VIDEO REVIEW : ‘Facts’ Count at Annual AFI Festival : This year’s program shows a creeping CNN-ization that overshadows more individual visions.

Judging by the dozens of long and short videos on display at the American Film Institute’s 1994 National Video Festival (starting tonight at 7 and continuing through Sunday at various venues on the AFI campus), what videomakers currently seem interested in are the facts.

Or at least, their version of the facts.

Unlike past festivals, laden with works blending experiment and fiction pushing video closer to feature films, the dominant trend in the ’94 crop is the report from the front lines, be it Nagorno-Karabah, South-Central L.A. or former Soviet military installations. Despite the inclusion of the always rule-breaking L.A. Freewaves series of local independent video into this year’s program, there’s a creeping CNN-ization dominating the four days and overshadowing the uncategorizable work of signature video artists.

The marginality of these videomakers is exemplified here by a tribute to the late Juan Downey (Saturday, 7 p.m.), whose works such as “Hard Times and Culture” showed a genuinely developing vision.

On the other hand, some startling inventions do pop to the surface. Peggy Ahwesh and Margie Strosser’s creepy, pulsating “Strange Weather” (billed with Terri Hanlon’s weak “Inversion of Solitude,” 10 a.m., Sunday) is a genuinely original fusion of naturalistic drama and choreographed camerawork depicting a group of young Florida crack addicts oblivious to the coming onslaught of Hurricane Andrew.

Indicative of how this year’s sample of videomaking isn’t so much art as about art is an assembly of works profiling writers, filmmakers, painters and performance artists. “Working With Orson Welles” (at 9:15 tonight) by Welles’ last cameraman, Gary Graver, is long on anecdotes and short on any perspective on Welles’ sad, waning career.

Another portrait of a master, John L. Reilly and Michelle Shaw-Smith’s “Waiting for Beckett” (7 p.m., Saturday), is sure to stand as one of the lasting records of Samuel Beckett’s life and work.

In Saturday’s program on Latino artists (12:15 p.m.), Juan Garza’s easygoing look at one of L.A.’s most vital painters, Gronk, titled “Fascinating Slippers,” is an uncommon recording of the creative process, while Coco Fusco’s amusing “Couple in the Cage: A Guatinaui Odyssey” documents how she and performance collaborator Guillermo Gomez Pena pulled a creative and cultural joke on audiences during a recent touring installation.

But topical issues are the order of the week, and no topic gets a bigger and more slanted examination than L.A.’s April, 1992, riots. Accompanying Elizabeth Canner and Julia Meltzer’s “State of Emergency: Inside the Los Angeles Police Department” is Matt McDaniel’s hip-hoppy “Birth of a Nation” (2:45 p.m., Saturday), which unconvincingly insists that the riots were actually the start of a revolution, while failing to show us where it’s going.

The gutsiest video reporting comes from the former Soviet empire. The festival program rightly notes the “decidedly partisan . . . almost unrelievedly grim images” in Tsvetana Paskaleva’s reports on the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Nagorno-Karabah region (10 a.m., Saturday). But few cameras have ever gotten as close to the face of war as Paskaleva’s, whose Bulgarian background helps her understand the suffering.

More front-line reports come from Russia itself, with a pair of alternately boring and provocative Jacob Poselsky videos: “Red Dolphins,” about military use of dolphins as sea-borne weapons carriers, and “Chemical Weapons in Russia,” looking inside a former top-secret chemical weapons facility (12:15 p.m., Sunday).

A pair of documentary heavyweights here previously aired on TV are Barbara Kopple’s “Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson” (7 p.m., Friday) and Michael Pack’s thoughtful critique of PC on campus, “Campus Culture Wars” (9:15 p.m., Friday).

Typically, relief from the hefty issues doesn’t come from such sections as the Saturday animation program, but from an amusing documentary bill titled “Eccentrics” (2:30 p.m., Saturday). It starts with Gary Roma’s admirably obsessive look at the uses and abuses of doorstops, “Off the Wall and Off the Ground,” goes on to Berry Minott’s gently humanistic “Leonard’s Travels” and finishes with the festival’s funniest hour, “Hawgwild in Sturgis,” in which videomakers Ken Solomon, Chris Iovenko and Rusty Walden peer inside the ribald, nutty subculture of motorcyclists on parade in Sturgis, S.D.

The AFI campus is located at 2021 N. Western Ave. Free admission.