Lived Lives

The American Cinematheque’s Alternative Screen series has a superb sneak preview tonight at 7:30 in Raleigh Studios’ Chaplin Theater with Daniel J. Harris’ scabrously funny-sad “The Bible & Gun Club,” due for release early next year. If Harris didn’t have affection and compassion for his burned-out, overweight middle-aged salesmen, his picture would never work. Since he does, he gets away with everything that happens when the men of the Anaheim branch of American Bible & Gun go off to a company convention in Vegas, where their worn-down lives start unraveling for real.

Also screening is Paul Rachman’s 13-minute “Drive Baby Drive,” in which a man plans a terrible revenge for his wife’s infidelity with his best friend. (213) 466-FILM.

The American Cinematheque opens its “Really Long Film Series” Friday at 7:15 p.m. with an archival 35mm, 243-minute print of Joseph Mankiewicz’s famously trouble-plagued, mainly maligned but occasionally respected 1963 version of “Cleopatra” with Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and Rex Harrison.

On Saturday at 7:15 p.m. and Sunday at 6:15 p.m. the Cinematheque will present Hans-Jurgen Syberberg’s rarely screened seven-hour “Our Hitler: A Film From Germany” (1977), a prodigious work. It has a description-defying richness and complexity that grapples more successfully than any other film with the 20th century’s most infamous figure. Syberberg has long believed that it’s been far too easy to dismiss the leader of the Third Reich as a madman and has therefore marshaled every cinematic means at his command to persuade us that Hitler lives within us all--that he was in fact the very culmination of German culture, embodying the dreams and aspirations of his people, holding out the promise of their fulfillment.

“Our Hitler” is a dazzlingly inspired, contemporary sound-and-light show that derives much of its impact from its stunning juxtapositions of images and events. A fairly steady stream of newscasts maintains the chronology of Hitler’s 12-year reign of terror, allowing Syberberg to move freely in time, place and consciousness. A veritable torrent of words and images is accompanied by sonorous, deeply emotional passages from Wagner and other classical composers.

Syberberg’s ploy is to catch us up in the intoxicating, exalted dreams of Teutonic glory so that he might better drive home the horror and folly they led to with such tragic inevitability. The achievement of “Our Hitler” is that it makes palpable the links between philosophy and the arts and the kind of taste and thinking that permitted the concentration camp atrocities. (213) 466-FILM.

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Eve Annenberg’s “Dogs: The Rise and Fall of an All-Girl Bookie Joint,” which opens Friday at the Music Hall, is a slight comedy about Lower East Side roommates who resort to bookmaking in the face of imminent eviction. Annenberg, who also plays one of the roommates, has a giddy sensibility that’s engaging, but her film is simply too silly for its own good. As a result, it works best as a showcase for herself and her fellow actresses, Pamela Gray, Pam Columbus and Melody Beal. (310) 274-6869.

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The UCLA Film Archive continues its Alberto Sordi retrospective in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater Saturday at 7:30 p.m. with one of Fellini’s finest, that 1953 classic of small-town lassitude, “I Vitelloni,” in which Sordi plays one of three restless young men, which will be followed by the less-familiar 1962 “Mafioso,” a masterwork of irony. Alberto Lattuada’s faultless direction of this penetrating social satire smoothly accomplishes the almost impossible task of moving from humor to pathos without destroying the film’s essentially comic tone. In the title role Sordi is triumphant as the somewhat smug bourgeois who leaves Milan with his family to vacation in his native Sicily only to be caught most unexpectedly with the Mafia. (310) 206-FILM.

Kira Muratova’s “The Asthenic Syndrome,” which Filmforum is presenting Saturday and Sunday at noon at the Nuart, shakes a furious satirical fist at a listless Soviet Union just as it’s about to crumble. This winner of the Silver Bear at Berlin in 1989 and shot in a high-contrast black-and-white opens with a tale of a doctor (Olga Antonova) raging in grief at the death of her husband. Some 40 minutes or so later, this film proves to be a film-within-a-film that is in color. We find a man introducing Antonova to the audience, which nonetheless is fleeing in droves, leaving only a sleeping man (Sergei Popov, one of the film’s co-writers) in the seats.

“The Asthenic Syndrome” then opens up to suggest that Soviet Russia itself is in effect asleep as Muratova, from a feminist point of view, blasts away with savage humor at Soviet society’s myriad failures. Muratova has tremendous drive and energy, fueled by an understandable anger and frustration, but her 153-minute film becomes wearying in reiterativeness. It may just put you to sleep, too. (310) 478-6379.

Filmforum presents Sunday at 7 p.m. at LACE, Daniel Eisenberg’s beautiful, poignant “Persistence,” in which images supported by a spare use of text, music and natural sounds powerfully link the atmosphere of Germany--Berlin specifically--in the immediate postwar and in the aftermath of dismantling the Berlin Wall.(213) 526-2911.

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Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s “The Blue-Veiled,” which opens Friday at the Monica 4-Plex, is a compassionate and leisurely story of a lonely, wealthy, 60ish widower, Rasul (Ezzatolah Entezami) who finds himself attracted to a poor young woman, Nobar (Fatemeh Motamed-Aria). She has become one of his many employees at his tomato farm and processing plant, where he is much respected as a kind and generous man. Ever so gradually, Bani-Etemad allows us to realize just how conservative contemporary Iranian society is when the mere notion of a man marrying a much younger woman of a lower class is an invitation to a major scandal. (310) 394-9741.