Ubuntu: The Essence of South Africa
(Fri.-Sun., Oct. 21-23, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542) Two film programs add to International House's year-long focus on South Africa. First, there's Siliva the Zulu, a 1927 rarity that offers precious glimpses of Zulu life. Filmed by Italian Attilio Gatti in the mode of Nanook of the North, Siliva's contrived love triangle provides the framework for fleeting but fascinating tableaux: a snatch of native dance, a hint of the magic used to cure sick cows. Gatti doesn't have Robert Flaherty's visual sense or his way with nonactors, but Siliva is almost certainly one of a kind. South African Canadian Themba Thana will provide accompaniment for the Friday night screening, and lead an African drumming workshop the next morning. (Details at www.ihousephilly.org.)

Sunday afternoon, British-born documentarian Peter Davis (not the director of Hearts and Minds) will present two films: Sangoma, a post-apartheid portrait of the popularity of homeopathic remedies in a health care system once ruled by European values, and In Darkest Hollywood: Cinema and Apartheid. From Cape Town smoothies copying Cab Calloway to a reverse-blackface Al Jolson, Davis unearths fascinating arcana, tracing the presence of South Africa in film from local product like 1949's African Jim through The Gods Must Be Crazy and the likes of Cry Freedom. But on his way to an argument for African self-definition, Davis unfortunately becomes so consumed with attacking white liberals like Freedom's Richard Attenborough that he seems to forget they're not actually the enemy: However feeble their art, Attenborough and his ilk played a role in awakening the West's conscience, and ought not to be likened to apartheid supporters for their trouble.

I Am Cuba: Siberian Mammoth
(Wed., Oct. 26, 7 p.m., $5-$7, International House) With loftier aims than your average making-of, Vicente Ferraz's documentary investigates not just the filming of I Am Cuba, Mikhail Kalatozov's luscious, hallucinatory paean to Castro's Cuba, but the revolutionary climate that spawned it. Thawing out in Havana, 1962, Kalatozov (The Cranes Are Flying) took his time: two years to film, including days spent waiting for "interesting" clouds to form. Practicality was not his strong suit: Composer Carlos Fariñas recalls how Kalatozov arrived with a prefilmed sequence of a peasant "musician" who could neither sing nor play, and asked Fariñas to write a song to fit the man's mouth movements. (The result was the classic "Cancion Triste.") Filmed in elaborate, fish-eye tracking shots, I Am Cuba has little in the way of revolutionary urgency, and it flopped with both its intended audiences: Too slow for Cubans and too humid for Russians, it was buried until the early 1990s, when it was exhumed in a U.S. that could now afford to see Soviet propaganda as art. The film's production secretary pays Kalatozov an unintended compliment when she says, "I had the feeling he wanted to show a reality that wasn't exactly reality."

The Val Lewton Horror Collection
($59.92 DVD) After Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons put the studio in the red, RKO adopted a policy of "showmanship, not genius." Russian-born producer Val Lewton gave them both. In some respects, Lewton was as much Welles' heir as his antidote, a literate button-pusher with a flair for achieving maximum effects on minimal budgets. If Lewton reminded his house directors — Jacques Tourneur, Robert Wise and Mark Robson — that the most potent fear was fear of the unknown, it was in part because nothing was cheaper to film than darkness.

Given market-tested titles by the RKO brass, Lewton often subverted their intent: The title character of The Leopard Man is not a human-feline hybrid, but a man who owns a leopard, while the only phantom in The Ghost Ship is the "ghostlike loneliness" of command. More than the supernatural, Lewton's characters are threatened most by themselves. Irena (Simone Simon), the heroine of Tourneur's malevolent Cat People, is haunted by an old-world superstition that a man's kiss will transform her into a ravenous cat, and it's that belief that eventually drives her to madness. Tourneur keeps the validity of Irena's fear ambiguous until the end, and by then it's almost ceased to matter: Whether Irena has become a cat or not, she's been transformed.

A far cry from monster-movie ghouls, Lewton's horrors are interior, psychological: The curse in The Curse of the Cat People, directed by newly promoted editor Wise, is the madness that may afflict Irena's ex-husband's daughter (Ann Carter, giving the best performance in the Lewton canon). The movie comes to a jumbled climax, but its depiction of the effects of lingering trauma on a child's mind is nothing short of astonishing. (In his commentary, the late Wise proudly notes that the movie was often shown to child psychologists.) As in Cat People, the functional acting and tangled plot only add to the dreamlike dislocation: If the movies were better, they wouldn't be perfect.

Among the Tourneurs, I'll take The Leopard Man over I Walked With a Zombie, the latter's tropical-decay imagery notwithstanding; like the shuffling undead, Zombie goes just where you think it will, while Leopard's camera is always drifting off to ensnare some new protagonist. Proof that restraint can be gorier than splatter: The stream of blood oozing under a door after a young Mexican girl has been clawed to death on the other side. Latex couldn't conjure the lacerations your mind's eye creates.

The Lewton-Tourneur collaborations are justly celebrated, but who knew that Valley of the Dolls director Mark Robson once turned out minimalist horror gems? Ghost Ship's story of a captain's murderous egotism rivals The Caine Mutiny, while The Seventh Victim's prosaic satanists are only a few blocks from Rosemary's Baby. Victim, whose plot lacunae are particularly broad, was hacked down from A-picture length after studio execs complained that its message was unclear. Replied Lewton, "The message is, 'Death is good.'" Indiscriminate death is a horror-movie staple, but Lewton's protagonists often choose death over compromise, or are driven to it by their inability to adapt. Ending with a Boris Karloff trio (The Body Snatcher, Isle of the Dead and Bedlam), Lewton's brief but prolific RKO run (11 movies in five years) is duly honored by Warners' box set, which features generally good transfers and informative commentaries.

Misc. Picks
The "Penn Film and Media Pioneers" conference kicks off Friday with a keynote by Sundance's Geoffrey Gilmore (class of '74); a full day of panel discussions follows Saturday. Schedule at www.sas.upenn.edu/ home/news/cinema_studies.html. Secret Cinema proves it all night with an into-the-wee-hours frightfest: Programming starts at 8 with The Abominable Dr. Phibes, followed by the John Wayne "horror-Western" Haunted Gold; drop by at 1 a.m. for the original Frankenstein as well as free coffee and donuts. (Sat., Moore College of Art and Design).