Skolimowski’s World

The American Cinematheque’s “The Outsider: The Films of Jerzy Skolimowski,” begins Friday at 7:15 p.m. at Raleigh Studio’s Chaplin Theater. It kicks off with “Deep End” (1971), one of the masterpieces from the Polish emigre director who has aptly said of himself, “I have the talent to create panic all around.”

Indeed, Skolimowski, who is as disciplined as he is impassioned, is the master of emotionally charged, beautifully evoked atmosphere. Skolimowski will be present to discuss his films at all screenings.

“Deep End” deals with a youth on the brink of manhood, but the hero’s wryly comic encounters move from poignancy and charm to unexpected tragedy. In the process, Skolimowski has created a masterpiece, a picture that freezes the smile on your face.

When 15-year-old Mike (John Moulder Brown) is hired as an attendant at a huge and dingy London public bath, his instructor is Susan (Jane Asher), a beautiful redhead several years his senior. (Both actors are flawless.) Shy and sensitive, Mike is abashed by Susan’s warning that the patrons, male as well as female, may want more than just a towel and soap and, what’s more, that there’s good money in it.

One day, however, Susan, who is both cruel and provocative, discovers Mike is a virgin and makes a teasing pass at him only to catapult him into a total and helpless love. Mike’s passionate pursuit of Susan is hilarious until at last there is a final confrontation between innocence and corruption.

For Susan, a lovely, resilient young woman who has been made deeply cynical by poverty, is even more cynical and bitter than she realizes. Without uttering a word of social protest, Skolimowski has created an impassioned denunciation of society’s evils.

Before that chilling moment of truth, “Deep End” is a very funny film. The choice of that cavernous public bath with its huge indoor plunge--longtime Angelenos will be reminded of the old Bimini Baths--as the principal setting is inspired. It lends a slightly surreal quality to the story that is echoed in Skolimowski’s highly developed sense of the ridiculous, the hallmark of East European filmmakers.

Populated with acutely observed characters, “Deep End,” deceptively casual, is full of superb comic episodes. Skolimowski finds the line between comedy and tragedy very thin indeed.

Before the credits of “Barrier” (1966), which screens Friday at 9:30 p.m. with “Identification Marks: None,” we watch a series of men, their hands tied behind their backs, hurl themselves off whatever it is they’re kneeling on. The camera gradually discloses that they’re engaged in a crazy kind of competition, the prize being a piggy bank containing their pooled savings. We learn they’re a group of young medical students, and the winner (Jan Nowicki) of the contest then commences a Kafkaesque odyssey involving a brief encounter with a pretty blond streetcar driver.

The film’s title, it would seem, refers to the obstacles that young people everywhere must overcome to become a part of the society in which they live. Skolimowski is highly critical of life in an Iron Curtain country, and he expresses his strong feelings obliquely in stark, abstract images.

The world of “Barrier” is a nightmarish one in which an individual is cast adrift in vast empty spaces, desperately reaching out to another only to be pulled away.

On his fantastic journey, which commences symbolically the day before Easter, Nowicki is weighed down by a large suitcase and is armed with his father’s antique sword, reclaimed from a pawnshop that could have been designed by Dali.

Skolimowski’s images, shot in harsh, high-contrast black and white, are frequently striking. At one point we watch Nowicki try to scale an old brick wall to rescue a chicken tied to a fire escape. The camera then pulls back to show us an immense crowd gathered to watch Nowicki fall. A sequence takes place in an immense, nearly deserted nightclub in which the charwoman proves to be the star yet must scrub the floor before she can sing.

Perhaps inevitably, a studied, pretentious quality creeps into “Barrier,” which boasts one of the late Krzysztof Komeda’s evocative scores. But it remains an effective expression of protest by an angry and talented young artist. It has been suggested that Skolimowski had been influenced by Cocteau and Fellini. But with its romantic quality and often luminous lighting “Barrier” brings to mind Murnau’s “Sunrise,” which also involves a trip to a city, streetcars, a romance and even a big cafe scene.

Most of Skolimowski’s films are all too rarely shown and his 1964 “Identification Marks: None” most likely has never before been screened locally. It is remarkable for a first feature, for it elicits an unsettling ambiguity and uncertainty as effectively as subsequent Skolimowski films. Casting himself as a drifter finally caught up in the draft, Skolimowski uses an astonishingly fluid camera to allow us to see the world through his young man’s eyes.

His world, again shot stunningly in black and white, is that of a bleak city in which people go about the lackluster routine of their daily lives. His hero has dropped out of his postgraduate course in ichthyology but hasn’t told his glum older girlfriend, with whom he lives in a picturesque but shabby garret. (Skolimowski’s wife, Elzbieta Czyzewska, plays all four women in the film.)

The film opens with the young man facing a hostile draft board very early one morning. He has evaded his three-month obligatory military service, and now has been ordered to board a train at 3 p.m. to begin a two-year stint as a soldier. Will he actually show up? That’s from the start a very real question, for he is a determined free spirit with a candor scarcely welcome in a Communist state.

But that’s the whole point as we follow the young man in the course of his day; very subtly he emerges as temperamentally at odds with his drab, corrupt totalitarian society. As we become concerned with his fate, we realize that the world of the lyrical, flowing “Identification Marks: None” would seem just as somber if it had been shot in color. (213) 466-FILM.

Also screening on Saturday at 7:15 p.m. is Skolimowski’s best-known film, “Moonlighting” (1982), starring Jeremy Irons.

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Filmforum will present Friday at the Art Center, 1700 Lida St., Pasadena, at 8 p.m. Johan van der Keuken’s “Brass Unbound” (1993), a glorious documentary on how brass band music, introduced in colonial times, flourishes in Nepal, Surinam, Minahassa/Indonesia and Ghana in delightful permutations.

The enduring passion for brass instruments becomes for Van der Keuken--hailed accurately as the successor to the late legendary documentarian Joris Ivens--a way of entering and illuminating a culture, observing with affection and sensitivity its rituals and ceremonies. Like Ivens, Van der Keuken has the gift of embracing and celebrating life in all its richness and contradictions.

That can also be said for Van der Keuken’s more ambitious and provocative “I (Heart) $” (1986), which Filmforum presents Sunday at 7 p.m. at LACE, 6522 Hollywood Blvd. In 145 minutes Van der Heuken attempts--brilliantly--no less than to reveal the way in which world economy works--and how ruthlessly it always has. Unfolding in two parts, with Amsterdam paired with New York, Hong Kong with Geneva, Van der Heuken punctuates his images with the constant flicker of an electronic stock exchange board. He talks with titans of finance and people in the streets struggling to survive.

Yet Van der Keuken again embraces life, leaving us with the memory of a young, bright New Yorker who lives in a neighborhood where selling drugs is the only profitable enterprise. She wonders how she’ll ever get the education she craves that will enable her to work with children and yet can break out in a pitch-perfect “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows.” Van der Heuken will be present at both screenings. (213) 526-2911.

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The UCLA Film Archive will present “A Revolution in Small Things: The Films of Karel Kachyna” Saturday-April-12 in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater. None of the films of the veteran Czech filmmaker, virtually unknown in the U.S., were available for preview.