Screenpicks

Black Maria Film Festival

(Thu., Feb. 28, 7:30 p.m., Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St., 215-569-9700, www.princemusictheater.org)

The 21st installment of this experimentally focused traveling short film festival — directed by U Arts’ John Columbus, who will present the films — includes a pair of Academy Award nominees and two local shorts: Michael Matai and Brendan Castner’s Mr. Tambourine Man and Mike Mayfield’s Lollipop Tree. For more info, go to www.blackmariafilmfestival.com.

Little Otik

(Fri., March 1-Sat., March 2, 7 p.m.; Sun., March 3, 6 p.m.; Wed., March 6, 8:30 p.m.; Thu., March 7, 7 p.m.; Fri., March 8, 9 p.m.; Sun., March 10, 6 p.m.);

Alice

(Fri., March 8, 7 p.m., Sun., March 10, 4 p.m., Prince Music Theater)

"My brain is melting," I was heard to exclaim, as I walked out of last fall’s screening of Jan Svankmajer’s Faust at the County Theater. Though, for convenience sake, the 68-year-old Czech filmmaker is usually referred to as an animator, he properly speaking defies categorization. Working primarily in the short form, though he’s produced a handful of features in the last 15 years, Svankmajer is a card-carrying surrealist who uses stop-motion animation, abrupt changes of scene, grotesque close-ups and deliberately jarring sound effects to assault complacency and an untroubled view of the world. He often strikes at human appetites — greed, lust, simple hunger — turning the mind against the body in the most visceral of ways. I can’t think of any contemporary filmmaker whose work I find more disturbing — David Cronenberg might be a close second — but Svankmajer strikes at the mind as well as the gut; his work is consistently enthralling on every level.

Given that no filmmaker does as much with the act of eating — only in a Svankmajer movie could the sight of a man slurping soup invoke existential dread — Little Otik (shown during last year’s film festival under its Czech title, Otesánek) would seem to be a slam dunk for Svankmajer. Based on a Czech fairy tale, the film tells the story of a couple whose grief over their inability to have a child drives them to adopt a baby-shaped tree stump. In what seems like a miracle, the stump comes to life, but soon turns out to be a ceaselessly growing monster with a bottomless appetite. (Think of it as Rosemary’s Baby crossed with Little Shop of Horrors.) Set in an aggressively modern Prague, the film is poised to comment on the country’s ever-increasing consumerism, the extent to which Otik’s parents make excuses for their adopted child’s ravening (even as people in the apartment complex start to disappear) paralleling the willful ignorance of capitalist apologists. It doesn’t quite click the way some of Svankmajer’s other features do — for one thing, at over two hours, it runs too long for a film whose plot is essentially cyclical (i.e. Otik grows, his hunger increases, his parents uneasily handle the situation, repeat). For another, it lacks the elaborate skeins of meaning that make the multilayered Faust so compelling. Little Otik is clearly an attempt to branch out into a more transparent and straightforward storytelling mode, which makes it a good entry point. Just make sure you keep going.

In addition to the Prince’s animated shorts program (premiering Wednesday at 6 p.m. — see next week for more details), which includes two by Svankmajer, they’ve also tracked down his unsettling 1987 adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, called simply Alice. Faithful to the original’s plot if not its tone, Svankmajer’s re-telling (which, like Faust, is narrated sparingly in English, although it’s mainly dialogue-free) strips Alice to its proto-surrealist core. It’s astonishing how quickly Carroll’s tale turns menacing without the cheery insulation of the narrator’s voice — suddenly, those cries of "Off with their heads!" don’t seem quite so innocuous. While Carroll bookended his tale with evocations of the "golden afternoon" of youth, Svankmajer’s cosmos is one where children are constantly in peril, and even the most cherished childhood toys — like Alice’s stuffed rabbit, which gnashes its sharp teeth and bleeds sawdust when it’s injured — can turn threatening. When the narration kicks in, Svankmajer’s cuts to an extreme close-up of his Alice’s lips, moving out of sync, which both fetishizes the act of storytelling and dramatizes the gap between what we say and what others hear (which is as close as Carroll’s whimsical wordplay gets to working its way into the narrative). The film’s uncomfortable blurring of the line between organic and mechanical is just one of this things that makes this magical adaptation tick.

Don’t Knock the Rock

(Mon., March 4, 8 p.m., $3, the Khyber, 56 S. Second St., 215-238-5888)

Hard to believe it’s been fully a decade since Jay Schwartz started digging through the Secret Cinema’s treasure chest/trash heap, digging up obscurities, lost classics and sometimes films simply too awful to be ignored. The first event in a year-long anniversary celebration technically comes five days shy of the 10-year mark, but since they’ve graciously rolled back the admission fee to Bush I-era prices, who are we to complain? The 1956 feature film, shown on that storied evening many years ago, features Little Richard, Bill Haley and the Comets and legendary DJ Alan Freed (commonly credited with coining the term "rock ’n’ roll") in the story of a would-be singer and his struggle to bring rock ’n’ roll to his conservative hometown. Produced by "king of the quickies" Sam Katzman as an attempt to squeeze more juice out of the teen audience he’d tapped with Rock Around the Clock, the film also boasts an appearance by Philadelphia obscurities Dave Appell and his Applejacks, the house band for Cameo-Parkway Records.

The Mystic Masseur

(Sat., March 2, 3 p.m., $12, Prince Music Theater)

On the opposite end of the spectrum from the Black Maria, there’s the Weekend Festival, which gives the idle rich a chance to fritter away some of their not-so-hard-earned cash and cozy up to (typically) middlebrow filmmakers — if you’ve got around $500 to spare, head to www.weekendfilmfest.com with all due speed. (On the other hand, if you had $500 to spare, you probably wouldn’t be reading a free newspaper.) This year, at least, there’s an alternative for all the proles: a one-time screening of WFF guest Ismail Merchant’s The Mystic Masseur, a rare directorial outing for the normally producing half of the Merchant-Ivory team. The preview screening of the film, based on a novel by V.S. Naipaul, will be followed by a Q&A with Merchant hosted by Columbia prof Annette Insdorf, who’s written well-respected books on François Truffaut and Krzysztof Kieslowski.