A Peek at the Best

Two key movies by master directors who rank high in the annals of world cinema screen tonight: Satyajit Ray’s “Pather Panchali” (1955) and Sergei Eisenstein’s “October” (1928).

Both are available on videocassette, the latter also on videodisc. But these are classics worth seeing on a screen larger than your average living room tube. They are not alike in subject, style, period or culture and therefore may appeal to different tastes. Yet each embodies inspired filmmaking that, taken on its own terms, represents the best of the best.

“Pather Panchali”--7 p.m. at Bowers Museum (2002 N. Main St., Santa Ana); free with $6 museum admission; (714) 567-3600--was the first of Ray’s pictures and the first he made in “The Apu Trilogy.” It won the grand prize at the Cannes International Film Festival and brought the Bengali director sudden worldwide acclaim, much as “Rashomon” had done for Japanese director Akira Kurosawa at the Venice Film Festival in 1951.

The trilogy is a richly detailed epic filled with charm and detached subtlety about a young boy, Apu, whose coming-of-age is traced from a rural Bengali village to the city of Benares, from childhood and innocence, through an adolescence of painful doubts, to manhood and responsibility and, ultimately, a certain, quiet triumph over death and tragedy.

“Pather Panchali,” which means “Song of the Open Road,” was adapted (along with the rest of the trilogy) by Ray from a novel by Bibhuti Bhushan Bannerjee that the director had illustrated for publication before deciding to make a film of it. The picture focuses on Apu’s boyhood, school days and family life.

Former Times film reviewer Peter Rainer once described Ray as “perhaps the most complexly sensual and transcendent film artist who ever lived.” Extreme as that sounds, many critics agree with him, including some, such as British film historian David Shipman, who are not usually so effusive.

“Ray loves his people, but never patronises or sentimentalises them,” Shipman writes of “Panther Panchali.” “He lingers on a moment of humour, on a faded hope, on reeds on the lake, the wind ruffling the water-lily leaves, the boy dawdling on the way home from school, the sweet-seller jogging by the river.

“There is a timelessness,” he continues, “which evokes the dead lightness of time in the tropics, of everything suspended listlessly in the warm air; and with it is conveyed a series of perceptions that come to us all as we are growing up.”

Ray, who died at age 70 in 1992, was the son of a writer-artist and began his career at a British advertising agency in Calcutta after graduating from Calcutta University. His interest in films developed under the spell of American movies that he had seen in London as a young man.

His favorite directors, he noted, were William Wyler, John Ford, Frank Capra and George Stevens. But his major influences turned out to be Jean Renoir and Vittorio de Sica. “It was after seeing ‘Bicycle Thief,’ [De Sica’s 1948 neo-realist movie],” Shipman reports, “that he determined to make a film of Bannerjee’s book.”

Eisenstein’s “October,” subtitled “Ten Days That Shook the World,” screens as part of the continuing series Looking at Revolution, tonight at 7:30 at the UCI Film and Video Center in the Humanities Instructional Building, Room 100 (West Peltason Road, near Pereira Drive). $4-$6. (949) 824-7418.

Though it is romanticized history, a fictional narrative on a theme of the revolt of the oppressed--in this instance about the Bolshevik overthrow of the Kerensky government during the 1917 Russian Revolution--certain sequences from “October” have been mistaken for genuine historical footage.

Eisenstein begins the picture, which followed “Battleship Potemkin” in 1925 (about naval mutineers during the 1905 uprising) with the demolition of a statue of Alexander III and the proclamation of the provisional regime.

He spins out the story with an inexorable rhythm--the massing of the proletariat, the struggle by the ruling class against its inevitable doom, the Kerensky revolutionists waiting for popular support--and ends with the storming of the Winter Palace.

Moreover, Eisenstein used experimental techniques--including striking montages, blurry images and flickery lighting effects--to create emotional impact along with visual metaphors intended to convey abstract intellectual concepts.

