A Jarring Image of Beauty

Artist Jessica Bronson, whose video installations and related works are on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art (250 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A.), will introduce Andy Warhol’s newly restored “Outer and Inner Space” (1965) tonight at 6:30 in the museum’s Ahmanson Auditorium. Clearly, Warhol perceived a discrepancy between the physical beauty of his doomed superstar Edie Sedgwick and her inner conflict when he decided to videotape her talking, then film her facing her previously taped image, which we in turn can see on a TV set on a table behind the chair in which she is sitting for filming. When this 66-minute segment is presented in split screen, reducing the running time by half, with the latter part projected on the left side of the screen, we get an even more intensified sense of Sedgwick’s fragmented personality as she is confronted with her own image and words.

What a radiant natural screen presence was Sedgwick, whose perfect diction reveals her aristocratic ancestry, and whose dazzling smile and charming personality recall the young Elizabeth Taylor--and what a Hollywood screen test Warhol’s footage could have been. Indeed, the shimmering image of Sedgwick on the video screen recalls that famous clip of the younger Gloria Swanson from “Queen Kelly” quoted in “Sunset Boulevard.”

Unintentionally or not, “Outer and Inner Space” has a muddied soundtrack, but in a way that is sadly appropriate. As she prattles on, enough of her talk can be heard to suggest that she was trying to make sense of her life. But neither she nor others listened to her closely enough to save her from the drugs that left her personality vacant but her beauty intact, and which finally claimed her life in 1971 at age 28. Much has been written about the implications for the possibilities of mixed-media posed by “Outer and Inner Space,” but surely it is more important as a portrait of a beautiful woman with the touching vulnerability of a Marilyn Monroe. (213) 626-6222.

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The UCLA Film Archive’s “Cinema Novo & Beyond” resumes today in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater, and includes a number of key vintage films. Among them is Hector Babenco’s 1981 masterwork, “Pixote” (Saturday at 7:30 p.m.), one of the most famous and justly celebrated Brazilian films of all time. To convey the impact and artistry of this film, you would have to compare it with Vittorio De Sica’s “Shoeshine” or Luis Bun~uel’s “Los Olvidados” in its unsparing yet poetic depiction of the desperate lives of a group of abandoned Sao Paulo youths.

Caught up in one of the periodic police sweeps of the city streets is 10-year-old Pixote, played by Fernando Ramos da Silva (whose real-life fate would inspire a later film). For all the grim inevitability of the course Pixote’s life takes, Babenco’s film is vibrantly, passionately alive. It is a work marked not just by compassion, but by a deep understanding. As unforgettable as Ramos da Silva is Marilia Pera (currently in “Central Station”) as a world-weary prostitute.

“Pixote” will be followed by Leon Hirszman’s bitter, impressive 1981 drama of social consciousness, “They Don’t Wear Black Tie.” A strike at a Sao Paulo factory divides a father (Gianfrancesco Guarnieri), a veteran labor organizer, and his son (Carlos Alberto Ricelli), who turns scab, resenting the hardships his father’s union activities have created for his family. In contrast to the father and mother’s tender, good-humored, all-sustaining love for each other is the brutally repressive society in which they live. The mother is played by none other than “Central Station’s” Oscar-nominated Fernanda Montenegro.

Jorge Bodanzsky and Orlando Senna’s 1975 “Iracema” (Tuesday, about 9:15 p.m.) is a gritty, captivating account of the gradual degradation of a darkly pretty, sexy 15-year-old girl (Edna de Cassia, in the title role) who becomes a prostitute. This extraordinary film takes place along the Transamazonic Highway, which exploits and spoils the countryside, just as the truck drivers who travel it do to Iracema and other women. With only one professional actor--Paulo Cesar Pereio, who plays the man most responsible for Iracema’s downfall--the film has the look and feel of cinema verite. (310) 206-FILM.

