Squeaky Wheels and Termites: The Journeys of Dorothea Braemer (Fri., Nov. 14, 7 p.m., $10, Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St., 215-569-9700) Manny Farber defined termite art as art that eats its own borders, which means Termite TV's Dorothea Braemer must be starting to feel a bit full. After decamping to her native Germany for a year, the longtime Philadelphia resident has landed in Buffalo, where she is now executive director of the Squeaky Wheel media arts center. Luckily, Termite TV's omnivorous aesthetic meshes perfectly with Braemer's peregrinations, as this evening's program will show. Nickel City Landscapes, the latest in Termite's "Living Documentary" series, pays tribute to Braemer and co-Termite Carl Lee's new home. Produced by the recently Termited Meg Knowles, the show is a typically diverse Termite production: A man claims Los Angeles in the name of Buffalo; citizens muse on what the City of Good Neighbors might look like in a hundred years; people move, to the suburbs or larger cities; and it just keeps on snowing. Braemer will present the work, as well as Termite's just-completed The War Show, which includes Braemer's Patriot Act: The Weasel Clause. (Note: For endless fun with online video, visit www.termite.org -- just not when you're trying to finish a column on deadline.)

The BRD Trilogy ($79.95 DVD) Apparently the folks at the Criterion Collection are a bit tired of Brazil consistently winning every critics' poll, and decided the only thing for it was to produce a box set even more obscenely laden with supplementary materials. Perhaps more than any in Fassbinder's oeuvre, the films in the BRD Trilogy -- The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), Veronika Voss (1982) and Lola (1981) -- cry out for elucidation; though the films deal explicitly with the development of post-war Germany, Fassbinder is sufficiently uninterested in historical exposition that outside research is all but required. The commentary track for Maria Braun is a godsend in that respect, mixing recollections by colleague Wim Wenders and cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (now a noted Scorsese collaborator) with invaluable thumbnail histories of the nation and its film culture. Likewise, Veronika Voss includes an hourlong documentary on UFA star Sybille Schmitz, the unhappy actress who was Fassbinder's model for his own suicidal starlet. Interviews with collaborators and historians abound, and among the three hours of material on the supplemental fourth disc is a nearly hourlong chat with Fassbinder himself, touted as the longest interview with him ever filmed.

Among the films themselves, Lola was the real find for me. Despite its reputation as a masterpiece, Maria Braun seems too full of the arbitrary plot twists that were Fassbinder's way of playing God, and the cool sadism of Veronika Voss wears thin over the long haul (though Xaver Schwarzenberger's elegantly austere black-and-white photography is rapturously rendered on the new disc). Like Fear Eats the Soul, Criterionized earlier this year, Lola shows that Fassbinder never got closer to emotional transparency than when emulating Douglas Sirk. Though its story of a bureaucrat (Armin Mueller-Stahl) who becomes obsessed with an independent-minded cabaret singer and prostitute (Barbara Sukowa) owes an obvious, though legally unacknowledged, debt to Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel, it's Sirk's candy-colored style that predominates. Fassbinder was in awe of, if not obsessed with, powerful, sexually manipulative women, so much so that he sometimes lost interest in their victims' suffering, sketching it only as necessary. But in his best films -- Fear Eats the Soul, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Fox and His Friends -- the victim's point of view is at least equal to the tormentor's. True, Mueller-Stahl's pie-eyed functionary looks perfectly foolish when he buys a gaudy new suit to impress Sukowa's brassy prostitute (who has fooled him into thinking she's a "respectable" lady), but there's a poignancy to his performance that prevents him from seeming merely like a figure of fun (something that can't always be said of The Blue Angel). Something of an accidental addition to the trilogy -- filmed second, slotted third and not conceived as such until after it was filmed -- Lola is as much a fable as a historical confrontation, which may be why it works so well as both.

Primary/Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment ($24.95 each DVD) "I don't want to stage-manage this," says an offscreen voice in Crisis (1963), the landmark documentary that captured the confrontation between the Kennedy White House and Alabama Governor George Wallace over the desegregation of the state's universities. But, in fact, stage-managing is just what Attorney General Robert Kennedy and his deputy, Nicholas Katzenbach, have been doing. There is no question that the federal government is in the right, and that if Wallace goes through with his threat to personally bar two black students from registering at the University of Alabama, Kennedy has the power to take control of the Alabama National Guard and compel Wallace to un-bar the door. But the appearance of a New England Catholic seizing power from a good-old-boy governor could prove deadly to the larger cause, and so Bobby is on the phone, wondering that if Wallace must be moved, he might be pushed aside rather than picked up.

Primary (1960), filmed with the equipment Robert Drew had just finished inventing, was the first cinéma vérité documentary, and the first up-close look at election politics. Like its later, more accomplished cousin, the film shows JFK to be a master of image control and personal relations. Though Minnesotan Hubert Humphrey, his opponent in the Wisconsin Democratic primary, should be on his home turf in farm country, his pledges to continue agricultural subsidies sail out over a sparse, sleepy-eyed audience, while Kennedy talks broad strokes and grand visions, moving in a crush of delirious women; Kennedy's campaign song goes to the tune of "High Hopes," Humphrey's to "The Ballad of Davy Crockett." Watching the film, you'd think Humphrey lost the nomination for being square.

Historical significance aside, though, Primary is ultimately fairly dull, too effective at conveying the long, hard slog of endless handshakes and rubber-chicken dinners. Crisis, by contrast, will likely always stand as the most intimate, all-access chronicle of a White House in quick-response mode. (Just imagine our press-conference-shy president letting a documentary camera anywhere near him.) Both discs include commentary by Drew and his co-pioneer, Richard Leacock, and Primary includes a historic roundtable reminiscence with Drew, Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker and Albert Maysles, all of whom worked on the film. As a bonus, Crisis includes the haunting short Faces of November, a cinéma vérité tone poem shot on the day of J.F.K.'s funeral.

Misc. Picks New Authors of Italian Cinema, which runs through Nov. 23 at I-House, kicks off Tuesday night at 8 p.m. with the excellent Fellini bio I'm a Born Liar. In this month's Silver Screen Classic ($1 admission including soda and popcorn) is A Man for All Seasons (1966), Tuesday at The Bridge at 1 p.m. Sundance Channel presents the riveting documentary Sex in a Cold Climate, the inspiration for Peter Mullan's The Magdalene Sisters, along with the similarly themed Abused and Catholic, Monday at 9 p.m.