Festival takes a trip to summer camp

The American Cinematheque’s fifth annual Mods & Rockers series of ‘60s film begins today at the Egyptian, where 30 films, representing the good, the bad and the campy, will be screened through July 15. It begins on a high note this evening with D.A. Pennebaker’s landmark “Monterey Pop” (1968), a record of the seminal 1967 Monterey Pop Festival featuring Jimi Hendrix and a slew of other major figures. Michelle Philips, representing the Mamas and the Papas, and festival producer-organizer Lou Adler will appear. The second feature will be Pennebaker’s revealing documentary-concert film on Bob Dylan, “Don’t Look Back” (1967).

Nancy Sinatra, Leigh Taylor-Young and Roger Corman will receive in-person tributes in the course of the festival, and the many special attractions will include screenings honoring the memories of James Coburn and Maurice Gibb.

The Saturday double feature is of special interest because Michael Sarne’s “Joanna” (1968) and Jacques Demy’s “The Model Shop” (1969) are so rarely screened.

If “Joanna” is remembered at all, it is as the English film that landed Sarne the infamous “Myra Breckinridge,” which effectively ended his directorial career almost before it had started. Sarne hasn’t added anything to what “Blow-Up” and “Darling” had expressed better about a callow young person turned loose amid the treacherous shoals of Mod London. Yet he is painfully honest and more concerned with style than most British filmmakers. (His “Myra” star, Mae West, was on the mark when she confided, “This guy wants to be Fellini.”) He in fact gives us a sense that he’s showing his fluffy, fantasizing 19-year-old heroine, Joanna (Genevieve Waite), as she sees herself.

An aspiring artist, Joanna is soon caught up in shoplifting and sex, yet the people she becomes involved with in a butterfly existence are as charming -- and vulnerable -- as she: her roommate (Glenna Forster-Jones), the roommate’s brother and Joanna’s lover (Calvin Lockhart), and Forster-Jones’ lover, an ailing British aristocrat (Donald Sutherland). “Joanna” is uneven but captures the spirit of its time and place.

Demy, the late French director, made his feature debut in 1960 with “Lola,” an exquisite film starring Anouk Aimee as a cafe entertainer in the port city of Nantes who never gives up her hope that the American father of her son will one day return. Lola herself returned in “The Model Shop,” Demy’s only American movie, which also is the first film from a major Hollywood company (Columbia) that depicts the effect of Vietnam on American young people.

The central figure is a restless young man (Gary Lockwood) with whom an older and defeated Lola crosses paths. The film, which takes place in less than 24 hours, begins on a Saturday morning in a Venice, Calif., pad in which Lockwood, an unemployed and disenchanted architect, lives with his fed-up girlfriend (the late Alexandra Hay), an ambitious actress. In essence, he begins a search for $100 for an overdue car payment and ends up finding himself. The model shop of the film’s title is a tawdry Santa Monica Boulevard pin-up studio in which Lola is working. In this place of fantasy, Demy found the perfect metaphor with which to link the relationship between Lockwood and Aimee to its setting, Los Angeles, a gritty foil for Demy’s lyricism. What better background could there for expressing the transitory nature of love?

The Silver Lake Film Festival kicks off its Declaration of Independence weekend matinee series Saturday at the Vista Theater with writer-director Jagmohan’s powerful “Sandstorm.” It is based on the true story of a young Indian woman, a wife and mother of low caste, who is raped by five upper-caste villagers after she joins a government-sponsored women’s movement aimed at enforcing the ban on child marriage and ending female illiteracy.

Her courageous struggle for justice exposes the enduring evils of the caste system, of the oppressed status of women and of male chauvinist-fueled government corruption. The film’s spirit of protest may get heavy-handed at times, but “Sandstorm,” which has stunning color cinematography and a fine central performance by Nandita Das, remains as absorbing as it is revealing. It was co-produced by Jag Mundra, long a mainstay of Hindi production both here and in India.

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Screenings

Mods & Rockers Film Series

What: “Monterey Pop” and “Don’t Look Back,” 7:30 tonight; “Joanna” and “The Model Shop,” 9:30 p.m. Saturday.

Where: American Cinematheque Lloyd E. Rigler Theatre at the Egyptian, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles

Info: (323) 466-FILM

Silver Lake Film Festival

What: “Sandstorm,” 11 a.m. Saturday and Sunday

Where: Vista Theater, 4473 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles

Info: (323) 660-6639