Films of Sarah Jacobson (Thu., May 27, 8 p.m., Space 1026, 1026 Arch St., $5-$10 suggested donation) "Be proud of it," sneers a dismissive film prof in Sarah Jacobson's autobiographical Road Movie, or What I Learned in a Buick Station Wagon. "Be proud of your own shit." Without the budgets or the inclination to ape Hollywood style, Jacobson's films struck some as just that. But many more got the message. Beginning with 1992's I Was a Teenage Serial Killer, shot when she was all of 20, Jacobson preached the gospel of DIY film at a time when the "independent" movement was already turning towards calling-card films. Uterine cancer took her life in February, at age 32, but her movies are too tough to die.

As no one had before her, Jacobson adopted the rock-band approach to promoting her films, touring endlessly with them and screening them at colleges, in warehouses, anywhere people would watch. (The station wagon in which she left her Minneapolis home became a part of her personal mythology, enshrined in the name of her production company and even her e-mail address.) Though the films in this retrospective, curated by Jacobson shortly before her death and presented locally by Small Change, are full of surprising, well-honed moments, Jacobson prized the message over the medium. At the end of Road Movie, the main character, who's just driven across country, filming as she goes, shows the completed film (i.e. the one we've just watched) to a friend in her new hometown. "You said what you wanted to say, and you got your point across," he responds. "That's what matters, right?"

In I Was a Teenage Serial Killer and her sole feature, Mary Jane's Not a Virgin Anymore (not part of the event), Jacobson attacked the mainstream ill-informed, destructive stereotypes of girl- and womanhood, quite consciously joining forces with the riot grrrl movement. Teenage Serial Killer begins as a feminist splatter movie, with Kristin Calabrese simultaneously strangling and fucking a man who's dared to remove a condom during sex, so that his death throes and her climax mesh perfectly. But then, after a failed romance with a fellow serial killer, Calabrese lets loose with an unrestrained and very ungenrelike confession of sexual abuse, simultaneously awkward and honest; the movie conditions you to accept fake horrors, and then confronts you with real ones. Like the music of Corin Tucker's pre-Sleater-Kinney band Heavens to Betsy, whose song "My Secret" plays over the closing credits, the film's naked honesty is both astonishing and discomforting, as if you've just stumbled into a support group and aren't sure if you should stay.

Jacobson's do-anything spirit didn't stop with filmmaking. After a college screening of Mary Jane's in 1999, she took the students who had booked her and anyone else who cared to tag along bowling. No doubt the camera helped, not least when confronting former classmates at her 10-year high school reunion, like the blond "good girl" who'd asked Jacobson to a weekend Christian retreat, despite knowing she was Jewish. But even a brief encounter with her left you with the impression that Jacobson would have spoken up even without a camera in her hand. With traveling "punk rock" film festivals now the norm, it's hard to remember what distributing your own film meant in the days before every church basement had a video projector and a DVD player.

Elaine Stritch at Liberty (premieres Sat., May 29, 8 p.m., HBO) The attachment of documentary legend D.A. Pennebaker's name to this "onstage É and off" hybrid is something of a ruse; while Pennebaker had a hand in the backstage interludes that punctuate this 90-minute program, the performance material that constitutes most of it was filmed, and none too well, by Andy Picheta, whose weakness for editing flourishes and reaction shots diminishes the impact of Stritch's starkly staged one-woman show. The excerpts from Stritch's musical autobiography are well-chosen (a complete version of the show is available on DVD, under the same title), but the hand-holding use of stock photographs every time Stritch mentions a famous face from her past (there are, of course, loads of them) merely detracts from the power of her storytelling. What's more, editing the show means losing the carefully constructed arc of Stritch's long battle with alcoholism -- not to mention the riotous segment in which she goes onstage drunk in The Women, adding a touch of real chaos to an always-chaotic show. The underlying conceit of At Liberty's original production, directed by George C. Wolfe and "constructed" by John Lahr, was that after decades of supporting parts and out-of-town closings, Stritch had earned the right to stand on her own, with no more than a dress shirt and a pair of black stockings between her and the audience. Despite its scattered insights, it's hard not to see this version of the show as, at base, a betrayal.

Lonely Boy ($19.95 DVD) Available on the DVD of the facile career history Paul Anka: Destiny, this half-hour documentary by Roman Kroiter and Wolf Koenig joins the ranks of "special features" whose value far outstrips the main attraction. Filmed in 1962, Lonely Boy follows a teenage Anka whose star is very much on the rise. Proclaimed by his manager to have a talent greater than God has given "anybody in the past 500 years," the Ottawa-born Anka thrills teenage girls on the boardwalk, rips off one-liners in smoky nightclubs and prepares for a long career. (The teen idol being a relatively new phenomenon at the time, the filmmakers address the last with understandable skepticism, though by American Idol standards, Anka's a formidable triple threat.) While perils-of-fame documentaries abound, few contain a character as unabashedly crass as Anka's manager, who discusses Anka's appearance like a deli customer selecting a cut of meat: "His eyes are great; he has a great mouth." (His dialogue was good enough that Peter Watkins swiped some of it for his pop-political Privilege.) An early example of cinema verite, Lonely Boy is still one of the finest.

Salvatore Giuliano ($39.95 DVD) Franceso Rosi was on the short list of directors considered by Algerian rebels to tell their story in The Battle of Algiers, and with its stark black-and-white photography and sympathetic portrait of Sicilian nationalists, Salvatore Giuliano shows why. But Rosi's 1961 film, a major influence on such Italian-American directors as Michael Cimino and Francis Ford Coppola (see The Sicilian and the Italian scenes of The Godfather, Part II for proof), is too postmodern to be propaganda. Despite its ripped-from-the-headlines title, Giuliano is more of an epistemological inquiry than a blood-pumping expose. The title character, a bandit-nationalist who was murdered under mysterious circumstances in 1950, appears only as a corpse or a distant, faceless figure. Time frames shift without warning, from the inquiry into Giuliano's death to the years leading up to it. The plot is difficult to follow, most likely by design, though Peter Cowie's audio commentary helps fill in the gaps. By turns fascinating and frustrating, Salvatore Giuliano mirrors, arguably too well, the void, not just of presence but of meaning, that important figures leave after their deaths. Its signature image is a group of people gathering around a fresh corpse, asking questions that will never be answered.

Misc. Picks "Master of Light: Ghislain Cloquet" continues at International House, with Love and Death, Au Hasard Balthazar (see review), The Young Girls of Rochefort and Tess. Secret Cinema fires up vintage WWII newsreels, training films and propaganda shorts on Friday, which should be the perfect aperitif for From Here to Eternity at the County (June 2, 7) and Ambler (June 9).