Honoring a Master Japanese Filmmaker

The American Cinematheque at Raleigh Studios will present over the next two weekends “Days of Snow & Blood: The Films of Hideo Gosha,” a retrospective of one of the last masters of the Japanese period picture--a director whose work has much in common with the auteur the Cinematheque just celebrated: Jean-Pierre Melville.

Both men were rigorous, spare stylists, ultimately romanticists preoccupied with the interplay of fate and honor, usually in the underworld.

The series, sponsored by the Japan Foundation, begins with “Goyokin” (7 p.m. Friday and Saturday), a 1969 film of stunning beauty and power set in 1831 and attacking the feudal code. Tatsuya Nakadai, a Gosha regular and the most reflective of screen heroes, plays a samurai who renounces his clan after his brother-in-law, the Lord Chamberlain (Tetsuro Tamba), has led a slaughter of an entire village of fishermen who retrieved a fortune in gold from a ship that had sunk on its way to the Shogunate in Edo.

“The Wolves” (9:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday) nostalgically harks back to a mythical late 1920s when a Japanese crook could still believe in honor among thieves, before organized crime became absorbed in the world of big business and politics. With much dash and eloquence, Gosha made this highly romantic 1971 gangster movie in the grand manner, rich in mood and atmosphere.

A samurai movie at heart, complete with intricate plotting, it also stars Nakadai as a gangster released from prison, along with his foes, as part of the amnesties granted on the death of Emperor Yoshihito and the coronation of his son Hirohito.

Information: (213) 466-FILM.

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Unfinished Race: Jeb Bergh’s “I’ll Have Blinking Eyes & a Moving Mouth” (Saturdays and Sundays at 11 a.m. at the Sunset 5) affectionately documents Northern California’s annual Kinetic Sculpture Race (“People Powered All-Terrain Amphibious Sculptures-3 Days-38 Miles”) and its founder Hobart Brown, whose pixie-like demeanor belies a brave fight against crippling arthritis.

At nearly two hours, the film is in real need of editing and organizing, lots less talk and longer looks at such whimsical entries as a Flycycle, Carrot Chariot and Crawfish.

Information: (213) 848-3500.

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Low-Budget “Bear”: “Who Killed Teddy Bear?” (Nuart for one week Thursday) is a dated, dreadful 1965 low-budget flick that’s not consistently funny enough to make it as camp.

Sal Mineo stars as a crazed disco busboy menacing club deejay Juliet Prowse. With Elaine Stritch as the tender-tough disco manager, Jan Murray as an obsessive cop and Daniel J. Travanti (billed as Dan Travanty) as the disco bouncer.

Information: (310) 478-6379.

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A Look at Brooks: By now universally regarded as one of the most electrifying presences in the history of the cinema, Louise Brooks can be seen in her most famous films, her two for Germany’s G.W. Pabst, “Pandora’s Box” (1928) and “Diary of a Lost Girl” (1929), when they screen Wednesday and Thursday only at the New Beverly Cinema, 7165 Beverly Blvd.

In her totally amoral, casual way, Brooks in “Pandora’s Box” tempts an imposing newspaper magnate (Fritz Kortner) with destruction and then does the same for his dashing son (Francis Lederer). Neither these men nor a costume-designing countess (Belgian actress Alice Roberts, portraying the screen’s first explicit lesbian) can possess so free a spirit.

With Brooks, Pabst in both films was able to transform the most lurid of melodramas into the highest art. Even if “Diary of a Lost Girl” isn’t as complex or has so profound an impact as “Pandora’s Box,” it is a fine achievement. Brooks plays a young woman who, seduced and abandoned, winds up in a strict reformatory and then in an Art Deco brothel.

Pabst and Brooks turn a Victorian tale into a timeless story of hypocrisy forgiven and of good triumphant over evil.

Information: (213) 938-4038.

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Oshima Series: The Monica 4-Plex launches a Saturday-Sunday at 11 a.m. series, “The Films of Nagisa Oshima,” with the director of “In the Realm of the Senses’ ” second film, “The Sun’s Burial” (1960), a grim yet compelling, documentary-like story of slum life in which a young woman survives as a prostitute and by selling her blood.

Running through the film is a thread of dissatisfaction with the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty.

Information: (310) 394-9741.