Scenic Detours

The American Cinematheque’s Alternative Screen series presents tonight at 7:30, at Raleigh Studios, 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-FILM.

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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 sneak preview of Randa Haines’ “Dance With Me” at the Directors Guild, 7920 Sunset Blvd. 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 ‘30s 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. 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, eliminating those who’ve brought her joy as well as those who’ve brought her misery. Has she become addicted to killing? Has the overwhelming oppressiveness of her existence simply driven her insane?

Let’s just say that some of us will want more answers from a film that depicts in protracted fashion the agonized death throes of a little boy while his mother, her eyes glazed and sweating in madness, stands over him, drinking in the horrible fate she has dealt him.

Other films screening are Yolande Zauberman’s “Clubbed to Death” (following “Gesche’s Gift,” at 9:30), a French film about a young woman, at the end of her tether, 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 on June 4 at 8 p.m. at the academy, 8949 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills. (310) 206-FILM.

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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 reflected in transvestism.

After a couple of shots with Francis Francine, the Margaret Dumont of drag queens, Smith gets down to the business of multiple sex, with the fervor and confusion of a blizzard. There’s such a tangle of hairy limbs poking out of wrinkled silks and satins it’s all but impossible to tell who’s doing what to whom, and indeed, what belongs to whom.

The focus of all this action is, believe it or not, a bosomy girl! After everyone has collapsed in a heap of exhaustion, blond-wigged Mario Montez emerges from a casket, a bouquet of lilies in hand, to the accompaniment of a rock ‘n’ roll number. Everyone then begins twirling and dipping madly to a scratchy record of “Siboney”--including that one “real” girl in the group. When we see her happily cavorting we realize what looked like rape was merely orgy, plainly enjoyed by one and all. It would seem that the transvestites, by ravishing the girl, reinforced their own sense of femininity.

None of this looks nearly as sordid--or even prurient--as it sounds. In its unabashedly pagan way “Flaming Creatures” is ultimately joyous and, incredible as it seems, really rather innocent. Playing with “Flaming Creatures” (45 minutes) is “Blonde Cobra” (33 minutes), which filmmaker Ken Jacobs assembled from Bob Fleischner’s amusing, poignant footage of Smith performing monster-movie antics in a decrepit Lower East Side Apartment. Avant-garde filmmaker-critic Jonas Mekas heralded “Blonde Cobra” extravagantly as “the masterpiece of the Baudelairean cinema, a work hardly surpassable in perversity, in richness, in beauty, in sadness, in tragedy.” This program, as well as the three successive programs, will be repeated Sunday at 7 p.m. at LACE, 6522, Hollywood Blvd., (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-FILM.