The ambitious curators behind the Coolidge Corner’s Balagan film and video series, Alla Kovgan and Jeff Silva, scour the world in pursuit of worthy experimental shorts. They have screened works from Russia and Israel, Austria and Allston-Brighton. Next Thursday, December 5, at 8 p.m., their voyage will take them to Islamic countries for an unusual program called "Arabian Nights," with non-narrative works from Lebanon, Morocco, and Iran. One film made by a Palestinian is set in Tel-Aviv, another by an Arab filmmaker in the hostile USA.

"Arabian Nights" opens in postmodernity with "The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs?", from Lebanon’s Walid Ra’ad. This three-part essay deals with the Lebanese civil wars (1975-1991) in an opaque way: by telling of Lebanese historians who spend their time making wagers at the horse track, and of one prominent historian who after a divorce retired to his bed to watch tapes of his lectures and to arrange, and rearrange, his son’s bullet collection. We’re given to understand that the horrors of the world cannot be articulated by those who claim academic/intellectual/patriarchal authority.

The most troubling works of "Arabian Nights" are two austere videos directed by, and featuring, Souheil Bachar. This Arab videomaker was held in solitary confinement in Beirut from 1983 to 1993, except for 27 weeks when he was shoved into a tiny cell with five kidnapped Americans including Terry Anderson and Thomas Sutherland.

Since 1999, Bachar has collaborated on videotapes about his hostage experience with the Atlas Group, which describes itself as "a non-profit cultural research foundation based in Lebanon." Suffice to say that George W. would be shouting "al-Qaeda" if he saw these two volatile tapes (Nos. 17 and 31 out of 53). Bachar has nothing to say about his Lebanese captives. His wrath is aimed at the five Americans, who, he alleges, were paranoid about touching one another and yet were obsessed with having sex with him and with their Arab abductors. One night, he claims, he felt an American penis pushing at his thighs. The message is that Americans are decadent infidels, even anointed heroes like Terry Anderson.

There’s one lightweight work in the collection, Saeed Tarazi’s "Deadtime," a montage of Iranians caught in a Tehran traffic jam. Where’s the illumination? A far more potent, and controversial, car-set movie is Tawfik Abu Wa’el’s "Diary of a Male Whore," in which a Palestinian trick masturbates in the shotgun seat while an Israeli john watches from behind the steering wheel. More troubling stuff: a flashback to the male hooker’s childhood, where an Israeli soldier — Islamic propaganda? — rapes his mother on camera.

"My Beard Forever" was unavailable for preview. Afif Arabi’s film is about how fingers were being pointed at Arabs residing in America after the Oklahoma City bombing but long, long before September 11.

EYAL SIVAN’S Adolph Eichmann: The Specialist, which screens this Wednesday, December 4, at the Harvard Film Archive, is painfully important, a two-hour edit of footage shot by American documentarian Leo Hurwitz during Eichmann’s infamous 1961 trial in Israel. You are there watching the man in the glass booth explain again and again how he was a friend of the Jews and how he supported a plan to send them all to Palestine. But his "idealism" (Eichmann’s word) was shattered when his Nazi superiors said no. What choice did he have? From that moment, he followed orders. He was a "specialist" in transporting people, sending Jews to the death ovens of Auschwitz.

What’s it like seeing this killer of millions up close? I think it calls into question "the banality of evil," the famous phrase with which Hannah Arendt described Eichmann’s actions. He’s more than a mediocre-minded bureaucrat. He’s "Adolf 2: The Devil Incarnate."

THE BRATTLE’S "THE ’80S ARE BACK!" series goes early John Cusack this Tuesday, December 3, with the pleasantly daffy teen comedy Better Off Dead (1985). Young John contemplates suicide, even though he’s never been to New York City. He’s been dumped by his bitchy girlfriend ("It’s nothing, we’re only losing our virginity," she protests over his under-the-cover fidgeting), who’s leaving him for the blond ski-team captain. Fortunately, Cusack has that fabulous ’80s beatnik actor Curtis Armstrong (Revenge of the Nerds) as his drug-obsessed nonconformist pal. And there’s the possibility of a rebound romance with a French exchange student. Better Off Dead was made by the inspiringly named school-of-John-Hughes filmmaker Savage Steve Holland.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com