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On Friday at 8 p.m. at the Art Center College of Design (1700 Lido St., Pasadena), Filmforum’s series of films by renowned photographer and experimental filmmaker Robert Frank will launch with two diary films, the 35-minute “About Me: A Musical” (1971) and the 26-minute “Conversations in Vermont” (1969). (The series was supposed to have started Feb. 19, but “Me and My Brother” proved unavailable and will be screened next year.) In “About Me,” Frank asks the beautiful Lynn Reyner to play him, as a group of people quiz her in a manner that suggests Frank is attempting to ask himself all the big questions about how he has spent his life. Has his work meant anything? Has his family suffered because of his career? And so on and so forth. In this very free-form film, shot largely in his Bowery loft in New York Cityand a spacious old apartment, Frank intercuts a dizzyingly wide variety of musical interludes, featuring Indian temple musicians, Allen Ginsberg, and a blues choir composed of young black male prisoners--even a snatch of Rogers and Hammerstein. In this tonic, supple work music becomes celebrated as a source of liberation.

Frank tells us that “Conversations in Vermont” is a film about the past and present. He surveys his own work as photographer, particularly the images of his daughter Andrea and son Pablo, during a visit with them at a commune in Vermont, where they seem to be living harmoniously. Pablo, however, has had a drug problem and says that such an environment must be perceived as “absolutely abnormal.”

Frank questions them about how they view their past, whether they thought he and their mother were so caught up in a bohemian Manhattan lifestyle that they felt left out or neglected. Questions and answers are tentative, sometimes wary or evasive, as they so often are between children and parents. As has been pointed out with this thoughtful film, Frank, inquestioning his children about their lives and his role in them, is ultimately calling into question the meaning and value of his own life. (323) 526-2911.

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Among the films screening at the Egyptian in the American Cinematheque’s ongoing “Recent Spanish Cinema” is Santiago Segura’s scabrously funny “Torrente: The Dumb Arm of the Law” (Friday at 9:30 p.m.), which last year became Spain’s biggest box office hit ever. Segura stars as a hard-drinking, overweight, bigoted slob of an ex-cop who lives in a Madrid slum apartment with his frail but feisty father (Tony LeBlanc). By chance, Torrente learns that a nearby Chinese restaurant has become a front for a drug smuggling operation and that the dealers are all set to pay 50 million pesetas for a soon-to-arrive shipment. Torrente, of course, sees an opportunity both to become reinstated in the force and to make off with a fortune. The film is unflaggingly outrageous, with Torrente enlisting the help of a new neighbor, a nerdy young fishmonger (Javier Camara), while attempting to score with hiscousin (Neus Asensi), a voluptuous wanton. “Torrente” is an example of sheer exuberance sustaining unabashed vulgarity, but is not for kids or prudes. There will be a discussion afterward with the film’s writer, Elvira Lindo.

Saturday’s program begins at 4 p.m. with another hearty comedy, Miguel Albaladejo’s “The First Night of My Life,” set on the last day and evening of the 20th century. The multi-character story is set in motion when a young married couple, Manuel (Juanjo Martinez) and the very expectant Paloma (Leonor Watling), take off to see her parents not knowing that Paloma’s father (Emilio Gutierrez Caba), who disapproves strongly of his social worker son-in-law, is already on his way to pick them up. They have adventures that acquaint us with a lively cross-section of Madrid society; whereas Albaladejo, in a potent directorial debut, takes note of social ills and inequities, he ends on a note of hope. If “The First Night of My Life” is unapologetically sentimental, it is also highly entertaining. (323) 466-FILM.

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Note: The Sunset 5 will screen Friday and Saturday at midnight “Waiting for the Man,” a pretentious and callow gangster picture, and the Grande 4-Plex will screen for one week, beginning Friday, Monica Pellizari’s lurid, overwrought “Fistful of Flies,” which launches “Aussie Adventures: Four Films From Down Under.” “Fistful” details the horrors of a bright assertive young woman (Tasma Walton) coming of age in a rural Italo-Australian community. The young woman’s father (John Lucaantonio), a brutal philanderer, terrorizes his wife (Dina Panozzo) and daughter, who resists an arranged marriage. On the one hand, Pellizari heavy-handedly asserts female sexuality and, on the other, explores it with a Freudian surrealism beyond her abilities. Her film is best when it zeros in on the mother, deeply conflicted over her conditioned obedience to a husband she hates and the sense of recognition she experiences in her daughter’s plight, which she vehemently attempts to deny. Sunset 5: (323) 848-3500; Grande 4-Plex: (213) 617-0268.