Lake Reflections

The first Silver Lake Film Festival opens a four-day run tonight at 7:30 at the Vista Theater, 4473 Sunset Blvd., with Lucas Reiner’s “The Gold Cup,” a gentle little film inspired by the people Reiner encountered at the now-gone Onyx Cafe while an Otis Parsons art student. There’s a painterly quality to the images and hues of the film, which focuses on two couples (Wood Harris, Sarah Lassez; Jim Haynie, O-Lan Jones) of different generations who meet at the cafe. It takes awhile for the film to find its rhythm, and you wish that not so much time was spent with the cafe’s clutch of eccentric regulars and more spent with the two couples and their evolving parallel relationships, but the film has an ingratiating bohemian sensibility, compassionate and laid-back.

The festival, which has keyed various programs and events to its locale as the cradle of the motion picture industry (many of the earliest studios were built in the area) and its rich architectural heritage, has pulled off a major coup in landing Samira Gloor-Fadel’s rigorous yet seductive “Berlin-Cinema” (Saturday at 3 p.m. at the Los Feliz, 1822 N. Vermont Ave.), a meditation on the reunited Germany’s capital and the nature of cinema. It focuses on how the sense of space in film--how meaning and emotional impact emerge between and beneath words--echoed in the open spaces of Berlin, created by World War II bombings and the removal of the Berlin Wall, are filling in so rapidly that soon there will be no more evidence of the Third Reich and its consequences in Berlin than there are in Munich. This loss of a sense of history is lamented by the film’s contemplative key figure, Wim Wenders. Heard off-camera are the thoughts of another major figure in the world of cinema, Jean-Luc Godard.

“The Annihilation of Fish” (Friday at 7 p.m. at the Los Feliz) is so theatrical in nature that it could go fatally awry at any moment, lapsing into excess or mere whimsy. But the solid subtext to Anthony C. Winkler’s script and the ability of director Charles Burnett to see Winkler’s seeming crazies steadfastly as real people first of all allows Lynn Redgrave, James Earl Jones and Margot Kidder to soar. Out of desperate loneliness, Redgrave’s faded Poinsettia has imagined composer Giacomo Puccini back to life as her lover; Jones’ Fish has conjured a demon he must repeatedly wrestle with; and these two end up in the right place, in apartments in an old Hollywood hillside home whose silver-haired landlady (Kidder) has her own obsessions. The crux of the film is the determined fight Poinsettia, having come out of her own fantasy, puts up to free Fish from his imaginary demon so that they might begin a new life together. Poinsettia is a would-be Blanche DuBois made brave and tenacious by love, and Redgrave surpasses her Oscar-nominated performance in “Gods and Monsters.”

Kenneth Anger and Mary Woronov, imaginative choices both, are the recipients of the first Spirit of Silver Lake awards, and Saturday evening will be highlighted by Ray Greene’s documentary “Schlock: The Secret History of American Movies: 1953-1969” (Saturday at the Los Feliz at 9:30 p.m., followed at 11:30 p.m. by Bill Rotsler’s 1966 “The Agony of Love,” a grade-Z “Belle du Jour” with Expressionist flourishes and a surprising concern for psychological validity. The festival concludes Sunday at 7 p.m. with “The Temptress” (1926), starring Greta Garbo and Antonio Moreno and screening at Moreno’s fabled hilltop estate, Paramour. Information: (323) 221-1763.

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Akira Kurosawa, who died in 1998 at 88, rounded out his career with his 30th film in 50 years, “Madadayo” (Nuart on Wednesday and Thursday), a singularly fitting valedictory for one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of the cinema. Drawn from the writings of Hyakken Uchida, a revered professor of German literature, this exquisite film celebrates friendship, takes a warm, ruefully comic look at old age and concludes with a calm acceptance of death’s inevitability. The extreme attentiveness of the former students of Uchida (the masterful Tatsuo Matsumara) after his 1943 retirement at the age of 60 underlines both the the neglect of the elderly in today’s world and the eternal vulnerability of even the most cherished and cosseted seniors. The film’s title translates as “Not Yet,” which was Uchida’s standard reply at his annual birthday party when asked if he was ready to die. It is a sad commentary on the state of foreign film exhibition in the U.S. that it took “Madadayo” seven years to get released here and then screens only two evenings. The uncut, 20-minutes-longer version of Kurosawa’s splendid, elegiac 1980 period epic “Kagemusha” (The Shadow Warrior) premieres at the Nuart, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West L.A., Monday and Tuesday only. Information: (310) 478-6379.

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Debra Chasnoff, of the Women’s Educational Media, has followed up her groundbreaking “It’s Elementary: Talking About Gay Issues in School” with the equally illuminating 30-minute “That’s a Family,” which illustrates beautifully one child’s observation that “there are many different ways of being a family; all that matters is that you love each other and take care of each other.” Chasnoff has invited children to speak of what it’s like to be adopted, to be of a family of mixed race, to have but one parent, to be a child of divorce, to be raised by grandparents, or to have gay parents. What is striking is that the kids seem happy and well-adjusted because adults have taken the trouble to explain how their families are different and why. This film will have a benefit premiere Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. at the Paramount Studio Theater, 5555 Melrose Ave. Information: (323) 463-6020.

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The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presents Friday at 8 p.m a restored print of the 1925 stop-motion animation classic “The Lost World,” which has a quaint charm and is still lots of fun. Adapted from the Arthur Conan Doyle novel, it stars Wallace Beery, leading an expedition to the jungles of Brazil, where, he claims, he discovered an enclave of prehistoric animals. In the Samuel Goldwyn Theater, 8949 Wilshire Blvd. Information: (310) 247-3600.