King Kong x 2 (Thu., Dec. 8, 8 p.m., The Rotunda, 4014 Walnut St.)/King Kong ($26.98 DVD) The original King Kong may be the least seen of instantly identifiable movies: No senti ent being is unfamiliar with the image of Fay Wray clutched tightly in the monstrous ape's paw, but who knows what precedes it? It's as if we're content to have Kong among us without wanting to know too much about where he came from. It's hard to imagine that Peter Jackson's imminent three-hour remake won't devote at least some of its length to explaining away Kong's mythical origins, but part of what makes Merian Cooper and Ernest Shoedsack's 1933 original work is that we barely know more about Kong when the movie is over than when it begins.

Not that it matters to Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong), the brash, enterprising explorer-filmmaker modeled on Cooper himself (just as Denham's taciturn, woman-hating first mate is a Shoedsack stand-in). As laid out by I'm King Kong, the excellent profile that comprises the second half of Warner Bros' two-disc set, Cooper was a born adventurer, whether flying WWI bombers or pressing his lens against the nose of a man-eating tiger. Before Kong, Cooper and Shoedsack made Grass and C hang, a pair of ethnographic documentaries in the mold of Nanook of the North, both available as Milestone DVDs. After adapting The Four Feathers, a copy of which raised Cooper's spirits as a German POW, he decided to fuse his experience filming in remote regions of Iran and Thailand with a natural flair for showmanship. (Chang's climactic stampede was presented in "Magnoscope," which allowed the frame to swell as the elephants approach, and Cooper was instrumental in the developm ent of the immersive Cinerama process.) The result was the story of a proudly crass American showman who takes a film crew to an uncharted island and returns, minus a few dozen crew members, with a creature that is "neither man nor beast." Never mind the islanders and their primitive customs, or the dinosaurs that also swarm the island: Denham wants only the biggest game. In fact, he has more in common with his prey than his fellow humans; Kong's chest-thumping conquests, his obsession with (literally) ma king it to the top are a reflection of Denham's ambitions, which makes Denham's final statement, "It was beauty killed the beast," seem less a moral than a misdirection, an attempt to cover his tracks.

To judge from his recent films, Jackson's appetite is every bit the size of Cooper's (even if Jackson is looking alarmingly thin these days). But there's a ferocity in the original Kong Jackson will be hard-pressed to match—not just in Will is O'Brien's stop-motion monsters, but in Denham's rapacious exploitation. If the movie is ultimately a tragedy about the consequences of masculine possessiveness, it's entirely sympathetic to the desire to have it all—even if it is Cooper and Shoeds ack flying the biplane that eventually sends Kong to his doom. The Rotunda screening (on DVD), also includes the 1976 remake, with Charles Grodin in the Cooper role and Rick Baker in a monkey suit.

The White Diamond ($24.98 DVD)/The Great Ecstasy of the Sculptor Steiner/How Much Wood Could a Woodchuck Chuck…/La Soufrière ($29.95 DVD) In the 20 years since Cobra Verde, Werner Herzog has released only three fiction features. But the seeming draught has actually been a boon: Whether precipitated by artistic urges or financial necessities, Herzog's turn from fiction to documentary has produced some of his richest and most fascinating works, as well as casting light on decades' worth of hitherto overshadowed nonfiction work. Of course, where Herzog is concerned, "nonfiction" is a tricky term. In his polemical "Minnesota declaration," Herzog proclaimed his hostility to cinema verité and "the truth of accountants," and has n o compunction about staging scenes without acknowledgement. In The White Diamond, released earlier this year, Herzog and his subject, airship engineer Graham Dorrington, engage in a furious argument over whether or not Herzog will be allowed to acc ompany Dorrington on his dangerous test flight over the rain forest canopy, a scene that seems to illuminate Dorrington's lingering guilt over the death of cameraman Dieter Plage on a similar test flight years before. That is, until you learn that, accord ing to Dorrington, the entire scene was fabricated at Herzog's request, which makes Herzog's insistence on wearing down Dorrington's resistance seem self-aggrandizing as well as disingenuous.

