Adlon’s Films: Quirky Characters

“The Films of Percy Adlon” continues Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. at UCLA’s Melnitz Theater with “Jean-Paul, Fantasy Piece on a French Genius” (1975) and “Herschel and the Music of the Spheres” (1985) and on Friday at 7:30 p.m. with “The Ape Painter Gabriel Max” (1980) and Adlon’s best-known film prior to “Bagdad Cafe,” “Celeste” (1981). “Celeste” is an exquisite and subtle study of Marcel Proust (Jurgen Arndt) as seen through the eyes of his devoted and perceptive housekeeper, played with superb understatement by Eva Mattes. To see this earlier work of Adlon heightens our appreciation of his affection for quirky, atypical individuals and admiration for creativity and imagination.

The first two are set in rural regions of an almost fairy-tale-like beauty. Jean-Paul was not French but a celebrated Bavarian poet and humorist, a hard-drinking, hard-working eccentric who espoused anti-war sentiments and commented wryly on the battle of the sexes; Adlon made the film for Bavarian TV to commemorate the 150th anniversary of his death. Adlon’s one foray into video, “Herschel and the Music of the Spheres,” imagines a 1792 meeting between astronomer, Sir William Herschel (Rolf Illig), inventor of a landmark reflecting telescope, and Joseph Haydn (Josef Meinrad); they never actually met, but the great Austrian composer did peer through his telescope, near Windsor Castle, thus inspiring his “Creation” five years later. In essence, the video, which is vividly surreal in style, is a witty discourse about the impact of science on art, philosophy and religion. Preceding “Celeste,” “The Ape Painter Gabriel Max” is at once a study of the artist (1840-1915), who was fascinated by the relationship between monkeys and humans, and his son, who became his father’s keeper of the flame. Information: (213) 206-FILM, 854-0993.

Pioneer filmmaker Lois Weber’s “The Blot” (1921) screens Thursday at Venice’s Beyond Baroque Foundation at 8 p.m., providing a rare opportunity to see one of the most successful films by one of Hollywood’s most socially conscious directors. On the surface “The Blot” sounds typical: A rich, handsome playboy (Louis Calhern, best remembered as the suave gangster who made an entrance with Marilyn Monroe on his arm in “The Asphalt Jungle”) becomes smitten with a beautiful but impoverished librarian (Claire Windsor). What concerns Weber most is that Windsor’s father, one of Calhern’s professors, is paid such a pittance that his proud, anguished wife (Margaret McWade, the film’s true star) is tempted to steal a neighbor’s chicken. The film’s key visual motif is of McWade constantly looking out her kitchen window at the always-abundant food on her neighbor’s kitchen table. Playing with it is Lotte Reiniger’s “Frog Prince” (1956), an animated fairy tale in which the figures are seen in silhouette. Information: (213) 822-3006.

Among the films screening on the opening weekend of the UCLA Film Archive’s monthlong “Young Japanese Cinema” at Melnitz Theater are Riju Go’s 1989 “Zazie” (Saturday, following the 7:30 p.m. screening of Shunichi Nagasaki’s bizarre 1989 study of schizophrenia, “The Enchantment”) and Mitsuo Yanagimachi’s 1976 “God Speed You! The Black Emperor” (Sunday at 7:30 p.m.). Both films go against the popular image of young Japanese as ultra-competitive workaholic students or office workers since much of the time the people in these films simply hang out. The first is a plotless, deliberately meandering, often tedious portrait of a rock star (Yoshito Nakamura) who has dropped out in a protracted odyssey of self-discovery, much of it via a video camera turned on himself; he’s a likable spiky-haired guy with a disarming smile, but Go tends to pump up the musician and his stasis with an overweening cosmic importance. In Yanagimachi’s far more engaging documentary you can already see emerging this now-eminent filmmaker’s abiding concern with the plight of Japanese cut off from their roots. Indeed, the Tokyo youths who belong to the Black Emperor motorcycle “touring club” who gather every weekend seem to be unconsciously reinventing the samurai clan with its emphasis on loyalty and obedience. Information: (213) 206-FILM, 206-8013.