Hubley’s works is “The Hole” (1962), in which Dizzy Gillespie and George Mathews are heard improvising beautifully as a pair of New York construction workers talking away as they work underground and happen upon the subject of accidents, which in turn leads to them thinking about the possibility of a nuclear catastrophe triggered purely by chance. Never was so serious a message expressed with such effectively beguiling jauntiness.

Last year Faith Hubley created her magical, autobiographical “My Universe Inside Out: Moments in My Life Connect With Life in the Universe,” in which she reveals that even in childhood, she felt close to nature--”I listen to the waves, I talk to the stars.” In charting her cosmic relationships, she moves freely from homely images to those of her films of the ancients. Animation has allowed Faith Hubley to create her own quirky, faux naif universe, in which her imagination has free play, moving at will between past and present, one world to another. “The Art of the Hubleys” will premiere her latest work, “Beyond the Shadow Place,” in which she envisions death as a transition rather than as an end.

Emily Hubley is represented by only one work, her brand-new “One Self: Fish/Girl,” which is also autobiographical, remembering a childhood in which she regarded God and the devil as two boys, brothers, each of whom appealed to a different side of her nature. Speculative, bemused, it has the freedom of her parents’ work, but is less obviously socially conscious and ethnographic.

“The Art of the Hubleys” adds up to an evening of distinguished work in animation exceptional in its accessibility and appeal, reaching out to audiences beyond specialists in the form. (310) 206-FILM.

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The American Cinematheque’s Lina Wertmuller retrospective enters its final weekend with one of the Italian filmmaker’s finest films, the 1973 “Love and Anarchy,” which screens Friday at 7:15 p.m. at Raleigh Studio’s Chaplin Theater. For full schedule and further information: (213) 466-FILM.