NEW YORK: Positif, affectionately known as "the other French film magazine" for its often confrontational stance in regard to the institution that is Cahiers du Cinema, has its say about that matters in the American indie canon with "Mavericks and Outsiders: Positif Celebrates American Cinema", January 30 - February 5. The program, curated by the magazine's longtime editor Michel Climent, includes such cultish provocations as James Toback's directorial debut Fingers (1978); Paul Schrader's working-man dirge Blue Collar (1978); the living-tabloid The Honeymoon Killers (1970), the sole directing job by Leonard Kastle (who took over from the original hire, Martin Scorsese); Wanda (1971), a character drama written and directed by its star, Barbara Loden, a heartbreakingly gifted actress perhaps better known for having been married to Elia Kazan; the presecient my-camera-ate-my-life mock-documentary David Holzman's Diary (1967); and the little-seen 1989 Reunion, starring Jason Robards and directed by Jerry Schatberg from a script by Harold Pinter. Climent will introduce many of the screenings and also host discussions with such special guests as Toback and director Larry Clark.

If all that only serves to whet your appetite for vintage American indies, The Panic in the Needle Park, the 1971 New York City junkie drama that boasts Al Pacino's first starring role, checks into the Film Forum for a week starting today. Directed by the aforementioned Jerry Schatzberg, from a script by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, and produced by Dunne's brother (and Didion's brother-in-law) Dominick Dunne before he began his own writing career, the movie is a well-made downer that has special historical value for its location shooting, which captures Fun City at its most rat-infested and raggedy--and which is augmented by an impressively grungy-looking supporting cast that includes Richard Bright, Raul Julia, Kiel Martin, Warren Finnerty, Joe Santos, Alan Vint, Marcia Jean Kurtz, Sully Boyar, and a tubby young Paul Sorvino in a bit as a cop--and of course for the first starring movie appearance by Pacino, 31 years old and a year away from The Godfather. He plays a scuffling heroin addict who falls in love with a young slummer played by Kitty Winn and sucks her into his vortex. The movie played at the Cannes Film Festival, where, surprisingly, it was Winn who came home with a prize for her performance. She would go on to play the assistant of the mother of the possessed little girl in both The Exorcist and Exorcist II: The Heretic, and disappear from the radar a few years later.

Douglas Sirk's 1950's films Magnificent Obsession and Imitation of Life would go on to win him a high-toned critical reputation as some kind of subversive master of stormy, hyperbolic melodrama and an inspiration to later filmmakers ranging from Fassbinder to Todd Haynes. Meanwhile, the older studio director John M. Stahl is known as, well, somebody who made a batch of movies that were later remade by Douglas Sirk. (In addition to the original Magnificent Obsession and Imitation of Life, Stahl directed the 1939 When Tomorrow Comes, which Sirk remade in 1957 as Interlude. But many old-movie lovers maintain that Stahl's originals are unself-conscious, well-wrought classics that have been unfairly overshadowed by Sirk's versions, and Anthology Film Archives is giving viewers a rare chance to compare them side by side with screenings this weekend of all six movies. Just on the basis of the on-screen talent, the 1934 Imitation, co-starring Claudette Colbert and the great black actress Louise Beavers, may have a clear edge.