Screening Room : A Gathering of Cinephiles : They’ll spend the holiday weekend with the films and tributes of Cinecon 35.

Cinecon 35, the 35th annual Labor Day Weekend convention of the Society of Cinephiles, commences today at the Red Lion Hotel and the Alex Theatre in Glendale, the society’s venues for the past several years. The best reason possible to stay in town over the long holiday for film buffs once again will offer more rarities than any one person could hope to see. The films range from Tod Browning’s “The Mystic” (1925) to the all-too-infrequently screened 1950 film of Irving Berlin’s “Annie Get Your Gun,” starring Betty Hutton and Howard Keel and directed by George Sidney. Keel, who will be present for the 4 p.m. Sunday screening, also will receive a career achievement award at a Sunday evening banquet, at which Rhonda Fleming, writer-director Curt Siodmak, pioneer story editor and scenarist Frederica Sagor Maas and Ann Savage will be similarly honored.

Other key offerings include Raoul Walsh’s “The Loves of Carmen” (1927), starring Dolores Del Rio. Walsh also will be represented by “The Monkey Talks” (1927), a circus story in the macabre vein of the Browning-Lon Chaney collaborations. John Ford also has two films in the lineup: his 1924 version of “Dante’s Inferno” and the recently restored “Riley the Cop” (1928), starring J. Farrell MacDonald, a Ford stalwart in a rare leading role. “The Amazing Mr. Williams” (1939) features Melvyn Douglas and Joan Blondell in a comedy-mystery, and “Two Senoritas From Chicago” (1943), a wartime musical comedy, features Ann Savage, best known for her ferocious heroine in “Detour.” There also will be a tribute to Francis Boggs, the filmmaker who established the first permanent studio in Los Angeles, the Selig-Polyscope Co., exactly 90 years ago. His promising career was cut short when he was shot dead by a disgruntled studio janitor in 1911. There will be a film memorabilia show for collectors at the hotel throughout the convention. Cinecon: (800) 317-9177; Red Lion Hotel, 100 W. Glen Oaks Blvd., Glendale, (818) 956-5466.

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The Grande 4-Plex (Figueroa Avenue at 3rd Street) commences a new Documentary Days series Friday with a one-week run of Barbara Sonneborn’s Oscar-nominated, 72-minute “Regret to Inform.” Sonneborn explains that as the 20th anniversary of her first husband’s death in Vietnam drew near in 1988, she realized she had so many unresolved feelings about his death and the war that she decided to go to Vietnam and to make a film of her odyssey, which would take her to the valley in which he died and include interviews with war widows on both sides of the war. While her film is a powerful expression of the inherent futility of war, judicious editing could have made it more effective. When one woman after another recounts her pain and suffering and the circumstances of her husband’s death, Sonneborn weighs down those accounts with archival footage matched as closely as possible to those circumstances. More information about the women, who in the vexing tradition of contemporary documentaries are not identified until the end credits, would help. “Regret to Inform” is strongest in revealing how many American men committed themselves to the war without thinking it through for themselves; indeed, as Sonneborn honorably admits, she and her first husband talked about the possibility of him getting killed but never about him having to kill. (213) 617-0268. “Regret to Inform” also will open Friday at the South Coast Village, South Coast Plaza, Costa Mesa, (714) 540-0594 or (717) 777-Film (No. 323).

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This week’s Alternative Screen offering Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. at the American Cinematheque’s Lloyd E. Rigler Theater at the Egyptian is Michelle Le Brun’s 63-minute “Death: A Love Story,” followed by Eva Brzeski’s exquisite 29-minute “24 Girls.” Early on in her unflinching yet poetic chronicle of husband Mel Howard’s losing battle for his life, Le Brun tells us that “the camera became my saving grace; it gives me some kind of job in this situation.” The 23-year age difference between Howard and Le Brun, who met when they were 58 and 35, respectively, faded swiftly as they fell in love. Both had had varied careers in film and theater and related fields that gave them much in common, but only two years into their marriage Howard was discovered to have a malignant tumor in his liver. At first Howard, who had a long history of hepatitis C infection, resisted the recommended ordeal of chemotherapy and a liver transplant, but eventually accepted that it was his best hope for survival while continuing to explore alternative therapies.

At the outset, Howard decided that, whatever the future held, he wanted to make his journey a transforming experience--and that is exactly what he did, with Le Brun’s loving and steadfast support. In effect, he embarked on a spiritual quest pursued with such intellectual rigor that he achieved a remarkable clarity of thought and vision, allowing him to observe that while he and his wife may have came close to finding a cure, he discovered the difference between “curing” and “healing.” Near the end, he tells us that healing meant “opening the closed spaces of my heart” and that he is grateful for the “real communication” he has experienced with his wife and friends. In this most intimate and powerful of collaborations, Le Brun and Howard confront death in a manner that allows it to give life meaning. “Death: A Love Story” opens a one-week run Sept. 12 at the Grande 4-Plex as part of its Documentary Days series.

