UCLA to Present ‘New Italian Cinema’ Series : ‘The Blonde’ and ‘Manila Paloma Blanca’ are among the offerings at the Melnitz Theater beginning today.

Among the films screening today through Sunday in the UCLA Film Archives’ “New Italian Cinema” at the university’s Melnitz Theater are the very different but equally impressive “The Blonde” (“La Bionda”) and “Manila Paloma Blanca,” which play Saturday at 7:30 p.m.

Two years ago, actor Sergio Rubini made his directorial debut with “The Station,” a sly charmer about an unprepossessing young stationmaster in a small town in Southern Italy who gives shelter to a beautiful but distraught young woman.

Now he’s back with “The Blonde,” once again casting himself as a wistful type, a student at a Milanese watch repair school whose life is turned upside down when a blond beauty (Nastassja Kinski, as elegant and poised as Catherine Deneuve) runs in front of his car and is knocked down, leaving her an amnesiac. He’s soon captivated by her, but who is she anyway? What if she is to regain her memory?

“Manila Paloma Blanca,” a nonsense title, is a one-of-a-kind movie in which actor Carlo Colnaghi collaborated with director Daniel Segre in depicting a once-renowned stage actor attempting to pull his life together after a decade in and out of mental institutions. The zinger here is that the film is loosely based on Colnaghi’s own experiences.

When we meet Colnaghi’s alter ego, Carlo Carbone, he’s relying on medications to hold himself together--more or less. He’s intent on writing a theater piece for himself and making a comeback on the stage. He’s a tall, rangy man of manic intensity, mercurial temperament and a strong-featured face like Boris Karloff’s--in an instant his expression can change from a benign cragginess to outright menace charged with pain and torment. He dares to hope for love and rejuvenation when he captures the imagination of an attractive, wealthy woman (Alessandra Comerio).

One is left wondering whether Colnaghi himself could ever regain the stability to sustain a return to the stage. Meanwhile, this film--in which Colnaghi/Carbone comments on himself in brief asides shot in black-and-white--allows him to command the screen unforgettably. While the line between the role and the actor blurs, Colnaghi makes it clear that we are in the presence of great, volcanic talent.

For a full schedule: (310) 206-FILM.

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‘Mexican Cinema’: On Saturday at the Chaplin Theater at Raleigh Studio, 5300 Melrose Ave., the American Cinematheque will present “Hecho en Mexico: Contemporary Mexican Cinema.” The all-day showcase of five films begins at 11 a.m. with Guita Schyfter’s warm, intimate, ironically titled “Bride to Be,” a highly evocative, richly detailed story of two Jewish girls growing up in the 1950s and ‘60s--and, in the process, developing a resistance to traditional expectations. The film is believed to be the first to deal with Mexico’s long-established Jewish community and its special challenges in co-existing with the heavily Catholic majority.

Gabriel Retes’ “El Bulto” (1:45 p.m.) is an engaging and persuasive feat of the imagination in which Retes stars himself as an activist bludgeoned into a coma during a demonstration who awakens 20 years later to find that his radical views (combined amusingly with an old-fashioned machismo) clash with his family’s comfortable bourgeois existence and values.

Alfonso Cuaron’s “Love in the Time of Hysteria” (4:30 p.m.) is a wonderfully risque sex farce in which we meet a handsome young Mexico City advertising copy writer (Daniel Gimenez Cacho), an incorrigible Don Juan whose doctor routinely prescribes an HIV test with a physical exam. Suspense quickly generates as Cuaron deftly places a classic screwball comedy in a contemporary context with deadly serious implications.

Dana Rotberg’s “Angel of Fire” (7:45 p.m.), a lurid allegory of innocence and corruption, tells of the spiritual odyssey of a pretty teen-age performer (Evangelina Sosa) in a gloriously rag-tag circus. Pregnant by her own father, a dying clown, she is defiantly proud of her condition, which gets her thrown out of the circus and into the arms of a religious fanatic. Rotberg’s tone is so relentlessly deadpan, and everything that happens is so ultra-dramatic and bizarre that the film becomes darkly humorous, intentionally or otherwise.

Closing the series is Guillermo del Toro’s horror picture “Cronos,” which was unavailable for preview. All films will be accompanied by discussions with their makers.

Information: (213) 466-FILM.