For an eleven day stand, starting November 9, the Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood will bulge with movies. Movies in unfamiliar language, usually (the most grating must be Danish, weaving between whine and stutter, seldom hitting a sound on the head), movies from underground, from film schools, from out of the past, from beyond remembrance, and new movies from beyond prior awareness or interest, from film-makers well known and unknown and without a prayer. An ail-day, everyday turnover of movies, each shown only once, to foster the worrying illusion that every one you miss is an opportunity that cannot be regained. All these movies are accumulated under a heading which is printed and pronounced variously as Filmex (could be a new cleansing discovery which no housewife should be without), and known, more lucidly, as the Film Expo, and known, in full feather, as the Second Los Angeles International Film Exposition.

Faced with this lavish layout, San Diego filmgoers — or those among them who are driven-can hardly fail to recognize temptations that cannot be passed up. Especially conisdering the drought which occupies San Diego (the movie page in the Union is just slightly more likely to list an unusual and compelling item than is the menu at Jack in the Box). And considering, too, the conquerable distance dividing San Diego from Los Angeles, that can be crossed in a barely endurable two-hour car ride of impatient, despairing stretches known as Downey and Commerce and Next Services 17 Miles.

The selectivity which must be exercised in covering this massive affair is cued by the "Expo" label, which lumps this film festival with the summer's end affair in Del Mar. (Well, the must-sees are the sad-eyed livestock, and the vaudevillians from Mexico and the Ferris wheel. but can't we bypass the agricultural exhibits, the puppet show, and the caramel apple vendor) In other words, one "expo" operates pretty much like another, and you can't see, or stand. everything.

There are some typical ways by which the shiny urgency of some of the new films is dulled by excessive handling, by predictability, by the certainty of commercial distribution. For instance, the new Bunuel, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, a certain bet to become a cyclical occurrence in art theaters. This coveted nugget has already acquired a hand-me-down pallor from having been circulated through the recent festivals in San Francisco and New York that you've been reading about in Time and Newsweek. Besides, the reviewers along the festival route have dampened curiosity by chanting the prescribed chorus, "the old Spanish master has done it again blah blah." This memorized line barely masks the reviewers' and readers' deep-rooted ho-hum.

There are also a certain number of alluring decoys in the Expo cargo. The film co-directed by Godard and Jean Pierre Gorin (250 words per image) is a stripped down imitation of past Godardisms. An anthology of concepts, chalked-out camera moves, and color combinations that take liberally from Two or Three Things, and scattered bits from La Chinoise, Contempt, Weekend, this and that. In large part, it is made up of direct addresses to the camera by smoothly mannered. incontestably Gallic types (excepting Jane Fonda) acting puckish, acting bulldogish, acting candid, acting righteous. The title is Tout Va Bien. It means Everything's Fine. It is ironical. We catch on to this fact long before the movie even starts; striker's banner unfurled over a meat-packing plant, we see a brightly painted studio set with upper and lower levels, several compartments, and one open side, like a dollhouse, so that we can watch workers in bloodied white aprons charging up and down the stairs, through the halls and the offices. Where, in the past, Godard was a hard man to keep up with, you now feel you are with him, often ahead of him, almost step for step.

Eric Rohmer's Chloe in the Afternoon, sixth in a series of six "moral tales," inevitably will be praised (how light, how refreshing, how cerebral) in an implied comparison to the masses of gut-level movies on the market. But it is an open question whether Rohmer's mystique would have soared so high if his films had been imbibed by American audiences in a context with Rohmer's French cousins, who are unscreened in this country-such "cerebral" moral comedy-makers as Pierre Kast, Michel Deville, Doniol-Valcroze -rather than separated out by arbitrary imp 0 r t a tion whims. Over here, Rohmer has enjoyed a lucky monopoly on this type of movie. His new Chloe panders to his private audience, most obviously, in one astonishingly patronizing scene: an inane dream sequence through which parade all of the adored actresses from the for ego i n g "moral tales." Although vanished from Chloe are the intellectual content, of My Night at Maud's, and the vacation-y climate, of La Collectioneuse and Claire's Knee, Rohmer adheres to the will-he-or-won't-he plot, and the passive gazing at agreeable actors doing elegant gestures (fingers stroking through hair, etc.), doing calm poses on easy chairs, doing lip tricks, pursing, puckering, pouting, smacking. Rohmer's new discovery, a surly fashion model called Zouzou, makes a habit of kissing her cigarette filter on each puff. TI,e key word flit ting through the dialogue is d'accord (all right/okay/fine), which, along with the handclasps , and cheek kisses that introduce numberless scenes. expresses perfectly the lubricated, brainless float of the movie.