Inspired by John Reed’s famous account of the revolution, “Ten Days That Shook the World,” Eisenstein made “October” for an official celebration of the revolution’s 10th anniversary. He and his collaborator, Grigori Alexandrov, shot more than 150,000 feet of film throughout Leningrad.

They finished editing just in time. But then Stalin eliminated Trotsky as his main rival, and the film had to be re-cut with the paranoid dictator looking over Eisenstein’s shoulder.

Consequently, “October” wasn’t actually finished until months later; and when it was shown, the public gave it a lukewarm reception, largely because it did not appreciate the film’s avant-garde style.

Elsewhere in the County

Robert Altman’s “The Gingerbread Man” (1998), based on the John Grisham thriller, opens Friday and continues through June 4 at the Port Theatre, 2905 E. Coast Highway, Corona del Mar. $4.50-$7, (949) 673-6260.

Jack Mathews, who reviewed the movie for The Times in January, didn’t much care for it. “Altman, of course, didn’t have much to work with,” he wrote. But that’s not the whole explanation.

“The problem with having a good director working with mundane material,” he noted, “is that you’re inevitably promised more than you get.” The first half of the movie is “compelling groundwork for a story that eventually turns on deadly cliches.” Altman creates tension “relieved only by disbelief.”

It’s a sexy cast, though: Kenneth Branagh, Daryl Hannah, Robert Downey Jr., Robert Duvall and Tom Berenger.

UC Irvine’s Mexican Cinema of the 1990s continues with “Mujeres insumisas” (1994), Saturday, 7 p.m., at the UCI Film and Video Center; $4-$6; (949) 824-7418.

Billed as the “Thelma and Louise” of Mexican cinema--the title translates as “Untamed Women”--and directed by Alberto Isaac, the picture centers on a group of wives who decide to get away from their husbands’ abuse by fleeing to the United States. Their adventures en route change the course of their lives.

In L.A. and Beyond

The American Cinematheque’s Alternative Screen series presents tonight at 7:30, at Raleigh Studios in Hollywood, Craig Richardson’s truly venturesome “Anima.” A devoted elderly couple (George Bartenieff and Jacqueline Bertrand) live in idyllic seclusion in a beautiful old New England farmhouse. Gradually, we come to understand that they are refugees from Nazi Germany and that isolation from others is the way in which they have coped with an unspeakable past.

Unfortunately for them, the husband’s reputation as a taxidermist is so great that in time he’s sought out by a crass TV documentarian (Bray Poor) and his crew for a piece on the various ways we cope with death.

The intruders are so persistent that Poor at last uncovers a mind-bending secret. At once beautiful and bizarre, “Anima” benefits from Bartenieff and Bertrand’s luminous portrayals. Although it lacks pace in the beginning, it effectively builds an ominous yet tender mood. (213) 466-3456.

The Los Angeles International Women’s Festival, a new event presented by the UCLA Film Archives in association with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Directors Guild of America, presents eight pictures through June 7 at James Bridges Theater at UCLA, except for the Tuesday 7:30 p.m. opening preview of Randa Haines’ “Dance With Me” at the Directors Guild, 7920 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood.

Of four films that were screened for preview, the most impressive by far is Ann Hui’s “Eighteen Springs” (Friday at 9:30 p.m.). The Hong Kong-based Hui has long been a world-class filmmaker whose style at once embraces the intimate and the epic, as evidenced in “The Boat People,” her film on the plight of Vietnamese refugees.

“Eighteen Springs” is a love story that spans the 1930s to that brief period of time after the end of World War II before the communist revolution. Wu Chien-Lien and Leon Lai star as an attractive couple who meet at work, the office of a Shanghai factory. That the young woman’s older sister (Anita Mui, who is remarkable) worked as a bar hostess (a euphemism) to support her family causes the young man’s family in Nanjing to disapprove of the match. That the man is too ineffectual, too respectful of family, not only suggests that he’s unworthy of his true love but also, alas, that his timidity makes her vulnerable to the lack of status of Chinese women in the deceptively modern-looking, Westernized ‘30s.

