2 CHINA DOCUMENTARIES ON TAP AT THE DOOLITTLE

The American Cinematheque and UCLA Film Archives’ introductory week of “50 Years of Film From the Museum of Modern Art” tonight at 8 will present at the Doolittle (formerly Huntington Hartford) two of the 12 one-hour documentaries Joris Ivens made in China in 1972-73 as the Cultural Revolution was coming to its conclusion.

“The Village,” a study of a primitive but industrious small town of 5,500 in Shantung province, and “The Drug Store,” for which Ivens recorded the activities of a very busy Shanghai state pharmacy over an eight-week period, reveal Ivens to be as exuberantly enthusiastic about China’s collectivist political system as he is exhaustive in recording daily life under it. The result are a pair of films with much immediacy, unpretentious appeal--but also considerable repetitiveness.

On Tuesday at 8 p.m. the festival presents “Cineprobe: The Experimental and the Avant-Garde,” a potpourri of the best of its kind, including Maya Deren’s famous, timeless “Meshes in the Afternoon,” a highly poetic, highly Freudian experimental film awash with images equating sexual longing with the fear of death. Also screening is Bruce Baillie’s “Castro Street,” in which the reprocessed shots of a moving train has much of the beauty of the industrial images of “Red Desert.” Phone: (213) 462-0055.

Kon Ichikawa’s exquisite, subtly sensual “The Makioka Sisters,” which played at the Kokusai at the end of 1983, returns Wednesday at the Monica 4-Plex. An homage to the waning humanist tradition in the Japanese cinema from the veteran director of “Conflagration,” “Fires on the Plain” and other major works, it is the third filming of a much-loved Junichiro Tanizaki novel. It is strongly reminiscent of “Pride and Prejudice” in the wit and compassion with which it views the efforts of two married sisters (Keiko Kishi, Yoshiko Sakuma) to find suitable husbands for their two younger sisters (Sayuri Yoshinaga, Yuko Kotegawa). Phone: (213) 394-9741.

Fox International’s “Canada’s 10 Best Films” series in the monthlong Festival Canada gets under way Friday at 7:30 p.m. appropriately with what may well be Canada’s best film ever: Francis Mankiewicz’s 1980 “Good Riddance” (“Les Bon Desbarras”), a story by Rejean Ducharme of the love a precocious 13-year-old French-Canadian (Charlotte Laurier) has for her impoverished, good-natured mother (Marie Tifo). A film which disarms you with its casual, offbeat humor, it invites us to perceive in Laurier the terrible innocence of bright children and that lack of perspective and experience that prevents them from weighing the consequences of their acts. Playing with it is director Don Shebib and writer Wiliam Fruet’s endearing 1970 “Goin’ Down the Road,” in which two naive young fellows (Doug McGrath, Paul Bradley) from the sticks try their luck in the big city despite their awesome lack of qualifications. Unofficially kicking off the series is a Thursday 8:30 p.m. surprise attraction. Phone: (213) 396-4215.

A week of British director Michael Powell’s films commences today at the Nuart with “Peeping Tom” (1959), that most provocative, disturbing and original film which dares to force an audience to identify with a psychopathic killer (Carl Boehm) just as it is making us aware of our own capacity for voyeurism. This is an engrossing, virtuoso, one-of-a-kind film shot through with as much dark humor as pathos. Co-feature: “Tales of Hoffmann” (1951). Phone: (213) 478-6379, 479-5269.