Remembering Murnau : UCLA Film Archive series pays tribute to the master of German Expressionism.

With “The Devil and Mr. Murnau,” the UCLA Film Archive, in association with the Munich Film Museum and the Goethe Institute, will present not only such films as “Nosferatu,” “The Last Laugh” and “Sunrise,” which are among the most famous of silent films, but a number of far less familiar F.W. Murnau titles.

Fritz Lang, G.W. Pabst and Murnau formed the great triumvirate of the golden age of the German cinema of the ‘20s. Murnau was a poetic visionary who so trusted in the evocative, storytelling power of the camera that eventually he managed to eliminate all but the most essential inter-titles. Success led him to Hollywood but also to an untimely death at 42 in a 1931 car accident.

Late in his life, Murnau remarked that he “liked the reality of things, but not without fantasy.” German film historian Siegfried Kracauer observed, “Reality in his films was surrounded by a halo of dreams and presentiments.”

The Murnau retrospective commences Saturday at 7:30 p.m. in the James Bridges Theater in UCLA’s Melnitz Hall with “Faust” (1926), which will be accompanied by the Robert Israel Orchestra. (Israel will accompany all the other Murnau films on the organ.) It will be preceded at 6:30 p.m. by a reception sponsored by Detour magazine. The series continues through Oct. 19.

Adapted by Hans Keyser from Goethe, “Faust” is a triumph of elaborate decor and fantastic imagery. It is a picture of swirling mists and dark shadows, of macabre symbols and an atmosphere of evil. Above all, it is a breathtaking display of Murnau’s renowned bravura use of the camera; Carl Hoffman was his cinematographer.

It is a time of pestilence when the aged necromancer Faust agrees to sell his soul to Mephistopheles (Emil Jannings) in order to put an end to the suffering of the people. But having accomplished good by evil means, Faust allows himself to be tempted by Mephistopheles’ promise of youth and is transformed into a handsome young man (Gosta Ekman).

Bored by orgies in Italy, Faust returns home and instantly falls in love with the pure maiden Marguerite (Camilla Horn, who is fine, but Murnau’s first choice, Lillian Gish, would have been perfect). All this--and more--is presented through a series of grandiose tableaux in which both settings and acting are equally stylized. Epic in scope, sophisticated in sensibility, “Faust” is a landmark in the German Expressionist style.

Even directors as serious as Murnau have their lighter moments, and the sly comic touches in “Haunted Castle” (Sunday at 7 p.m.) are most welcome, for it has a grandeur that threatens to overwhelm its conventional material.

The setting of the mystery film’s title is a palatial country estate of a nobleman who is hosting a hunting party. Turning up uninvited is the baleful Count Oetsch (Lothar Mehnert), who three years earlier was cleared of the murder of his brother but who is widely believed to be guilty.

Who should be expected to arrive any minute but his elegant former sister-in-law (Olga Tsechechowa) and her new husband (Paul Bildt)? The plotting is clever, but the story is probably too trivial for an out-sized talent like Murnau. Nevertheless, “Haunted Castle” is entertaining and, in its strongly evoked sense of tormented gloom and doom, it points the way to “Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror” (1922), which will screen following it.

The first of the Dracula films, “Nosferatu” remains the greatest. Max Schreck’s Count Dracula is one of the cinema’s most indelible images--cadaverous in the extreme, with pointed ears and claw-like hands. The count has black-encircled eyes that express a tormented loneliness and a fevered desperation that make him seem as if he had just stepped out of an Edvard Munch painting.

Craving fresh supplies of human blood, and no doubt human companionship as well, the count has told one of his acolytes, Renfield (Alexander Granach), a creepy Bremen estate agent, to secure an estate for him in town. To that end, Renfield dispatches “to some lost corner of the Carpathians” in Transylvania his clerk, Jonathon Harker (Gustav von Wangenheim), to set the deal. The year is 1838, but the count has been Nosferatu the Vampire for four centuries.

“Nosferatu” has long been regarded as a landmark in German Expressionism for its extensive use of actual locales rather than the stylized sets of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” and other classics of Germany’s golden age. Although Schreck’s grotesque Dracula is the antithesis of Bela Lugosi’s suave, insinuatingly seducer, there is an aura of erotic longing in the film. (The late pioneer film historian Lotte Eisner saw in Nosferatu an expression of Murnau’s homosexual torment and alienation.) Yet “Nosferatu” is a profoundly romantic film, with a deep, abiding faith in the ultimate redemptive power of love--a recurrent Murnau theme.

