Spike & Mike Deliver Again With 22nd Festival

The 22nd annual “Spike & Mike’s Classic Festival of Animation” opens Friday at the Nuart (11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West L.A.) for a one-week run with its usual selection of award-winning shorts. Although all 17 are of high quality, several stand out. Daniel Robichaud’s “Tightrope,” with its lifelike figures, imagines what happens when two tightrope walkers, one a man in a bowler and spats, the other a classic Harlequin, find themselves walking the same rope. In reprise is Christophe and Wolfgang Lauenstein’s darkly amusing 1989 Oscar-winning “Balance,” which finds a group of cadaverous men standing on a platform floating in space only to have another man suddenly appear--with a weighty strongbox.

With “Busby” Anna Henckel-Donnermarck pays witty homage to choreographer Busby Berkeley using only a plethora of hands to re-create the signature geometric numbers of his early Warners musicals. The festival also brings back Marv Newland’s classic two-minute “Bambi Meets Godzilla” (1969) and follows it with Eric Fernandes’ far more elaborate but also clever “Son of Bambi Meets Godzilla.” (310) 478-6379.

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The Robert Bresson retrospective continues at LACMA on Friday at 8 p.m. with “Au Hasard, Balthazar” (1966) and “Four Nights of a Dreamer” (1971). Throughout his extraordinary career, Bresson has discovered saintliness in a pickpocket as well as in Joan of Arc. Now in “Au Hasard, Balthazar” he has found it in a donkey. This is not in the least as absurd as it may sound and it forms the basis for one of the very best of the 13 films Bresson made over 50 years, an incredibly demanding work of the utmost subtlety and ambiguity.

The rigorously elliptical plot of this fascinating allegory hinges upon the donkey Balthazar being passed from owner to owner in a drab provincial frontier town. On the most obvious level we’re able to see man’s inhumanity to man underlined by his cruelty to animals; Bresson, of course, goes far beyond this. Putting an animal through the same stoic martyrdom obligatory to his heroes in their progress to ultimate grace has allowed Bresson to concentrate on a larger and more varied number of people than is usual for him. From time to time Balthazar moves to the fore to symbolize man’s seemingly infinite capacity for selfishness, greed, ignorance and hypocrisy.

Beyond this, Balthazar’s journey through life with its ups and downs suggests that our own fates are determined by chance more than we sometimes care to admit--which allows Bresson to ponder the question of guilt and responsibility, free will and predestination.

When a director expresses intense spiritualty with the utmost austerity as obsessively and masterfully as France’s Robert Bresson has for so long, he requires material that can be no less than profound in impact. Otherwise his style will become oppressive and overwhelm his material.

This is what has happened with “Four Nights of a Dreamer” (1971), Bresson’s version of Dostoevsky’s “White Nights.” There is much that is admirable and moving in this eloquent, but ultimately unsatisfying, film.

Bresson’s heroes have had their spiritual mettle tested in pretty dire predicaments. In contrast, “Dreamer’s” young artist (Guillaume des Forets) is simply head over heels in love.

Walking by Paris’ Pont Neuf one evening, he prevents a young girl (Isabel Weingarten) from jumping off. It seems her lover, after a year’s study in America, was to meet her here and failed to keep the appointment. A solitary type given to dictating incredible romantic fantasies into his tape recorder to inspire himself, the artist falls hard and fast for this girl, who finds herself willing to reciprocate his passion--provided that absent lover doesn’t eventually show up.

Because of the way things turn out, it can be argued that the artist does attain a state of grace, like all Bresson’s tenacious protagonists, since in the end he is able to transform his four evenings with this girl into art. But it is difficult to experience a sense of triumph for him because Bresson has portrayed only the pain and none of the joy of heady romantic love. Don’t be surprised if you find it tough to accept Bresson’s conception of falling in love as being so absolutely akin to being burned at the stake.

With the 1967 “Mouchette,” Bresson continued his remorseless exploration of the solitary individual under severe stress. He is preoccupied with those who have the strength to be true to themselves no matter what, and his films suggest theirs is the only path to salvation. What concerns Bresson above is that they did not submit, according to their own precepts, to the pressures brought to bear upon them.

