Ariane Mnouchkine

The fall has been unseasonably warm. At the Cartoucherie, a former bullet factory in the woods of Vincennes that serves as home base to Le Theatre du Soleil, chestnuts litter the ground and a gray sun peers from behind the clouds.

The fall has been unseasonably warm. At the Cartoucherie, a former bullet factory in the woods of Vincennes that serves as home base to Le Theatre du Soleil, chestnuts litter the ground and a gray sun peers from behind the clouds.

Alexander Mnouchkine, 85, the French film producer who headed France's film academy. During his six-decade career, he produced films such as "That Man From Rio" and "Babette S'en Va-t'en Guerre" ("Babette Goes to War"), which launched actress Brigitte Bardot as an international star. He began making movies in 1932 and created Ariane Films in 1945. He was the father of Ariane Mnouchkine, creator and director of the avant-garde Theatre du Soleil.

Jacques Lecoq, the French mime master and teacher of the art of expressive gesture and actions, has died. He was 77 and died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Paris on Jan. 19. Because he rarely performed in public, Lecoq was not as famous as Marcel Marceau and Etienne Ducroux, French pantomimists who are well known in that country and around the world.

With its repertory of "The Seagull" and "Mephisto," the Actors' Gang isn't messing around. Both are large-cast affairs of extreme difficulty--contrasting studies in the psychic breakdown of an artist, one oblique in its societal criticism, the other blunt, befitting its Nazi Germany backdrop.

If an American director who admired Peter Brook's work set out to do his own version of Brook's production of "The Mahabharata" at a small Los Angeles theater, one would wish him good luck, while entertaining some doubts about the project. The same doubts attend Paul Verdier's English-language premiere of Ariane Mnouchkine's "1789" at the Las Palmas Theatre. Verdier's intentions are utterly honorable, and his production, within its limits, is not a disgrace.

One of the more intriguing things about Euripides' "Bacchae" is the latitude for interpretation that it presents. Written late in life, when Euripides was self-exiled in Macedonia, and therefore at a time of personal discontent, the play can be seen in any number of ways: as a general reaction against authority, as a war between fundamentalism and liberalism, between one side of a personality and another, between men and gods (read man and his fate).

In the wake of Le Theatre du Soleil's astonishing appearances at the Olympic Arts Festival, more than one observer wondered when the first home-grown imitation of Ariane Mnouchkine's Orientalized Shakespeare would pop up. That moment has now arrived. Reza Rory Abdoh's staging of "King Lear" has Mnouchkine written all over it (except in the program). It's a Mnouchkine mnemonic--a way of remembering the French director's techniques.

Invaluable quite on its own, the film of the Theatre du Soleil's epic theater piece "1789" is an event of special meaning for anyone who saw Ariane Mnouchkine's electrifying French company during the Olympic Arts Festival. In addition to its other virtues, the film (opening Friday for one week at the Fox International) is a little memoir of the company.

Since it's often claimed that the greatest loss in the history of the cinema is the 32 reels that Metro cut from Erich Von Stroheim's "Greed" (1923), it is important to remember that the 10 that remain were enough to get it voted as one of the 12 best films of all time by an international jury at the Brussels Exposition of 1958. As tragic as the fate of "Greed" was, it remains, even in truncated form, timelessly dazzling.

Celebrating International Women's Month, the Fox International will present from Friday through March 14 a festival of films made by women. (Most of the screenings will be local premieres.) Launching the series on Friday will be the world premiere of actress-director Lee Grant's "What Sex Am I?," a sensitive, harrowing yet candid documentary on transsexuals and transvestites, at once poignant and astonishingly revealing.