These two minor efforts from major personalities are suggestive of the static, insecure conservatism that possesses today's movie scene in general. The vital, bustling production centers and the crowds of director-personalities (new ones born every month). of the early Six ties. have dispersed. What remains is an unsettling, becalmed vista where activity is ran d 0 m and unventuresome; and this condition is mirrored in the current film festivals. The L.A. Expo makes a convenient small-scale replica of the broad situation: its hodgepodge of unknown, unpromising items and a few guaranteed, discussable items from self-repeating directors. In this type of scene, the ravenous filmgoer appears as a somewhat desperate, somewhat loony prospector, sifting through the depleted resources, hoping for an unpredictable, stray find.

1) Rendezvous at Bray, by the Belgian Andre Delvaux, has several affections growing out of its 1917 period: the archaic technical devices, iris-ins and -outs, used as Truffaut used them in Wild Child, to capture an old-fashioned quality; the monochrome oval portraits of the players during the credits, which are lettered in a fancy, formal announcement scroll; the classical music; a well-chosen film clip from Feuillade's Fantomas. But the movie is overwhelming if only in its feeling for setting, so attentive is Delvaux to sounds, to surrounding scenery, to people's postures and gestures which complement, or complete, the location. In its structure, Rendezvous resembles the sort of fiction — rather advanced, rather experimental, rather psychological-which was breaking conventions at the time of Rendezvous's WWI periods.

2) How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman, a Brazilian drollery by Nelson Pereira do. Santos (Barren Lives), uses native cannibalism as a metaphor of European colon i z a t ion: A blond Frenchman of the 16th Century spends several idyllic months in semi-captivity amidst naked primitives (with stunningly lustrous, oily, red-clay skin), before he is devoured in an apropos, passionless, ritual revenge. The beauty of this short, simple film is largely in the colors, fertile and natural colors of blue sky and darker blue sea, of jungle greens, .of a village's straw-c 0 lor e d mound-like dwellings, and of the mobs of unself-conscious skin. The hairless bodies, as smooth and squeezable and resilient as rubber dolls, skitter across sandy beaches in a battle waged with crude spears and bark shields, or glide sleekly through convenient swimming sites, or orbit around a roly-poly tribal chief. The somewhat disjointed flow of images is dazzling for its flexibility, its variance of pictorial fullness, and complexity, and distance.

Other, lesser movies in the festival also attempt to harness natural settings. Barbet Schroeder's The Valley, an exotic blend of Old World adventure and Space Age jadedness, has a band of hippie-types seeking for metaphysical truths on an obsessive journey to New Guinea's terra incognito. Nestor AIendros' photography of plains, jungle, tent interiors, and cloud-shrouded mountain sides caresses the settings for their tactile properties, especially in a big episode where the new French sensation, Bulle Ogier (she appears in four of the Expo presentations), drinks the "liquor of Dionysus" and proceeds to curl, embryo style, into the exposed roots of a giant tree, and crawl along the jungle floor in her bare knees, and drape a lime-green snake around her neck, very unwisely. In The Sudden Fortune of the Poor People of Kombach, Volker Schiondorff has a photogenic German forest, through which his cameras d rift and sprint habitually, causing a landslide of leaves, thin tree trunks, and impressionistic flecks of sunlight across the screen. This meandering in the woods goes on only while a vigilante band from a 15th Century hamlet attempts repeatedly, bunglingly, to rob the royal coach. Once the robbery is accomplished, the photography stabilizes in interior domestic scenes and prison scenes; the black-and-white photography is ravishing, in dank, overcast, middle-range shades of gray that appear to be crafted out of pewter.

3) Don Levy's Herostratus is a long, long 1967 British underground feature, never released commercially in this country, that traffics in all kinds of pent. up violence — physical, verbal, emotional, to say nothing of the violence of Levy's editing. The skeletal story: a failed poet elects to commit suicide and offers the act to an advertising agency to see how they can turn it to profit. Neither Levy nor the advertising characters come up with any coherent inspirations on that problem, but the premise serves as a launch for frustrated property-smashing, yelling, sobbing, pacing, sneering, flailing. The film's power comes from meticulous structuring of emotional ups and downs, louds and softs, darks and lights, which cannot be adequately suggested in telling about it. For example, virtually unwatchable footage of an animal slaughterhouse (an overly familiar cinema-of-cruelty device to begin with) is juxtaposed with footage of a luridly lit stripper (an overly familiar image in itself) and the sum of the two is a pretty familiar idea. But no matter how much brain tells you the devices, and the ideas, in this movie are familiar or contrived or overwrought, your brain will not be able to soothe you into blase repose during this punishing, exhausting movie.