Brakhage’s ‘23rd Psalm’ at LACE

As part of its occasional “Perennial Cinema” offerings, dedicated to presenting landmark experimental films--and also to mark Memorial Day--Filmforum is screening Stan Brakhage’s “23rd Psalm Branch, Parts I & II’ (1966/1978) at LACE tonight at 8.

To think of Brakhage is to envision his joyous, kaleidoscopic, multilayered celebrations of nature. Such moments in this two-part work are only fleeting, for “23rd Psalm Branch” is Brakhage’s sorrowful meditation on war, involving a flow of familiar newsreel images from World War I to Vietnam that have been intricately reprocessed and linked by Brakhage’s characteristic hand-painted abstractions to create a kind of cataract of chaos and destruction.

What makes the film so disturbing and timely is that Brakhage devotes almost as much time to the pomp and circumstance of military parades as he does to artillery fire and concentration camp victims. Experimental film historian P. Adams Sitney aptly describes this Brakhage work as “an apocalypse of the imagination.”

Information: (213) 663-9568.

Having worked unhappily as a director within the Hollywood studio system, John Cassavetes, in late 1968, once again emerged as his own man with the remarkable, gritty, low-budget “Faces,” in which he zeroed in on the bored existence of the affluent middle-aged in Los Angeles suburbia.

He follows one couple (John Marley and Lynn Carlin), through a harrowing 48 hours, climaxing in a veritable Walpurgisnacht . Having met a high-class call girl of extraordinary beauty and sensitivity (Gena Rowlands), the husband, exasperated by the stalemate in his marriage, abruptly asks his wife for a divorce, hoping for some kind of future with Rowlands; Carlin then goes out on the town with some woman friends.

Crosscutting between the subsequent tumultuous hours in the lives of the husband and wife, Cassavetes creates a bleak, painful portrait of modern American marriage. In doing so, Cassavetes resumed a new kind of cinema that he had commenced with “Shadows” nearly a decade earlier--a raw, jagged, painful (but sometimes uproarious) actor-oriented cinema in which his cast developed its own characterizations in weeks of rehearsal, and achieve performances that seem spontaneous and often agonizing in their fidelity to life.

“Faces” commences a one-week run Wednesday at the Royal as part of “The John Cassavetes Collection.” For full schedule and show times: (213) 477-5581.

Elinor Glyn, a well-born Englishwoman who had scandalized British high society with her first novel “Three Weeks” (1907), is today best remembered for proclaiming that Clara Bow had It.

Madame Glyn, as she fashioned herself, defined and redefined the term endlessly, but It really boiled down to sex appeal and suggested more: vitality, incandescence and spontaneity.

Inevitably, Bow, forever to be known as “The It Girl,” would star in a film called “It” (1927), which screens Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Silent Movie along with “The Eagle” (1925), a delightful romantic adventure with Rudolph Valentino and Vilma Banky set in Catherine the Great’s Russia.

Directed by Clarence Badger from an adaptation of a story by Glyn, who appears in the film and was also its co-producer, “It” is an archetypal, still-effervescent romantic comedy.

Department store salesgirl Bow and the store’s owner’s son (Antonio Moreno) find themselves caught in an intense, instant mutual attraction, but naturally there are complications.

(Conveniently, Glyn declared that the handsome Moreno also possessed It--along with the Ambassador Hotel doorman and Rex, the wild stallion!)

Petite, bouncy, adorable, scrappy, achingly vulnerable and more talented and beautiful than she probably ever realized, Bow defined the Roaring Twenties, but her appeal is timeless, the mark of a true star.

Featured are William Austin (the father of the Silent Movie’s operator Laurence Austin) and Priscilla Bonner (a key participant in the 1990 documentary “Preston Sturges: The Rise and Fall of an American Dreamer”). Information: (213) 653-2389.