At the Mercy of Men

The UCLA Film Archive’s outstanding 12th annual Celebration of Iranian Cinema continues tonight with a pair of formidable short films that offer further evidence of the oppression of women in Iran.

Amir Ali Abdollah Zadeh’s 35-minute “Gol Chador” was shot through the veil of a young woman--except in those moments when she is talking to another woman in private--desperately seeking someone to care for the unborn child fathered by a lover who has disappeared. The film unfolds almost entirely through the eyes of the pregnant woman, who elicits a wide range of advice and a few offers of help. An older woman and a younger woman, the two who take the greatest interest in the woman’s plight, see abortion as the only way out; the men tend to be more impractical and several have less than noble intentions.

Whether the imploring voice that we hear belongs to an actual unwed pregnant woman or an actress ultimately doesn’t matter; what does is the revealing range of responses. “Gol Chador” screens at 7:30 p.m. in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater.

Bahman Moshar’s terse 57-minute documentary “My Name Is Rocky” (screening after “Gol Chador”) focuses on the plight of runaway teenage girls and young women who in desperation have fled homes that have become unendurable, only to end up in a Tehran courtroom, where their stories of brutal parents or husbands fall on the deaf ears of an unseen judge. He either sends them home or to prison, with only a precious few remanded to a rehabilitation center.

Moshar cuts back and forth to various street scenes, maintaining a brisk tempo. In contrast to the despairing young women who rightly believe they have no futures, Rocky and Mona, whom he meets in a park, have learned how to survive on their own against all odds. He also interviews a young man who freely admits to beating his sister if she should “get out of line,” unquestioningly taking it as his prerogative. “My Name Is Rocky” is yet further evidence of the lack of status of Iranian women under Islamic rule.

Rakhshan Bani-Eternad’s “Under the Skin of the City” (Saturday at 7:30 p.m.) is a classic drama of a family struggling in a Tehran dominated by skyscrapers and freeways. Golab Adineh heads the cast as the family’s strong matriarch who tends a loom at a textile factory and has a lame husband at home, along with an ambitious son trying to scrape together money for a visa and transportation to Japan so that he might get a higher-paying job. She also has a son and daughter still in their teens; her married daughter curses her brutal spouse.

The family’s story unfolds with powerful simplicity in a society grown impersonal and corrupt. The result is a bleak, unflinching film that is sometimes hard to follow, but the message of frustration and despair comes across loud and clear. (310) 206-FILM.

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The American Cinematheque opens its two-day Best of the Slamdance 2002 Film Festival on Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. at the Egyptian Theatre with Mark Moskowitz’s stunning “Stone Reader,” which took the audience and special jury prizes.

Moskowitz is a commercials director specializing in political campaigns and works out of his beautiful old home in rural Pennsylvania. He explains that back in 1972 when he was 18 he tried to read “The Stones of Summer,” a novel that a New York Times reviewer proclaimed defined his generation. At the time he only got to Page 20, but he recently came across it, couldn’t put it down and felt that he had stumbled upon a truly great American novel.

Moskowitz’s cross-country search for its virtually forgotten author, Dow Mossman, makes this documentary a literary suspense tale--will he find Mossman? Is the author alive? But “Stone Reader” is a lot more. It’s a comment on the perils of publishing--of how a great novel can get so totally lost because its original publisher was not a powerhouse company. It’s also a comment on the amount of hoopla it now takes for any work to get attention or appreciation. As for the gifted artist, if deserved fame eludes him or her, the consequence can be total oblivion.

“Stone Reader” is also a celebration of nature and of literature, and as such it is refreshing as a presentation of a wide array of American men, middle-aged and older, holding forth on the joys of literature with the passion and knowledge usually reserved for baseball. Some of these men are renowned, such as literary critic and historian Leslie Fielder; Frank Conroy, head of the Iowa Writers Workshop; and Robert Gottlieb, who edited “Catch-22” and other landmark works and is now editing President Clinton’s memoirs. By the finish of this singularly resonant and beautiful film, Moskowitz has discovered the purpose of his odyssey: to drum up enough attention to get “The Stones of Summer” back into print. (323) 466-FILM.

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From Friday through Sunday at 8 p.m., with a Sunday matinee at 1 p.m., the Silent Movie will present one of the major epics of early American cinema, Rex Ingram’s 1921 film of Vicente Blasco Ibanez’s best-selling “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”

Pioneer Metro screenwriter June Mathis, who adapted the novel for the screen, not only had persuaded studio head Richard A. Rowland to buy the novel, but also to star Rudolph Valentino, who from 1913 on had played mainly villains and second-billed leading men at Universal.

A complicated and sprawling World War I epic in which cousin is ultimately pitted against cousin, “Four Horsemen” cast Valentino as a Buenos Aires playboy whom we meet in a gloriously seedy cabaret. When Valentino, in gaucho attire, stepped onto the dance floor for a tango (with Helena Domingues), he became an instant superstar and the smoldering sensuality of his dancing was one of the cinema’s great epoch-making moments. It is entirely appropriate that the plump and unglamorous but highly talented Mathis rests next to Valentino at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. (323) 655-2520.

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The 10th annual Pan African Film Festival opens Wednesday with the premiere of Eriq La Salle’s directorial debut film, “Crazy as Hell,” at the Century Plaza before getting underway Thursday at its regular venue, the Magic Johnson Theaters ([213] 896-8221). Meanwhile, the fourth annual Hollywood Black Film Festival starts Tuesday at the Harmony Gold Preview House, with Ben Ramsey and Kantz’s action drama, “Love and a Bullet.” (310) 348-0858.