Coldwave on Shore

The Coldwave Film Festival, at the Vogue Theater in Hollywood on Friday and Saturday, is composed of three films by Russia’s Aleksandr Sokurov and one by Lithuanian filmmaker Sharunas Bartas. Sokurov’s mesmerizing, mysterious 1993 “Whispering Pages” (Friday at 8 p.m.), which is inspired by the poetry of Friedrich Ruckert, is set in a labyrinthine sector of an ancient city of imposing architecture, marked by a profusion of steps and arches in which people in antique dress come and go in a series of random interactions, accompanied by the constant sound of water moving and dripping--it’s not for nothing that Andrei Tarkovsky was Sokurov’s mentor! Ever so gradually a young man emerges in an encounter with an official, and finally with a young prostitute of luminous beauty and innocence. The second feature is Bartas’ 1995 “Corridor,” which is similarly minimalist, set in a wintry city in which a number of people in a large apartment house seem to be in a state of waiting; outside a group of people builds bonfires to keep warm. One of the film’s few incidents involves a young girl trying to get past two men, who keep pushing her back into a stream. “Corridor,” which has no dialogue but makes fine use of natural sounds, is beautiful and unsettling but also wearying and elusive.

The 8 p.m. Saturday program is also demanding but far more rewarding. Sokurov’s “The Second Circle” (1990) and “Mother and Son” (1997) both tell of a young man faced with the death of a parent. In the first, a man has come to a remote village in winter, where his father dies in his humble home before a doctor can be summoned; in the second, a rich experiment in color, texture and distorted imagery, a young man cares lovingly for his dying mother. Like Tarkovsky, Sokurov understands the austere power of the visual, incorporating remarkable imagery and movement, and these films are sublime. 6675 Hollywood Blvd. (323) 341-7033.

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The weekend brings three key silent film presentations: Mary Pickford’s “The Hoodlum” (1919), Friday at 8 p.m. in the Samuel Goldwyn Theater at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 8949 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills; Buster Keaton’s “Our Hospitality” (1923), Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Alex Theater, 216 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale; and Douglas Fairbanks’ “The Thief of Bagdad” (1924), Saturday at 1 p.m. at the Avalon Theater in the Casino, in Avalon on Catalina Island.

The rarest of the three is “The Hoodlum,” a typical and charming Mary Pickford melodrama in which she plays the spoiled granddaughter of a ruthless magnate who on a whim decides to join her sociologist father on a sojourn in the Lower East Side instead of taking a trip to Europe. To be sure it is a transforming experience, one which includes her falling in love with the man (Kenneth Harlan) wrongly imprisoned because of her grandfather’s machinations. “The Hoodlum,” which will be accompanied by the Robert Israel Orchestra, is just the kind of hokum Pickford could make work, by finding the humor in the spoiled young woman’s temper tantrums and also in the everyday life of the working class as she goes about doing good. The settings, as is so often the case in early silents, have remarkable authenticity, and Pickford brings conviction as well as charm to the film; she knew poverty and hardship firsthand, just as she knew fame and privilege.

The program, which will include clips from other Pickford films, will be hosted by film historian and preservationist Kevin Brownlow. (310) 247-3000.

The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra will perform scores composed and conducted by Carl Davis for “Our Hospitality” and the curtain-raiser, Charlie Chaplin’s familiar 1917 two-reeler “The Immigrant.” This marks the 10th anniversary of LACO’s annual silent film presentations, and Jack Lemmon is the honorary chairman.

To watch “Our Hospitality” today is to be reminded of the tremendous sense of freedom that the great silent-era clowns had. Their elaborate gags had to be carefully planned, but a sense of graceful spontaneity also infused their work. “Our Hospitality” in particular gives the impression that Keaton himself might not always have known exactly what was coming next for his famously impassive alter-ego. It’s a delight but a bit discursive; the relentless, coolly comic logic of “The Navigator,” for example, was yet to come.

