Bold and Brazilian

The late Glauber Rocha’s “Antonio das Mortes” (1969), a landmark in Brazil’s Cinema Novo movement, is a bold, beautiful fusion of Brazilian folklore, mythology, religion, popular culture and history. It screens Saturday following the 7:30 p.m. showing of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Weekend” in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater. It’s part of the UCLA Film Archive’s “1968: Cinema in Revolution” series, which begins tonight at 7:30 p.m. with Haskell Wexler’s “Medium Cool” and Wexler set to attend.

Rocha takes a simple plot and loads it with as many references and symbolic meanings as any film ever made. Swarthy, bearded, leather-caped Antonio das Mortes (Mauricio Da Valle) strolls into the arid landscape of Northeastern Brazil like a villain from a Sergio Leone western. He’s a hired killer, a jagunco, enlisted by a blind, aging landowner to wipe a group of squatters off his property. The squatters, who perform ancient dances and ceremonies, eventually draw Antonio to their side. This means he becomes in effect a cangaceiro, one of the bandits who traditionally have come to the defense of the peasants.

Gradually involving other key characters and events, “Antonio das Mortas,” surely one of the world cinema’s great and unique epics, takes on layer after layer of meanings, incorporating a range of motifs from the European myth of St. George and the dragon to various African gods. While it would require a sophisticated knowledge of Brazilian history and culture to appreciate all of the film’s myriad meanings, “Antonio das Mortes” nevertheless is accessible and vital. (310) 206-FILM.

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“Venezia a Hollywood,” a selection of five of the 14 features in this year’s Venice Film Festival, will screen Monday through Nov. 14 at the Italian Cultural Institute, 1023 Hilgard Ave., Westwood. Closing the series will be a new print of Roberto Rossellini’s Neo-Realist classic “Paisan” (1946). Only “Of Love Lost,” which screens Nov. 12 at 6 and 8:15 p.m., was available for preview.

Drawing in part upon experiences from his youth in a small Sicilian town and working with writer Domenico Starnone, actor Michele Placido has created a distinctive and impassioned coming-of-age film in directing his fourth feature, “Of Love Lost.” Expelled from boarding school, 14-year-old Gerardo (Piero Pischedda) arrives home--the time is 1958--just as an upcoming election is stirring up volatile local politics. In the midst of the fray is Liliana (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), a beautiful young aristocrat who has established a school for women and girls. That she is a Communist does not help her cause, but she is more importantly a feminist defying an ancient patriarchal society. Gerardo, a brilliant, introspective youth, is inevitably drawn to this fiery woman, who will shape his destiny, and at the same time persuade him to see her as a human being and not a saint. All screenings are free, but reservations are mandatory. (310) 443-3250, Ext. 114.

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The Laemmle Theaters’ “Cinema Judaica: The Fourth Annual Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival,” continues at the Music Hall in Beverly Hills and the Town Center in Encino with a strong mix of revivals and new films.

Chen Shelach’s “Split” (Music Hall, Tuesday at 8:30 p.m.) chronicles Israeli filmmaker Dan Tal’s journey to Germany, where his father, Ben, was born Bernd Kandeler, a Christian who deserted from the West German army in 1962 to build a new life in Israel. Kandeler, now in his 50s, was so filled with disgust over the atrocities of the Third Reich and the way in which they were not being confronted in Germany at the time of his youth that he felt compelled to leave his native land in order to “remain myself.”

Settling in a kibbutz, Kandeler not surprisingly had a rough time. He fell in love with an Israeli woman, married her and converted to Judaism, changing his name to Ben Tal. Yet his father-in-law, a Holocaust survivor, was so outraged that when his daughter became pregnant with Dan, he wanted her to undergo an abortion.

Through all these experiences, Ben Tal has remained such a stoic that son Dan has always felt distant from him. The trip to Germany does in fact bring father and son to the point that the father acknowledges they need to sit down and have a heart-to-heart talk--but not, he insists understandably, in front of a camera.

