Beyond Baroque Offers Louis Feuillade Works

The Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center, 681 Venice Blvd., on Thursday at 8:30 p.m. presents Louis Feuillade’s three-minute 1908 “Une Dame Vrai Bien” (“A Truly Fine Woman”) and “Juve vs. Fantomas” (1913), which is the hourlong Part 2 of his famous five-part “Fantomas” serial. “A Truly Fine Woman” is a charming, comical curtain-raiser that records the impact of a curvaceous young woman with a corseted Anna Held-like wasp waist as she takes a brief stroll in Paris, distracting men right and left.

A delightful mixture of sophistication and innocence, “Fantomas” is quite different in tone and pace from the contemporaneous Pearl White cliffhangers being ground out at Fort Lee, N.J. Instead of knockabout action, breathless chases and heroines being tied down to railroad tracks in the paths of onrushing trains, “Fantomas” is a richly visual, polished work of ominous, dream-like mood and atmosphere in which a handsome master criminal, Fantomas (Rene Navarre), is constantly outwitting the Surete’s Inspector Juve (Breon). (Just to make sure we know who’s who at all times, the film begins by introducing both criminal and cop in their various disguises.) In this chapter Fantomas and his associates are out to bilk some Paris wine merchants. One of the villainesses is as chic as Mata Hari, dining at swank restaurants with egrets in her hair--and daring to smoke in public. For more information: (213) 822-3006.

Among the films screening this weekend in UCLA’s Melnitz Theater in the UCLA Film Archive’s “Liberation and Alienation in Algerian Cinema” is Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina’s monumental three-hour “Chronicle of the Years of Embers,” which took the top prize at Cannes in 1976. As grueling as it is magnificent, it is clearly a great film that gives absolutely no quarter to its audience.

Spanning the years between the outbreak of World War II to November, 1954, which is when Algeria’s eight-year struggle for freedom from France ignited at last, it is an account of unrelieved hardship and oppression as the Algerians suffer from drought and pestilence made much worse by brutal and exploitative French rule. What makes the film hard to get into (but eminently well worth the effort) is that, although nominally about a peasant family and its vicissitudes, its hero is really the Algerian people as a whole. We watch them gradually come to accept as truth about the French as stated by an Algerian martyr: “They came in violence, they’ll leave in violence.”

Lakhdar-Hamina casts himself as a bearded prophet, considered a madman by his friends and neighbors, which enables him to freely encourage revolution. As is the case with so many major Third World films, “Chronicle of the Years of Embers” (screening Sunday at 7:30 p.m.) is a paradox in that its depicts pain and sorrow with an awesome, sweeping sense of beauty. Attending the screening will be Ali Talmat-Amar, director of the Algerian Center for Cinematographic Art and Industry. For full schedule: (213) 206-FILM, (213) 206-8013.

“Black Talkies on Parade” continues through Thursday at the Four Star with a wide variety of offerings ranging from vintage “race” movies made exclusively for African-American audiences to the fine 1977 TV film “Scott Joplin, the King of Ragtime” starring Billy Dee Williams to such foreign documentaries as Menelik Shabazz’s “Burning an Illusion” (Barbados) (screening tonight at 7) and “Obeah, Voodoo, Horror, Terror and Love,” a new film from Trinidad in its local premiere Friday at 7. Another key offering is Euzhan Palcy’s irresistible “Sugar Cane Alley” (10:45 a.m. Thursday) in which a Martinique grandmother struggles to save her bright grandson from a life in the cane fields. For full schedule: (213) 737-3292, 733-9511.

Charles Chaplin’s 1931 silent “City Lights” screens Sunday at Royce Hall at 6:30 p.m. with Carl Davis conducting the Los Angeles Chamber Orchesta, which will perform Chaplin’s score. This graceful and poignant work of simplicity involves a beautiful blind girl (Virginia Cherrill) falling in love with Chaplin’s tramp. In its roundabout way, the film builds to one of the most affecting, justly famous conclusions in the history of the cinema. Information: (213) 622-7001.