A harrowing cry in the dark

Iran continues to produce some of the most provocative and compelling films in the world, as the UCLA Film Archive’s 14th annual Celebration of Iranian Cinema proves.

Fariborz Kamkari, who spent his childhood in Iranian Kurdistan, takes a bold approach in making a fictional film simulate an audiovisual record of real life in “Black Tape: A Tehran Diary -- The Videotape Fariborz Kamkari Found in the Garbage.” The entire film unfolds through a camcorder belonging to the 18-year-old wife of a prosperous Tehran businessman and former army sergeant.

The frequently unsteady and fragmented images perfectly mirror wife Goli’s oppressed and miserable existence. Our first glimpses of the couple in their lavish, tasteless high-rise apartment suggest that Goli (Shilan Rahmani) may be spoiled and petulant while her husband, Parviz (Parviz Moasese), loves her passionately, if possessively. However, it becomes gradually clear that Goli, of a Kurdish refugee family, is virtually her husband’s prisoner.

The film could scarcely be a stronger indictment of the abominable treatment Kurds have received from Iranians, especially the military. Kamkari does an admirable job of sustaining credibility in the film’s unusual and restrictive point of view -- some scenes seem to have been filmed only because Goli forgot to turn her camcorder off -- while building suspense. By any measure, “Black Tape” is a harrowing, corrosive accomplishment.

Great Garbo

“The Joyless Street” (1925) captures the economic and moral chaos of the post-World War I era, when runaway inflation threatened to destroy the bourgeoisie of Austria. It’s Friday’s feature in the UCLA Film & Television Archive’s “The Films of G.W. Pabst” series.

Pabst depicts Vienna as much a site of frenzied gaiety as Berlin at the time, and it’s against this vivid, unstable background that he tells a series of interlocking stories centering on two women, portrayed by Danish star Asta Nielsen, arguably the movies’ first great international actress, and Greta Garbo, in only her second feature film appearance -- the one that would take her to Hollywood.

Nielsen plays a woman betrayed and seeking revenge; Garbo is the daughter of a disintegrating upper-middle-class family. Both women, in desperation, are tempted by an insinuating bordello keeper, played by cabaret artist, avant-garde dancer and master mime Valeska Gert. The film features another major star: Werner Krauss as a brutish butcher who forces desperate women to submit to sex as payment. “The Joyless Street” offers a tumultuous panorama whose realism is heightened by the bold Expressionist style that marked the German silent cinema.

There have been many accounts of the final days of Adolf Hitler, but Pabst’s 1955 “The Last Ten Days” remains powerful and persuasive, though at times also ponderous and didactic. While Albin Skoda’s Hitler moves from self-denial to paranoia to resignation, Oskar Werner’s disillusioned and embittered young captain struggles to gain an audience with Hitler to tell him the urgency of sending troops to the eastern front to stave off a Russian invasion.

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Screenings

UCLA Film & Television Archive

Celebration of Iranian Cinema: “Black Tape: A Tehran Diary -- The Videotape Fariborz Kamkari Found in the Garbage,” Saturday, 7:30 p.m.; “Dancing in the Dust,” Feb. 6, 7:30 p.m.; “Abjad,” Feb. 8, 7 p.m.

“The Films of G.W. Pabst”: “The Joyless Street,” Friday, 7:30 p.m.; “The Last Ten Days,” Sunday, 7 p.m., followed by “Westfront 1918.”

Where: James Bridges Theater, Melnitz Hall, UCLA campus, Westwood

Info: (310) 206-FILM