“24 Girls” is a lyrical celebration of a group of pretty and vivacious adolescents, each auditioning for a part in a film, and in many instances suggesting the kind of women they will soon enough become. It is intercut with the filmmaker’s lament for a girl, killed in a car crash, who will never have the chance to glow as do Brzeski’s endearing and accomplished two dozen.

The Cinematheque is also presenting tonight through Sept. 12 “An American Girl: The Sad-Eyed Splendor of Natalie Wood,” a selection of the films of the star who began as a child actress and became a cherished icon for her own generation when she appeared with James Dean in “Rebel Without a Cause.” Beautiful, only rarely given due credit for her talent and versatility, and off-screen an unpretentious, thoughtful woman, Wood died by drowning in 1981 just as she was preparing to make her stage debut as “Anna Karenina,” a role she looked forward to playing and for which her courage and vulnerability seemed ideally suited. The retrospective commences tonight at 8 with Elia Kazan’s memorable 1961 film of William Inge’s “Splendor in the Grass,” in which Wood plays a teenager who falls hard for her high-school beau (Warren Beatty, to whom she had the same reaction in real life); the setting is the Midwest in the ‘20s. Appearing with the film is Lana Wood, Natalie Wood’s sister. “Rebel” screens Friday at 7 p.m., followed at 9:45 by Robert Mulligan’s “Love With the Proper Stranger” (1963), which will be shown in a rare 35-millimeter print and in which Wood, from a blue-collar family, falls in love with musician Steve McQueen. Edie Adams, in one of her best screen appearances, heads the supporting cast.

Saturday brings (at 3 p.m.) “A Cry in the Night” (1956), an obscure film noir directed by “This Gun for Hire’s” Frank Tuttle, in which Wood plays a teenager kidnapped by a sexual psychopath (Raymond Burr). Blake Edwards’ delightful period adventure “The Great Race” (1965), in which Wood starred with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, screens at 5 p.m, and is followed at 8:30 by Mervyn LeRoy’s rousing version of the Jule Styne/Stephen Sondheim/Arthur Laurents musical “Gypsy” (1962), in which Wood’s statuesque and lovely Gypsy Rose Lee breaks free from her ferocious stage mother (Rosalind Russell). A Sunday 4 p.m. double feature pairs “All the Fine Young Cannibals,” the only feature Wood made with her husband, Robert Wagner, and “Kings Go Forth” (1958), in which she co-stars with Frank Sinatra and Tony Curtis. (323) 466-FILM.

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To commemorate the 250th anniversary of the birth of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the Goethe Institute, 5750 Wilshire Blvd., will present “Films on Goethe and Goethe on Film,” Tuesdays at 7 p.m. through Sept. 28. Launching the series Tuesday is Peter Gorski’s “Faust” (1960), a graceful filming of Gustav Grundgens’ celebrated 1957 theater production in Hamburg, Germany. Unfortunately, it is not subtitled--but though the institute will be providing a scholarly description of the action.

Even so, it is clear enough that this staging of “Faust” is superb, so contemporary in its spare production design and dazzling in its performances, led by that of Grundgens as Mephisto. “Faust” will be preceded by a 16-minute 1981 short, “Camilla Horn Sees Herself as Gretchen in Murnau’s Silent Film ‘Faust.’ ” Horn made her 1926 screen debut in the Murnau silent classic and went on to become a star of German silents and later talkies. Next offering: “Tarot,” a 1986 modern-day adaptation of “Elective Affinities” Sept. 14 (323) 525-3388.

The Laemmle Theaters’ Summer Series continues with Zack Winestine’s “States of Control,” which screens at the Sunset 5 on Saturday and Sunday at 10 a.m. If you caught this picture at the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival last year, you may want to give its surly, unsympathetic heroine a second chance. Jennifer van Dyck’s Lisa, who has a vague job at a Manhattan theater company, is striving to be a serious writer and is growing weary of a passionless marriage. Lisa is caught up in a trendy yet arid milieu, and it’s no wonder she’s so tempted by the sex and violence that permeate our culture in her search for some sense of empowerment and meaning. You wouldn’t want to spend much time with as obsessive a personality as Lisa or with the bleak types who surround her, but “States of Control” delves rigorously into our longing for some sense of being in charge of our destinies. “States of Control” also screens Sept. 11 and 13 at 11 a.m. at the Monica 4-Plex. Sunset 5, (323) 848-3500; Monica 4-Plex, (310) 394-9741.

Note: A newly restored 35-millimeter print with never-before-seen footage of the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” (1968) opens a one-week engagement Friday at the Nuart. (310) 478-6379.