That the woman endures and overcomes a horrendous fate is a classic theme of Asian cinema, one beautifully expressed by Hui.

“Eighteen Springs” will be preceded by Samantha Lang’s “The Well” (Friday at 7 p.m.), one of those films that starts out great only to sail way over the top by the finish. Pamela Rabe plays a drab, well-educated, club-footed spinster tending to her foul-mouthed, aged father on a vast farm in the Australian outback. Her dull life is unexpectedly enlivened by a new servant, a free-spirited young woman (Miranda Otto, of “Love Serenade”), but that the spinster falls in love with her surely is going to spell trouble, sooner or later. The consequences, when they arrive, might have been more effective had they been less melodramatic and more realistic.

There’s a lot going for Carine Adler’s “Under the Skin” (Wednesday at 7:30 p.m.), in which Samantha Morton and Claire Rushbrook portray two very different Liverpool sisters confronting the swift death of their mother (Rita Tushingham). The film charts the way in which Morton’s nervy, vulnerable 19-year-old Iris’ life falls apart while her obtuse older sister Rose (Rushbrook) remains insulated in her happily married suburban existence. Adler has promise as a filmmaker, but her finale has a rushed, neatly tied-up quality that is not helped by the fact that one of the sisters undergoes a 180-degree transformation--off camera.

The notion that women may respond to films made by and about women differently from men surely has the force of logic. Perhaps they won’t need what seems to be the missing key scene of “Under the Skin”--and perhaps they won’t feel that illumination of the demented heroine of “Gesche’s Gift” (June 6 at 7 p.m.) is necessary. German filmmaker Walburg von Waldenfels offers her elegantly grim take on an actual early-19th century serial killer, Gesche Gottfried (Geno Lechner), a Bremen housewife, who manages to dispose of 15 people--including a slew of her closest relatives--between 1812 and 1831 by dispensing them arsenic.

Now, Gesche does live with a terrible, guilty secret from her severely religious childhood, marries a wastrel and certainly leads a repressive, narrow life. But it remains unclear why she becomes such a compulsive killer.

Other films include Yolande Zauberman’s “Clubbed to Death” ( at 9:30), a French film about a young woman who winds up in a remote warehouse where a rave is happening and becomes caught up in drugs, sex and romance; Odette Springer’s “Some Nudity Required” (June 7 at 7 p.m.), which documents her own experience as a classically trained musician who wound up music supervisor for more than 50 Roger Corman-produced straight-to-video erotic thrillers; and Nadia Fares’ “Honey and Ashes” (June 7 at 9:30 p.m.), a drama of three Tunisian women caught between tradition and modernity. Most of the filmmakers will be appearing with their films, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is hosting a panel featuring the filmmakers June 4 at 8 p.m. at the academy, 8949 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills. (310) 206-3456.

Filmforum launches its Jack Smith and His Secret Flix series Friday at 8 p.m. at the Art Center College of Design, 1700 Lida St., Pasadena, with “Flaming Creatures” (1963), a landmark in the underground cinema. Simultaneously funny and sad, and wonderfully exuberant, “Flaming Creatures” could be taken as a richly textured travesty of an old Maria Montez epic. The decor is dime store, and the transvestites dress in moldy Goodwill finery with a heavy accent on ‘40s padded shoulders and turbans. Although there are fairly graphic depictions of sex, Smith is above all most concerned with celebrating the camp sensibility of transvestism.

This program, as well as the three successive programs, will be repeated Sunday at 7 p.m. at LACE, 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, (213) 526-2911.

Note: The American Cinematheque’s wonderful Tai Kato retrospective, packed with superbly wrought and vastly entertaining period yakuza pictures, continues Friday at 9:30 p.m. with “Sasuke and His Comedians” (1963), a samurai movie starring Kinnosuke Nakamura, and Saturday at 7:15 p.m. with “History of a Man’s Face” (1966), a yakuza flick; and “Long-Sought Mother” (1962), about a gambler (Nakamura) roaming Japan in search of the mother who abandoned him as a child. (213) 466-3456.