Calls for Change, From Near and Far

The UCLA Film Archive’s “Travelers: New Iranian Cinema” opens tonight at 7:30 in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater with “The Circle,” the third film from Jafar Panahi. The same filmmaker’s 1995 “The White Balloon” and 1997 “The Mirror” were simple stories about young girls that illuminated the status of women in Iran.

The bleakly powerful “The Circle,” winner of the Golden Lion at the 2000 Venice Film Festival, suggests that Iran is a prison for women. It has a “La Ronde” structure, in that one episode links into the next until a circle is completed with the uttering of a woman’s name, at the beginning and at the end. Never seen, she is a young wife who has just given birth to a baby girl, terrible news for the baby’s grandmother, who knows her daughter’s in-laws, set on a boy, almost certainly will insist on a divorce.

As the grief-stricken woman enters a busy Tehran street, attention shifts to two young women, Nargess (Nargess Mamizadeh), a pretty 18-year-old, and her friend Arezou (Maryiam Parvin Almani), who are on a group outing from prison and have decided not to return.

Nargess and Arezou have in vain been trying to contact a friend, Pari (Fereshteh Sadr Orfani), who escaped from prison by sneaking into the group outing. Cast out by her father and threatened with death by her brothers, Pari eventually crosses paths with Nayereh (Fatemeh Naghavi) in the process of abandoning her beloved little daughter in the hopes that some family can give the child a better life than she could. Nayereh in turn comes into contact with a beautiful, defiant prostitute, Mojgan (Mojgan Faramarz); “The Circle” is now set to be completed in stunning fashion. “The Circle,” for all its spirit of protest, is not preachy. (310) 206-FILM.

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The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s “A Hou Hsiao-hsien Retrospective” continues Friday at 7:30 p.m. with the Taiwanese master’s superb “Dust in the Wind” (1987). Austere yet beautiful, detached yet compassionate, it is a classically simple story of two rural young people in love who seek a better life in Taipei. Not surprisingly, it proves far more difficult than they anticipated.

Throughout, Hou’s discretion is palpable, manifested in his middle-distance, deep-focus shots; it’s as if he did not wish to intrude upon his vulnerable couple. At the same time, Hou’s vision is unwavering, and conveys both timelessness and immediacy, about how the unskilled or semiskilled are losing out in an increasingly technological society. Wang Chien-wen is the young man, Hsin Shu-feng is the young woman, and they are perfect. Followed by “Goodbye South, Goodbye” (1996). (323) 857-6010.

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Among the films screening in the American Cinematheque’s annual, always impressive Recent Spanish Cinema is “Ocano--Intermittent Portrait” (1978), which screens Friday at 9:30 p.m. as part of a tribute to its director, Ventura Pons. The Barcelona-based filmmaker’s first film is a documentary that intercuts interviews with its fearless subject, a young man called Ocano, and the most outrageous of rebels in action. A gay man who detests labels--”I’m not for homosexuals, I’m for people!”--Ocano is a drag performer, an accomplished, passionate flamenco singer, a painter and a male actress of melodramatic vignettes.

Raised in harsh poverty, Ocano clearly developed his courageous spirit early on. He speaks of joys and sorrows with candor and tenderness. Confrontational in the extreme--he has a decidedly exhibitionist streak--Ocano has thrown himself wholeheartedly into gay lib and anarchist union demonstrations--and sung from a balcony as a religious procession passes in celebration of the Assumption of Mary. Ocano ultimately perceives the limitations of all movements and is finally his own one-man rebellion. One is left wondering what has happened to him since the making of this provocative film, one of many from Spain that express a vivid reaction to the end of the long, repressive Franco regime. 6712 Hollywood Blvd. (323) 466-FILM.

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The Laemmle Theaters’ Documentary Days series continues with Helen Garvy’s engrossing “Rebels With a Cause” (Saturday and Sunday at 10 a.m. at the Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd.), which through an array of talking heads, stills and some archival footage, yields a comprehensive and coherent history of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and how, in the turbulent ‘60s, this band of idealists tried to change America and end the Vietnam War.

SDS was formed by a small group of students at the University of Michigan in 1960, sparked by the four black students who dared to sit down and order coffee at the lunch counter at Woolworth’s in Greensboro, N.C., and thereby set in motion the bitter and bloody struggle for civil rights. The SDS, whose membership at its peak numbered 400,000 across the nation, concerned itself with forming interracial alliances to better the lives of the poor in the North as well as the South, and espoused participatory democracy in the belief that people really could directly change government policies. SDS intended to focus on domestic issues, but as the Vietnam War loomed, it underwent a shift from protest to resistance.

By the mid-’60s the SDS had launched the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, organized a March on Washington that drew 25,000 instead of an expected 3,000 participants, uncovered university research programs supporting the war effort, exposed Chase Manhattan Bank’s ties to apartheid in South Africa and joined hands with other progressive organizations in many causes, most prominently the women’s liberation movement.

The watershed year for SDS--and America--was 1968, with the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy and the police brutality directed toward antiwar protesters at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. This radicalized the SDS and similar groups to take ever bolder and more dangerous actions to “bring the war home.”

The majority of Americans were beginning to turn against the war--and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was increasing its attempts to infiltrate and undermine the SDS. Hoover’s tactics, plus the deepening frustration on the part of the students, created a factionalism that culminated in the emergence of a small splinter group, the ultra-radical underground Weathermen movement, which caused many SDS members to withdraw and scatter. The March 1970 explosion that wrecked a Manhattan townhouse where three Weathermen died making bombs effectively brought the SDS to an end.

This overview is given clarity and personal dimension by the interviewees, now in their 50s and still devoting themselves, in individual ways, to changing the world. “Rebels With a Cause” also screens March 17 and 18 at 11 a.m. at the Monica 4-Plex, 1332 2nd St., Santa Monica. Sunset 5: (323) 848-3500; Monica 4-Plex: (310) 397-9741.

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Notes: In Allan Dwan’s delightful 1924 “Manhandled” (tonight at 8 at the Silent Movie) Gloria Swanson went from being a DeMille clothes horse to playing a Macy’s clerk. (323) 655-2520. . . .

“Skippy,” a minor comedy about a seemingly hopeless nerdy type (Joe Convery, also the film’s writer and producer) who wins a competition to escort his favorite movie star (Paget Brewster) to the Oscars, opens at 10 theaters Friday.