GHATAK FILMS OPEN 2ND HALF OF INDIA SERIES

Indian film maker Ritwak Ghatak is as unknown as Satyajit Ray is familiar. A contemporary of Ray, Ghatak was born in Dacca, now in Bangladesh, and became a refugee with the partition of Bengal in 1947. His life and work were thereafter marked by this wrenching event.

Eight Ghatak films launch “Classic Films From India,” the second part of UCLA’s unprecedented survey of Indian cinema beginning Saturday at 5 p.m. in Melnitz Theater. Two of the best films of Ghatak, who died of tuberculosis and alcoholism in 1974, screen Sunday at 5 p.m. They are “Subarnarekha” (1965) and “Meghe Dhaka Tara” (“The Cloud-Capped Star”) (1961), and both are set against the tragic refugee experience.

In both instances Ghatak piles on adversity to soap opera proportions but so profound an artist is he that the effect is truly tragic rather than merely melodramatic. Both films are bleak, slow, and immensely demanding but shiningly beautiful with their poetic imagery, superb performances and plaintive scores.

Samuel Goldwyn’s first three-color feature--the rarely seen, pastel-hued “The Goldwyn Follies” (1938)--screens at Melnitz, UCLA, Thursday following the 7:30 p.m. screening of David O. Selznick’s memorably romantic “The Garden of Allah” (1936) as part of the “Technicolor: The Glory Years” survey. Directed by George Marshall and written (surely with tongue-in-cheek) by Ben Hecht, “The Goldwyn Follies” could have inspired Oscar Levant’s famous remark: “Take away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you’ll find real tinsel underneath.” Too ludicrous to describe, “The Goldwyn Follies” nevertheless does have Zorina dancing to Balanchine choreography, a George and Ira Gershwin score, (“Love Walked In” is the film’s theme song), scenes from “La Traviata,” Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy--and even the Ritz Bros. Information: (213) 825-9261, 825-2581.

Antonio Skarmeta’s “With Burning Patience,” which screens Tuesday and Wednesday only at the Nuart, is suffused with the expatriate’s longing for a homeland to which it is impossible to return. It is this emotion that gives substance to an otherwise overly sweet and very slight tale about a love-struck postman (Oscar Castro) in the Chilean seaside village of Isla Negra, whose most famous resident is Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda (Roberto Parada). Information: (213) 478-6379, 479-5269.

The Directors Guild Golden Jubilee retrospective continues Friday at the County Museum of Art at 1 p.m. and again at 8 p.m. with its most offbeat offering--Bob Rafelson’s 1968 debut film “Head.” Rafelson and his co-writer, Jack Nicholson, plunge the Monkees--remember them?--on a free-wheeling series of surreal adventures. But “Head” is more than that, for Rafelson defines his own sense of reality the way many of us do--with images from the movies we grew up on. However, when Rafelson places the Monkees in snatches of Westerns, war pictures or even Maria Montez harem epics, he is not spoofing these genres but is instead making us aware of what our pop culture tells us about ourselves--and how the media condition our perceptions. Information: (213) 857-6201.