Throughout, the medium of film proves crucial in communication, ultimately paving the way for the possibility of closeness between father and son.

Petite, lovely Eva Kerekes has deservedly won international acting prizes for her portrayal of a naive young woman in Sandor Simo’s devastatingly subtle “Every Sunday” (Town Center, Wednesday at 2 and 8 p.m.). The film, also shown at the recent Hungarian Film Festival, spans the outbreak of World War II to the coming of Stalinism. Kerekes’ Franciska, a happy-go-lucky servant, falls in love with a paunchy, middle-aged, married Jew, Lajos (Denes Ujlaki), a warm bear of a man. Their affair is interrupted by the war but resumes when, shortly after peace, his wife dies. Swiftly, the severe new Communist order emerges, but Franciska blithely goes about her life, becoming a policewoman assigned to a camp for political prisoners and viewing a promotion to the secret police as merely a change in uniform.

Somehow her relationship with the not surprisingly more aware Lajos flourishes, and she continues going through life with blinders. The way in which Simo winds up his jaunty yet scorching political allegory is wonderfully understated.

In 1987, around 400 color slides, among the first ever made, turned up in mint condition in a Vienna antique shop. They had been taken by Walter Genewein, the Austrian chief accountant of the Lodz Ghetto, and their subjects were the inhabitants of the ghetto itself. The irony is staggering: A man who was an integral part of the Final Solution--indeed, he got the German government to pay the ghetto workers 20% of their salaries and remit the rest to his office--inadvertently became one of its chief chroniclers.

With “Photographer” (Music Hall, Nov. 12 at 7:30 p.m.), Polish filmmaker Dariusz Jablonski shows the slides to Arnold Mostowicz, who had been a doctor in the Lodz Ghetto and is an Auschwitz survivor. As he views the slides, Mostowicz tells us his terrible story. Jablonski further cuts very precisely between the settings of Genewein’s photos and those locales today, often virtually unchanged, giving the film movement, tempo and also relief from endless images of gaunt faces ridden with despair and occasionally contempt at being photographed.

“Our Only Way Is WORK!” was the slogan of Chaim Rumkowski, the head of the ghetto’s Council of Jewish Elders who was entrusted to set up a model economy. The ghetto, enclosed by barbed wire on April 30, 1940, imprisoned 156,000 Jews, with the population later increased by 20,000 Jews from Germany, Bohemia and Austria, and by 18,000 from towns around Lodz. In increasingly overcrowded and filthy conditions, the Jewish workers manufactured a wide array of items for Germany’s home-front market and for the armed forces, even making military caps.

It was a tremendously profitable and efficient operation, for Rumkowski saw that responding to the Germanic zeal for efficiency was the only hope of saving his people. Of course, as the war wore on, conditions grew worse, and the sick, the very young and the elderly were deported to extermination camps. By August 1944, when the ghetto had to be evacuated in the face of the heavy Allied bombing of Lodz, the ghetto population had dwindled to about 70,000, who were sent to Auschwitz. Mostowicz is among the 15,000 of that number who survived; he surmises that had the assassination attempt on Hitler earlier in the year been successful, Rumkowski would have been able to save some tens of thousands of Jewish lives.

As Mostowicz recounts one horror after another, Jablonski counterpoints his excruciatingly painful memories with Genewine’s running complaints about Agfa over the quality of the printing and sometimes out-of-date stock. Genewein, who confiscated his camera from a Lodz Jew, seems the ultimate monster of detachment.

Those who believe that what comes around, goes around, should take notice: Genewein died a respected citizen of Vienna in 1974 at the age of 73. Music Hall: 310) 274-6869; Town Center: (818) 981-9811.

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Note: The Midnight Special Bookstore presents its monthly “Documental,” two different programs of short films, Saturday at 7 and 9 p.m. (310) 393-3923.