Be Sand, Not Oil: A Tribute to Amos Vogel (Tue., Oct. 18-Thu., Oct. 20, 7 p.m., $7, International House, 3701 Chestnut St, 215-895-6545) "The cinema," Amos Vogel wrote in 1974, "is a place of magic, where psychological and environmental factors combine to create an openness to wonder and suggestion, an unlocking of the unconscious." Such openness is hard to come by these days, in the cinema or anywhere else, but it lives on in Vogel's Film as a Subversive Art, which DAP has laudably brought back into print after many years of unavailability.

The founder and programmer of the legendary New York film society Cinema 16, which ran from 1947 to 1963, Vogel went on to cofound the New York Film Festival and later taught at the Annenberg School for many years. (For an overview, see Cover Story, "Rebel Yell," April 8, 2004.) A prelude to next weekend's "Penn Film & Media Pioneers" conference, International House's three-day tribute, "Be Sand, Not Oil," features Paul Cronin's affectionate documentary portrait (a reprise from the 2004 Philadelphia Film Festival) as well as a healthy assortment of the films Vogel showed and taught. Although health concerns forced the cancellation of Vogel's last Philadelphia visit, he and his wife, Marcia, are scheduled to appear with Cronin on Tuesday night.

In retrospect, it's clear that Vogel was at once programmer and pedagogue; Cinema 16 folded for many reasons, but one was a revolt sparked by Vogel's refusal to program or distribute works he considered inferior, even by filmmakers he had supported in the past. The abrasive approach reflected in the title of I-House's three-day tribute extended not just to Vogel's choice of films — which ran from the poetic slaughterhouse documentary Blood of the Beasts to the notorious Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew — but his programming style, which might find the latest in experimental film on a bill with a documentary about ants in equatorial South America. The idea was to produce conflict in the manner of Sergei Eisenstein's montage, forcing audiences to rethink their comfortable categorizations.

So it is, too, with Film as a Subversive Art, which eschews standard taxonomies in favor of provocative thematic clusters: A still from Robert Bresson's Pickpocket shares a spread with Buñuel's Belle de Jour and a Mae West clinch from She Done Him Wrong, all grouped under the heading, "Erotic and Pornographic Cinema." The lavishly illustrated book, which is as much fun to browse as is it to read, consistently throws up such surprising comparisons: Turn the page from the eye-slicing scene in Un Chien Andalou and you'll find King Kong's head starting back at you.

The three programs in "Be Sand, Not Oil" don't have quite as wide a wingspan, but they're full of unique and rarely screened short works. Cronin's documentary, also called Film as a Subversive Art, shares a bill with three short subjects. Weegee's New York, the only film directed by the legendary crime photographer, is a surprisingly sunny portrait of downtown Manhattan and Coney Island, edited by Vogel himself. Bruce Conner's Cosmic Ray mingles footage of fireworks, A-bombs, Mickey Mouse and nude dancing girls, although the blistering barrage of imagery (some 2,000 images in four minutes) is overpowered by the soundtrack: a live version of Ray Charles' "What'd I Say." Also on the bill, though not screened in advance, is Living in a Reversed World, a brief documentary about the results of a psychological experiment in which subjects wore special glasses reversing right and left.

Vogel called Bernardo Bertolucci's Before the Revolution, screening Wednesday, "a shamelessly passionate, intensely personal statement of political and sexual coming of age," and labeled it "perhaps the most germinal work of the new cinema." Filmed when Bertolucci was barely in his 20s, the film set the stage for a career obsessed with the conflict between sexual and political passions and the inescapability of bourgeois birth. If its style seems to belong as much to Bertolucci's mentor Pasolini as the budding auteur himself, the feeling that a sensibility is being born as you watch is still thrilling. (Although the print, like the rest in the series, is 16mm, chances are it's superior to the lousy extant video versions.) The film is preceded by a televised 1963 panel discussion between Vogel, NYFF co-founder Richard Roud, and directors Joseph Losey and Adolfas Mekas, a revealing flashback to a time when the idea that cinema could be a means of personal expression was still under debate.

Although the final night offers the fewest famous names, it's the most indispensable of the three: Composed of 10 shorts split into two hourlong programs, it's packed with visual delights like Francis Thompson's N.Y., N.Y. , a kaleidoscopic, expressionist portrait of life in the big city, and Norman McLaren's Pas de Deux, an enrapturing combination of dance and experimental film in which the lingering afterimage of a body in motion wraps itself in a mystical embrace. Dan McLaughlin's God Is Dog Spelled Backwards crams the history of Western art into three minutes and then informs the viewer, "You are now cultured," while Bruce Conner's A Movie deconstructs itself until there's nothing left.

Among the lesser known works are Elliot Erwitt's Beauty Knows No Pain, a documentary portrait of a Texas cheerleading squad that doubles as a potent, if mildly contemptuous, critique of American conformity, and Gary Beydler's Pasadena Freeway Stills, in which a moving image is manufactured on screen through the use of still photographs placed in a masking-tape frame. By varying the speed and length of his exposures, Beydler goes beyond a facile expose of the means of production to a tantalizing push-pull of forward motion and freeze frames. Gunvor Nelson's Kirsa Nicholina, from 1969, feels like a relic with its graphic footage of a hippie home birth, but Karen Johnson's Orange, from the following year, is still scandalous despite featuring nothing more explicit than extreme close-ups of a navel orange. As fingers and tongue probe its moist insides, the forbidden fruit stirs up all kinds of anatomical resonances and may even cause a few juices to flow. A mere three minutes in length, Orange is a pure, unique delight, and one that certainly fulfills Cinema 16's motto: "Films you cannot see elsewhere."

Misc. Picks: Andrew's Video Vault rolls Death Wish and Ms. 45 (Thu., 8 p.m., The Rotunda). Secret Cinema goes double-hush with "The Secret Secret Cinema," an all-35mm program of the usual rarities (Fri., International House, 8 p.m.). Exhumed Films cues up the second of three October triple bills: Friday the 13th, Part IV; Cat o' Nine Tails; and Alice, Sweet, Alice (Sat., International House, 8 p.m.)