This film is Keaton’s take-off on the Hatfield and McCoy feud. He casts himself as a young man raised on his aunt’s farm in Manhattan (at Broadway and 42nd Street!) who, after coming of age, heads south to collect his inheritance. Keaton devotes the first part of his picture to all the mishaps that befall him as a passenger aboard a quaint and exceedingly delicate-looking 1830 train traveling through Appalachia. Once he arrives at his destination, he unwittingly heads right smack into his family’s ancient enemies--and falls for its fair maiden in the process.

Keaton works the tradition of Southern hospitality for all its worth: As long as he is a guest in the white-columned mansion of those sworn to kill him, he is safe. How he escapes and how he survives leads to timelessly amusing and progressively dangerous escapades, one involving an attempt to navigate a waterfall. Here’s a poignant footnote to this lovely, airy comedy. Keaton cast his pretty wife, Natalie Talmadge (sister of the more famous Constance and Norma), as his leading lady and even used their baby son in the film, as a way of holding together his marriage, already in trouble. Like all of Keaton’s films, “Our Hospitality” is suffused with a wistfulness, an awareness of the sadness that always lurks under the laughter. (213) 622-7001, Ext. 275.

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The Los Angeles Theater Organ Society is presenting the evergreen “Thief of Bagdad,” one of the most familiar of silents, as its 12th annual silent film benefit (this time for the Catalina Island Museum), and also to mark the Catalina Art Deco showplace’s 70th birthday. This blithe, swift Arabian Nights fantasy-adventure, with sets by William Cameron Menzies and zesty direction by Raoul Walsh, finds Fairbanks at his most engaging and athletic. With Anna May Wong and Julanne Johnston. “The Thief of Bagdad” will be accompanied on the theater’s Page Organ (only one of four of its kind known to exist) by Robert D. Salisbury, playing his own composition. (310) 541-3692 or (888) 528-LATOS44.

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The Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd. in West Hollywood, launches its World Cinema program Saturday and Sunday at 11 a.m. with “Midaq Alley” (“El Callejon de los Milagros”), an old-fashioned, full-blown and highly entertaining melodrama directed by Jorge Fons from Vincent Lenero’s adaptation of a 1940s novel by Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz. Set in a picturesque narrow street in the center of Mexico City, it has as its key setting a faded, spacious old apartment house built around a courtyard. It is composed of three episodes centering on three apartment residents: a middle-aged bar owner (Ernesto Gomez Cruz) who openly pursues a young gay man with cataclysmic results; a beautiful young woman (Salma Hayek) who, when her suitor takes off temporarily to the U.S., falls under the spell of a vicious pimp; and the apartment’s spinster landlady (Margarita Sanz), desperate for romance. The film is enjoyably florid, exuding a nostalgic sense of community, and it would have been more convincing had it been set in the ‘40s instead of the present. (323) 848-3500. “Midaq Alley” will also screen June 5-6 at 11 a.m. at the Monica 4-Plex (1332 2nd St., Santa Monica, [310] 394-9741).

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Robert Byington’s “Olympia” (opening Friday for one week at the Grande 4-Plex, 345 S. Figueroa St., downtown Los Angeles) has a quirky charm, is well-cast but is too slight and ultimately too tedious to sustain interest. In the title role, Carmen Nogales, an Austin, Texas, actress and model, makes her film debut as the star of a popular Mexican soap opera who one day throws over her career to pursue her dream of becoming a champion javelin thrower--nine years after she last picked one up. She swims the Rio Grande, enters the U.S. illegally at Laredo, Texas, and winds up taking a nap in the back seat of a car.

The car belongs to Bill Daniel (Jason Andrews), a paunchy 34-year-old layabout loser still living with his indulgent mother (Patricia Fiske). Daniel’s life is gradually transformed by the single-minded Olympia, never mind her seemingly far-from-realistic goal. Meanwhile, her erstwhile manager-lover, Ed (Damian Young), a skinny, seedy guy who has only his sarcasm to recommend him, comes searching. Byington, however, carries the trendy minimalist approach to such an extreme that you should not be surprised to find your attention wandering. Still, Byington has a wry, subtle comic sensibility to build upon. (213) 617-3084.