An Electric Festival of Pan-Asian Perspectives

The UCLA Film and Television Archive and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art have joined forces to present “Electric Shadows ‘97: A Pan-Asian Film Festival,” an ambitious and far-ranging survey intended to be the first edition of an annual event. The series gets under way tonight at 7:30 p.m. at UCLA, where all screenings at the university will be held in the James Bridges Theater in Melnitz Hall.

Appropriately, “Electric Shadows” commences with its first entry in its tribute to King Hu, the late Hong Kong director who took the martial arts movie to remarkable levels of artistry and spirituality. Hu’s “The Valiant Ones” (1975), which will be screened from a restored print, is a swordplay saga in which an unorthodox band of fighters take on Japanese pirates terrorizing the Chinese coast in the 16th century with the aid of corrupt Chinese officials.

“Electric Shadows” moves to LACMA’s Bing Theater Friday for the 7 p.m. West Coast premiere of Park Chul-soo’s “Farewell, My Darling” (1996), a raucous social satire that is overlong but makes its point vividly about how far modern-day Koreans have strayed from tradition.

As Japanese filmmaker Juzo Itami did with “The Funeral” in 1984, Park similarly sees in an old-style five-day funeral an opportunity to create a far-ranging human comedy. It unfolds as ancient, long-winded ceremonies give way to increasingly unconvincing extravagant displays of grief and slide into a veritable bacchanal. Best-known for his eerie and venturesome dark comedy on the relationship of food and sex, “301 . . . 302,” Park is again shrewd, observant and outrageous but indulges in needless repetition that serves only to make us aware that his film is going on and on yet is not designed to allow us to get to know his several dozen characters very well.

By contrast, the second feature, screening at 9:15 p.m., is an unqualified triumph as a satire. Wang Shaudi’s “Yours and Mine” is a brilliantly original and hilarious take on modern life in which possessions and self-absorption so easily engulf us.

Centering on a slick, aggressive middle-aged Taipei plastic surgeon, Dr. Cheng (Gu Baoming) and his pretty, plump employee, Ah Ying (Bai Bing-bing), Wang divides his film into four interlocked chapters--”Car,” “House,” “Body” and “Love”--in which many of the trappings of everyday existence--plumbing, for example--go as wrong as they do in a classic silent comedy. In doing so, they reveal a self-destructive selfishness and ruthlessness in human nature. Bai and Gu are both comedians of terrific range and concentration.

Don’t be put off by the academic title of “Yang and Yin: Gender in the Chinese Cinema,” (LACMA Saturday at 4 p.m.), for it is a witty, highly personal survey of Chinese, Hong Kong and Taiwanese movies and their makers by top Hong Kong director Stanley Kwan. Kwan is openly gay and celebrated for his outstanding women’s pictures, including “Rouge,” a romantic tale of the supernatural, and “The Actress,” a splendid bio of the ill-fated Ruan Ling-yu, one of the greatest actresses ever to face a camera.

While referring to his own life, Kwan examines in this documentary the father-son, older brother-younger brother relationships and transsexuality and transvestism in an array of movies. He confronts such major directors as Tsui Hark and Chen Kaige with questions of homophobia in their films; Kwan is polite, and they’re good-natured in response.

Chen’s magnificent transformation of “Farewell My Concubine” from its original source into tragedy is particularly fascinating. (An earlier TV version of the story had both its male stars of the Chinese opera as gay men who years later encounter each other for a happy reunion in a gay bath!) Kwan begins “Yang and Yin” with a discussion of his father, who died when he was 14, and ends with an interview with his wise and loving mother.

Shyam Benegal has been such a major Indian director for so long that it’s disappointing to report on how heavy-handed his “Sardari Begum” (LACMA Saturday at 7 p.m.) is in getting off the ground. A New Delhi journalist is assigned to cover the death of a woman who stepped out on her balcony only to be caught in the cross-fire of stone-throwing Hindus and Muslims. At the woman’s funeral she discovers that not only was the woman a once-famous singer of classical Hindu songs of love and eroticism but also is her father’s older sister who scandalized her family by defying the usual arranged marriage to pursue a career.

Benegal piles on feminist protests on top of material in which it is already inherent. He further contrives to have the journalist, who has heretofore considered herself a liberated woman, involved in an affair with her editor, a married man. There’s not much incentive to go the distance with “Sardari Begum”--despite its lovely music.

King Hu’s 1968 “A Touch of Zen” (LACMA Saturday at 9:15 p.m.) is a fiercely demanding, incredibly beautiful Chinese folk tale filmed in Hong Kong and Taiwan. There’s much action to please martial arts fans, but this saga of good triumphing over evil, involving a naive young man with a widowed mother and mysterious young woman who moves into a ruined mansion nearby, is essentially spiritual in nature. At over three hours, it’s hard going yet dazzling and worth the effort.

Screening Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. at UCLA, “Frozen” is an amazing film--in its power and its daring as an unauthorized Chinese film. It is so critical that its director has taken an alias, Wu Ming, or “No Name.”

“Frozen” takes on a double meaning as a tall, handsome young woodcut maker and performance artist (Jia Hongshen) becomes increasingly determined to end his life by melting blocks of ice on his body and thus dying of hypothermia. The “Frozen” in the title also refers to an annihilating, repressive status quo in contemporary Chinese society in which its hero is tempted to carry his disaffection to what he sees as its logical conclusion. What gives “Frozen” its edge is the quality of ironic detachment with which Wu Ming views one and all. UCLA Film and Television Archive: (310) 206-FILM; LACMA: (213) 857-6010.

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The American Cinematheque’s Sam Fuller tribute continues Friday with three of the director’s best: “Park Row” (1952), a 19th century drama of a tough newspaper editor (Fuller favorite Gene Evans) that reflects Fuller’s first-hand experience as a New York newspaperman and his love of daily journalism. It screens at 7:15 p.m. and will be followed at 9 p.m. with a dynamite double feature, “Run of the Arrow” (1957), in which Rod Steiger plays a Confederate soldier who casts his lot with a Sioux tribe rather than surrender; and “Underworld U.S.A.” (1960), a terrific gangster picture starring Cliff Robertson as a man bent upon avenging his father’s death. With singer Beatrice Kay in a rare screen appearance. (213) 466-FILM.

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Note: The Nuart’s newly restored 35mm print of Fritz Lang’s 1931 masterpiece “M,” starring Peter Lorre as a self-loathing compulsive child murderer, has its final evening screenings tonight at 5:10, 7:30 and 9:50 before moving to the theater’s Saturday and Sunday noon slots for its last two screenings. (310) 478-6379.