AFI FILM FEST: WEEK 2

L istings and commentary for Week 2 of the American Film Institute Film Festival of Los Angeles, which runs through March 26:

TUESDAY

“Vendemiare” (France, 1919, 7:30 p.m., Melnitz Theater, UCLA). In the textbooks, France’s Louis Feuillade is known for such influential Surrealistic crime serials as “Fantomas” and “Judex,” but this absorbing film of classic pictorial beauty tells two interlocking stories that occur within a group of World War I refugees from the North of France heading south to the vineyard island of Castelviel. One has to do with two trouble-making German soldiers passing themselves as refugee grape-pickers; the other with a young matron wrongly accused when her country estate is commandeered by German officers. The declamatory acting style may be dated, but for its time, “Vendemiare,” only recently restored, is ambitious in its complexity and scope. Recommended.