Swiss Roots Documentaries (Thu.-Sat., Aug. 10-12, International House, 3701 Chestnut St.) Switzerland isn't all neutrality and numbered bank accounts, as the four documentaries presented by the cultural outreach organization Swiss Roots endeavor to show.

While the series hosts profiles of Thomas Pynchon and noted Zuricher Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, the strongest entries feature relative unknowns. Shown together on Saturday, Fernand Melgar's Storm in a C-Cup and Gitta Gsell's Point of View are profiles in courage. Melgar, whose striking euthanasia documentary Exit screened at the Full Frame Festival earlier this year, is a skilled observational filmmaker with a knack for working his way into uncomfortable situations. Instead of the homes of the dying, Storm works its way into the modest house of Pascale, a husband and father of four whose round-the-clock cross-dressing causes a stir in his provincial village (the French title Rémue-menage would be better translated as the less smirky "hustle and bustle"). The expected conflicts materialize, as when Pascale is told that unnamed "authorities" don't want him portraying Mrs. Claus at a street fair, but the movie's most revealing scenes are its most mundane: Pascale asking his wife if she's seen his blue panties, or his sons idly musing how their father is as feminine as a beauty queen, but as strong as a superhero.

Forest for the Trees

The performers in Gsell's Point of View explore bodily transformation through their art as well as their lives. Ju Gosling is a dancer and self-proclaimed cyborg who can stand only with the help of a back brace, while Raimond Hoghe's severe spinal curvature is incorporated into his own dance performances. Hoghe is a particularly fascinating and articulate subject, theorizing about the way his nonstandard body challenges the conventions of dance. "There are places assigned to a body like mine," he says. "The stage is not one of them." His movements say otherwise.

Point of View slides downhill after its opening one-two punch; the stagy twitterings of Simon Versnel (whose work allegedly addresses aging and the deterioration of the body) uncomfortably recall Martin Short and Harry Shearer's synchronized swimming routines, and the inclusion of choreographer Milli Bitterli, who straps her able-bodied dancers to prosthetic legs, seems like a stretch. But Hoghe is reason enough to watch, so much so it's a relief when the movie brings him back in its final minutes.

The Swiss Roots series is more frustrating with known quantities. Stefan Haupt's Facing Death, screening Thursday, spends so much time on the facts of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross' life that it short-shrifts her theories. Best known for identifying the five stages of grief in her 1969 book On Death and Dying, Kübler-Ross revolutionized the popular approach to mortality, shedding light on the darkest of times. She made death seem natural, approachable, to the point where her sister Eva here accuses her of "glorifying" it. As Kübler-Ross lies dying in her Arizona retreat, the film's narrator accuses the media of drawing a facile connection between her work and her apparent hesitation to accept her own death — an equation the movie replicates by lingering on deathbed interviews in which Kübler-Ross slips from English to Swiss German and back again.

Even more elusive is Thomas Pynchon, the subject of Donatello and Fosco Dubini's A Journey into the Mind of P. , screening Friday. Since the facts of his life are barely known, the press-shy author is less the subject of the Dubinis' doc than a pretext for conspiracy theories and over-interpretations. Far too much time is lavished on Pynchon buffs who seem less like devoted scholars than obsessed fans. One unironically proclaims that his prized copies of Pynchon's personal letters give "a sense of the person behind the publishing facade — and it's pretty much the same person." Though it amply documents the appetite engendered by Pynchon's refusal to discuss his own work or make his biography available for study, the film never questions that hunger. Which is to say, why can't we let an artist who so obviously wants his work to speak for itself have his wish? The more it digresses into onanistic speculation (theorizing, for example, that Pynchon and Lee Harvey Oswald might have taken the same bus to Mexico in 1962), the more Journey makes Pynchon's abstention seem like the sanest act in the world.