Fighting the Good Fight, Gracefully

Katya Bankowsky’s “Shadow Boxers,” which screens tonight at 7:30 at the Egyptian in the American Cinematheque Alternative Screen series, is a winning portrait of a winner, the beautiful and buff boxer Lucia Rijker.

The emergence of Rijker and other female boxers was made possible in 1995, when the Golden Gloves opened its 68-year-old amateur competition to women, at which time Bankowsky began chronicling Rijker’s three-year climb to the top.

Born in Amsterdam to a Dutch mother and Surinamese father, Rijker is a reflective, intelligent, self-aware woman with a radiant smile and a sense of humor as sturdy as she is. Boxing for her is a sport that possesses beauty and provides a way to combat fear, develop self-knowledge and command respect.

Rijker is cognizant of the dangers of boxing, which she admits is part of its appeal, and places priority on getting out at the right time, in quitting at the top before “you’re addicted, hooked on fame and money” to the point of becoming punch drunk or worse.

Rebuffing Don King’s offer to represent her, Rijker zeroes in on another veteran promoter, Bob Arum, who admits that he doesn’t care for female boxing but is won over by her personality and impressed by her technique. Much of this ingratiating film deals with Rijker’s discipline and introspection as she pursues her goal to become a champion. She wins the respect of her male counterparts, who realize that she’s on her way to becoming a world-class boxer. In the wise, knowledgeable Freddy Roach she has a world-class trainer whose maturity and temperament match hers.

To chart Rijker’s rise in the ring, Bankowsky alternates between black-and-white (accompanied by Rijker’s off-screen observations) and color (for events as they unfold on the screen). The resulting shifts accentuate a rhythmic pace and is enriching rather than confusing.

Zoel, the Argentine musician, and her group have provided a distinctive, enhancing score. Bankowsky, herself a boxer, has made a film as graceful and thoughtful as Rijker.

After its Cinematheque screening, “Shadow Boxers” will screen at 10 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday at the Sunset 5. American Cinematheque, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., (323) 466-FILM; Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., (323) 848-3500.

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“Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop, the Film,” an engaging example of a one-man show transferred to the screen, screens at the Sunset 5 Friday and Saturday at midnight, and Saturday and Sunday at 10 a.m.

Danny Hoch, an acclaimed performance artist, wrote his material and co-directed with his cinematographer, Mark Benjamin, whose easy, spontaneous style matches Hoch’s.

Hoch’s voice precedes his appearance on screen and, sounding like a rapper, he’s performing for a prison audience of predominantly black and Latino inmates. Hoch, a 30-year-old white guy from the Bronx who, as one New York reviewer observed, looks and sounds like the late Bowery Boy, Huntz Hall, wins points for sheer nerve.

In addition to the prison in Rahway, N.J., Hoch performs in a college auditorium and Greenwich Village’s Washington Square. Hoch and Benjamin cut between these venues and also to locations and sets in which Hoch’s monologues become dialogues--in short, dramatic vignettes. The clutch of characters portrayed by Hoch in a nonstop flow provides the continuity while the switching of settings provides the variety that filmed one-man shows often lack.

Punctuating the film are cuts to a multiethnic group of rappers performing on a snow-covered rooftop in Brooklyn; gradually they’re replaced by Cuban rappers on a sun-drenched Havana rooftop.

Form, however, never overwhelms content. Hoch is a dynamo, an in-your-face social commentator zeroing in on society’s inequities with an acute and fearless sense of humor. Among his cast of characters is an imprisoned heroin user proud to declare he was also a devoted vegetarian, a prison guard ordered to report to a therapist after beating a prisoner nearly to death, a Montana teenager who identifies with black rappers, a man with brain damage caused by his mother’s cocaine habit; Hoch is laying it on a bit thick here. A sequence in which a man, shot by a cop and forced to rely on crutches, tries to charm a woman visiting her grandmother in the hospital is one of the most effective sequences in the 90-minute film.

Hoch also appears as himself, explaining why he once refused a role on “Seinfeld” in which he would have played a Latino. In doing so he makes the point that people, not accents, are funny.

Oddly, the film’s other single-locale sequence is its least successful as Hoch pesters a Havana tourist on the street at tedious length while showing off his flawless, Cuban-accented Spanish. The point seems to be to express his character’s disappointment at discovering that the tourist, a young black man, is not into rapping. A couple of other sequences arguably go on too long, but Hoch and his film are ultimately as provocative as they are funny.

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The UCLA Film Archives’ invaluable Kon Ichikawa series enters its final weekend at Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. with “The Makioka Sisters,” Ichikawa’s exquisite, subtly sensual 1983 film of the Junichiro Tanizaki novel.

An homage to the waning humanist tradition in Japanese cinema, it is reminiscent of “Pride and Prejudice” in the wit and compassion with which it views the efforts of two older sisters (Keiko Kishi, Yoshiko Sakuma) to find suitable husbands for their younger sisters (Sayuri Yoshinaga, Yuko Kotegawa).

For all the decency within the sisters’ privileged world in 1930s Osaka, “The Makioka Sisters” is not a display of insufferable nobility but has Ichikawa’s characteristic flashes of dark humor and mischief.

By the time this civilized and rewarding film is over, we realize that while the formal world of the Makiokas is disintegrating, a bonding love among them remains.

Sunday at 7 p.m.: the slyly kinky “Odd Obsession” (1959) followed by the 1961 thriller “Ten Dark Women.” (310) 206-FILM.