Mouchette (Nadine Nortier) is a sturdy, stolid girl of 14, quite similar to Bresson’s St. Joan and living in a dour provincial town. Hers is an existence so grim--dying mother, baby brother to care for, brutal father and teacher--that it verges on parody. But soon Bresson’s implacability takes hold, his intense concentration grows so compelling, that something akin to suspense (fascination, perhaps) develops.

How much more will Mouchette be able to take? More important, what course will her growing resolve cause her to take?

More than any previous Bresson film, “Mouchette” has a random, quirky quality, while the director maintains his familiar relentless movement toward a moment of truth that makes it all the more lifelike. As always, Bresson elicits astounding performances from the novice cast. “Mouchette” will be followed by one of Bresson’s least familiar films, “Une Femme Douce” (1969), Bresson’s first foray into color. Dominique Sanda stars. All films screen in LACMA’s Bing Theater, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 857-6010.

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The “World Cinema” series continues Saturday and Sunday at 10 a.m. at the Sunset 5 (8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood) with Eric Heumann’s “Port Djema,” which takes a young French doctor (Jean-Yves Dubois) on an odyssey in a small fictional African republic, formerly a French colony, now wracked by a civil war in which France secretly--and cynically--supports both sides. He is a friend to a French physician who has paid with his life for establishing a clinic in the north of the country to serve the nation’s oppressed minority. He has promised to locate a certain boy and make sure he is safe; there is a catch in this request that gives the film an entire added level of meaning. Shot in Eritrea by Yorgos Arvanitis,who has worked with Theo Angelopoulos, “Port Djema” is stunningly visual, but it can’t quite sustain its portentous mood because the visiting French doctor is so opaque and so impassive. You need a Harvey Keitel, who has worked with Angelopoulos, or a Jack Nicholson, who has worked with Antonioni, who have strong enough personalities and complexity to to sustain enigmatic allegories. Nonetheless, the film is a notable directorial debut from the prestigious producer of such films as the Oscar-winning “Indochine” and the Angelopoulos-Keitel “Ulysses’ Gaze.” “ Port Djema” will also screen June 5 and 6 at 11 a.m. at the Monica 4-Plex, 1332 2nd St., Santa Monica. Sunset 5: (323) 848-3500; Monica 4-Plex: (310) 394-9741.

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The Los Angeles Conservancy presents its 13th annual “Last Remaining Seats,” a six-week Tuesday evening series of vintage movies presented in three downtown movie palaces, the Orpheum, the Palace and the Los Angeles. The series begins Wednesday at 8 p.m. at the Orpheum, 842 S. Broadway, with “42nd Street” (1933). This is the archetypal backstage musical, complete with extravagant Busby Berkeley choreography, in which the star (Bebe Daniels) breaks her ankle on opening night, and the bright-eyed chorine (Ruby Keeler, natch) goes on in her place. “You’re going out a youngster, Sawyer,” says slave-driving director Warner Baxter, shoving the fluttery lass on stage. “But you’ve got to come back a star!” (It’s one of Hollywood’s most deathless lines.) The Warner Bros. picture, which also stars George Brent and Dick Powell and features Ginger Rogers, has more than a fair share of smarmy dialogue and was directed rather perfunctorily by Lloyd Bacon. What really endures are the wonderful songs of Al Dubin and Harry Warren. “42nd Street” will be preceded by the live stage show “Dancing Cavalcade,” with music by Dean Mora’s Modern Rhythmists Dance Orchestra. June 9: “Sullivan’s Travels” at the Palace, 630 S. Broadway. (213) 623-2489.

The UCLA Film Archive presents one of W.C. Fields’ best at 7:30 tonight at the James Bridges Theater in Melnitz Hall, as part of its Archive Treasures, sponsored by Tedd Mann and Rhonda Fleming Mann. “It’s a Gift” (1934) is a Fields classic in which he plays a New Jersey grocer who dreams of owning a California orange grove, featuring Fields’ great nemesis, Baby Leroy. A variant on Fields’ 1926 silent “It’s the Old Army Game,” the film will be presented with a Fields short, “At Your Service, Madame” (1930), a Hearst Metrotone Newsreel and the 1935 travelogue “Los Angeles, Wonder City of the West.” (310) 206-FILM.