‘Mongolia’: A Camp Outing for Ottinger

Among the many offerings in the UCLA Film Archive’s “Women Make Movies” series, the most venturesome is probably radical German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger’s outrageous 1989 “Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia” (1989), screening at 7:30 p.m. Friday in UCLA’s Melnitz Theater.

Camp collides with ethnography as several women, traveling in the utmost luxury aboard the Trans-Siberian Express, confront on vast green plains a tribe of Mongolians, who stage a series of ancient ceremonies in elaborate traditional dress. Despite the film’s title, this is a blithe comedy, which makes fun of the tendency to view Asiatic people as exotic. What’s more, the getting to Mongolia is hilarious, considering the train’s first-class passengers, who are the real exotics: an imperious, know-it-all, unassailably confident yet sweetly likable British aristocrat (the late Delphine Seyrig); a prim, intense German botanist (Irm Hermann); an earthy Broadway musical comedy star (Gillian Scalicci), and a rotund star of the Yiddish theater (Peter Kern) on his way to Harbin, China. (Between incredible gourmet meals the latter two provide frequent and amusing musical comedy interludes, accompanied by a brassy all-girl trio, the Kalinka Sisters.)

Ottinger also contributed the witty production design. For full schedule of “Women Make Movies,” which commences Wednesday and celebrates the 20th anniversary of the film distribution cooperative of the same name: (310) 206-FILM, (310) 206-8013.

Four From Tanner: “The Films of Alain Tanner” continues at Melnitz Theater Saturday at 7:30 p.m. with the moody “No Man’s Land” (1985), in which Tanner focuses on three restless people stuck in a remote French provincial village near the Swiss border. Paul (Hugues Quester) smuggles people and goods across the border but dreams of emigrating to Canada. Madeline (Myriam Mezieres) runs a disco but dreams of escaping to Paris to become a singer.

Louis (Jean-Philippe Ecoffey), a local farm youth, is a trained clock maker whose conflicting desires make him the focal character. There is virtually no action, but there is plenty of interaction, and Tanner makes the beautiful but isolated locale highly revealing of his trapped people’s thoughts and emotions.

There could scarcely be a more honest or credible delineation of the potential for obsessive love than “A Flame in My Heart” (1987), which screens after “No Man’s Land.” Its story, which Tanner adapted from the film’s star (Mezieres), is simplicity itself. She plays an actress named Mercedes, who in fleeing from her obsessed lover (Aziz Kabouche), becomes an obsessive lover herself, consumed with passion for a young journalist (Benoit Regent). The combination of Tanner’s control and Mezieres’ fire and abandon--to her there is no difference between performing Racine and stripping--is what makes this film, which was filmed in Cairo as well as Paris, so compelling.

Sunday at 7:30 brings Tanner’s “The Phantom Valley” (1987) and “The Woman From Rose Hill” (1989). The first recalls the dream-like quality of “In the White City” as a middle-aged French director (Jean-Louis Trintignant) sends off his young assistant (Jacob Berger) to find a beautiful Italian actress (Laura Morante) he once met briefly to provide him with inspiration for his next film, thus setting in motion a shimmering odyssey of self-discovery for all three people that takes them to an idyllic Italian port town and even to Brooklyn.

All of Tanner’s work expresses, in one way or another, discontent with Switzerland’s conformity and provincialism, but rarely with such stinging bitterness as “The Women From Rose Hill.” Flight from a disastrous mail-order marriage to a middle-aged Swiss farmer (Roger Jendly) propels an exquisite young black woman (Marie Gaydu) from an island in the Indian Ocean into an impassioned but even more disastrous relationship with a young Swiss (Jean-Philippe Ecoffey). The film’s one bright spot is the warm, loving friendship the young woman forges with her ex-lover’s free-spirited elderly aunt (Denise Peron).

All four of these richly visual films, like all of Tanner’s work, are marked by the most expressive use of stunning landscapes.

Information: (310) 206-FILM, (310) 206-8013.