But you don't come to Herzog's documentaries for cold, hard facts. Just as his methods blur the boundaries of documentary, so his nonfiction features bleed into his fiction works, focusing in on the same kind of obsessive visionaries whose dedication c ourts insanity. "Let's be frank," Dorrington told the BBC after seeing The White Diamond. "In his documentaries, he basically portrays his chief protagonists as slightly mad." To all appearances, Timothy Treadwell, the title character of Herzog's < i>Grizzly Man, needed little help in appearing unbalanced. Indeed, the sick fascination that takes hold as you watch the movie comes from realizing that Treadwell, who prefers the company of wild bears to human beings, is not the humorous eccentric he first appears, but a deeply disturbed man whose extended sojourns in the wilderness are motivated less by his purported oneness with nature than his inability to deal with human beings. Anticipating the prepackaged voyeurism of a Capturing the Friedma ns, some audiences chuckle at Treadwell's antics, rejecting Herzog's insight to secure their own comfort.

Herzog's recent documentaries, together with the three mid-1970s works on New Yorker's DVD, suggest that Herzog's great theme is not obsession, but solitude: Watching Dorrington, or Treadwell, or Walter Steiner, the Swiss "ski-flyer" whose lengt hy jumps not only outdistance his competitors but threaten his safety, you start to wonder whether these men stand apart from society because of their passions, or whether they choose passions that will set them apart. Steiner, a world-champion jumper who carves wood in his spare time, links the thrill of flight to his separation from the ground, while Dorrington fantasizes about floating above the world, at once escaping and expiating his guilt. La Soufrière may be the loneliest, and most fat alistic, of all Herzog's films, as he charges into an abandoned Caribbean island threatened by an imminent volcanic eruption and finds a handful of men camped out on the mountainside. (The film's subtitle is "Waiting for an Inevitable Catastrophe," althou gh the volcano never does blow.) How Much Wood Could a Woodchuck Chuck… is the anomaly, a group portrait of cattle auctioneers that never surpasses the observational. But watching the others, as well as Wheel of Time, a portrait of the Dalai Lama that finds a different kind of bliss in solitude, it's striking how similar Herzog's concerns have remained over the decades. There are still more than a dozen Herzog documentaries that have never been released on home video, a vast trove of tr easures we can only hope home video companies have just begun to explore.

New Authors of Italian Cinema (Through Sat., Dec. 10, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542) This showcase of new Italian film sprawls in all directions. Although the two previewed features are both roughly "political," their appr oaches could hardly be more different. Saimir (Thu., 7 p.m.), is an earnest, gloomy drama about a young Albanian immigrant's struggle for selfhood; The Silence of the Skylark (Fri., 7 p.m.) is a brashly theatrical take on the martyrdom of Ir ish Republican Bobby Sands.

Directed by Francesco Munzi, Saimir follows such miserabilists as the Dardenne brothers and Lukas Moodysson. Much of the movie is dark, close to unwatchable, in a manner that seems amateurish rather than daring. It houses a fine, soulful perform ance from young Mishel Manoku, who plainly limns the pain of Saimir's relationship with his hard-pressed, unforgiving father. But Saimir never becomes more than a sketch.

There's something pleasingly nutty about a movie set in 1980s Belfast and performed entirely in Italian, but the novelty of David Ballerini's Skylark is worn down by its spiritualist posturing; surely one doesn't need to reference The Passion of Joan of Arc to make a man who starved himself to death protesting British occupation a martyr. Ballerini throws in heavy-handed references to the Nazis and Italian fascism as well (I doubt anyone ever scrawled "Arbeit Macht Frei" on an Irish priso n), but his cross-cultural transliteration never bears fruit.

(sam@citypaper.net)