What lingers in the memory, however, is the absolute isolation of Count Dracula, whether in his vast, stark, crumbling castle or on the deck of the ship headed for Bremen, a ship that arrives with no crewman alive, each corpse bearing two fang marks on its neck.

(310) 206-FILM.

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No wonder fledgling filmmaker Nicholas Goodman landed a feature deal at Paramount on the basis of his three-minute parody trailer, “Swing Blade.” The trailer imagines a cross between two radically different Miramax hits, “Swingers” and “Sling Blade,” in which sharp dudes try to turn Billy Bob Thornton’s Karl Childers into a ladies’ man. It’s absolutely hilariously spot-on--from Chris Cox’s flawless carbon of Thornton’s Karl to the trailer’s logo, which reads “Miraminor” Films.

Goodman also submitted another short, “Stigmata .44,” which shows his imagination is no less effective in a serious mode. The short tells of a little barrio kid (Paul Langdon) so obsessed with guns that one day, while cocking and pointing his finger, he discovers it has developed the ability to shoot bullets.

Both of Goodman’s films will screen in the second annual “lo-con.com. festival of shorts,” which screens tonight at 8 p.m., Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. at the Center Green Theater in the Pacfic Design Center, 8687 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood. There will be audiences awards as part of the festival. (213) 660-TKTS.

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Peter Lynch’s “Project Grizzly” opens a one-week run today at the Grande 4-Plex, 345 S. Figueroa St., downtown Los Angeles, as part of its “Documentary Days” series.

“Project Grizzly” is a droll account of a North Bay, Ontario, scrap dealer, Troy Hurtubise, whose frightening encounter with an ultimately disinterested bear during a hunting trip has triggered in him the desire for another close meeting with a bear. Only this time Hurtubise is to be wearing his amazing 145-pound Ursus Mark VI suit of armor, which transforms the 5-foot-8 Hurtubise into a 7-foot-2 Terminator. This guy is serious, but his story is not so interesting--or conclusive, for that matter--that it really belongs on the tube rather than on a screen.

(213) 617-0268.

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Among the films screening this weekend at Raleigh Studios in the American Cinematheque’s continuing Chris Marker series is the Los Angeles premiere of the French filmmaker’s 1977 “Grin Without a Cat” (Saturday at 6:15 p.m. and again at 9:45 p.m.). It is a two-part, three-hour survey of the fate of leftist movements in the 20th century occasioned by the Vietnam War, which Marker is said to have regarded as signifying the collapse of “the universal standard of civilization.”

This documentary represents both a formidable display of international research for archival materials and an equally impressive achievement in the elegant and fluid way in which they have been assembled. But unless you’re a political historian, you are likely to find “Grin Without a Cat” extremely hard going. For, while Marker lays everything out in style with lots of peppery observations, he leaves it to you to make all the connections.

Much of the film is composed of newsreel footage of chaos and protest in the streets--e.g, the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968--and of many, many speeches by political leaders and lots of political arguing and theorizing, mainly from French activists and commentators.

Of all the heads of government appearing in the film, by far the most impressive is Chile’s ill-fated Salvador Allende, whose speech to his people upon his election is direct, caring and challenging in his plain talk of how everyone will have to shoulder responsibility in a collaborative effort if the progressive society he envisioned is to succeed. (213) 466-FILM.

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Filmforum presents Stan Brakhage’s approximately three-hour “Arabics,” from the early ‘80s, in two parts this Sunday and next at 7 p.m. at LACE, 6522 Hollywood Blvd. The very mention of Brakhage’s name summons verdant, layered images of forest life, but “Arabics” is abstract in the utmost, with a dark screen punctuated by dazzling shafts of light and color in endless permutations. Very beautiful--and, not surprisingly, very demanding. (213) 526-2911.

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Note: The Academy/UCLA Contemporary Documentary Series resumes Tuesday at UCLA’s James Bridges Theater in Melnitz Hall with “Wild Bill: Hollywood Maverick,” a warm tribute to the colorful director William A. Wellman. Playing with it is “The Wild Bunch: An Album in Montage,” a 34-minute film on the making of Sam Peckinpah’s classic 1969 western, “The Wild Bunch.” (310) 206-FILM.