Among the more valuable holdings of the Harvard Film Archive is the Grove Press Collection, artifacts of the ’60s and ’70s that resulted when the publishing pioneer of Off Broadway drama (Genet, Ionesco) and Beat-and-banned literature (Henry Miller, Lady Chatterly’s Lover) wandered into film distribution. The movies complemented the literary works: diatribes challenging censorship, left-wing and avant-garde narratives. Too bad that so many HFA prints have got scratched and turned into one-color magenta weeping for restoration, because "Uncensored: Selections from the Grove Press Collection," which runs this Friday through Wednesday, February 7 through 12, is one interesting series.

Grove Press’s titanic publisher, Barney Rosset, will introduce a splendid triple bill this Friday at 7 p.m. Stan Vanderbeek’s "Science Friction" (1959) is a stop-action, high-voltage short using magazine cutouts to satirize the Ike-versus-Khrushchev space race. Alan Schneider’s "Film" (1965), with a screenplay by Samuel Beckett, is a silent minimalist semi-comedy featuring the sublime Buster Keaton as an old man residing in an eroding apartment with a rocking chair, pets, and photos that indicate (like Krapp’s tapes) an earlier and perhaps better life. And Robert Downey’s "Chafed Elbows" (1966) is a one-hour barrage of Mad magazine puns and visual jokes concerning a passive young man (George Morgan) who’s having an affair with his scraggy-looking mother (Elsie Downey). The movie meanders wherever, past a shoe fetishist and an underground-movie set; it ends with a hilarious Black Power rap mimicking LeRoi Jones.

Screening later that same evening, at 9:30 p.m., is Freedom To Love (1969), in which sexologists Eberhard and Phyllis Kronhausen rail against strictures on sexual expression. There are wretched snippets from scandalous dramas of the day (including Michael McClure’s The Beard) and predictable interviews with sexuality spokespersons like Hugh Hefner. One high-quality minute: a pub talk with the great British drama critic Kenneth Tynan, who says, "Call me conservative," because he appreciates erotic art that provokes an erection.

I haven’t seen Vilgot Sjöman’s I Am Curious (Yellow) (1967; February 8 at 7 p.m.) for decades, but I recall waiting through wearisome scenes of Swedish pseudo-sociology to arrive at a few glimpses of pornography. Even those were gone from the more-boring follow-up, I Am Curious (Blue) (1968; February 8 at 9:30).

The best film in the series is probably Titicut Follies (1967; February 9 at 7 p.m.), Frederick Wiseman’s documentary masterpiece about screwed-up real life in a Massachusetts mental institution. It makes Girl, Interrupted seem, as the cliché goes, like Mary Poppins.

Frank Simon’s The Queen (1968; February 9 at 9 p.m.) was, in its time, a first look for many aghast Americans at female impersonators. It climaxes in a beauty pageant with amazing judges: Andy Warhol, Terry Southern, Larry Rivers, Edie Sedgwick. Was Truman Capote out of town?

I didn’t see Susan Sontag’s Duet for Cannibals (1969; February 10 at 7 p.m.), Mary Ellen Bute’s Passages from Finnegans Wake (1965; February 10 at 9 p.m.), or Gabriel Axel’s Danish Blue (1970: February 11 at 9 p.m.). This last one plays with a terrific vintage porno short, "Getting His Goat" (1922), which is far sexier than I Am Curious (Yellow). L’homme qui ment/The Man Who Lies (February 11 at 7 p.m.) is an anti-novel Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge in which a man (Jean-Louis Trintignant) fleeing the Nazis is shot dead but then wakes up and lives, inventing conflicting stories about who he is. Sometimes he’s a Resistance hero, sometimes he’s a Nazi collaborator, as he alternately brags and confesses to foxy women. It’s a cryptic film from French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet — which means it’s about "time and memory."

Finally, the Grove Press series settles on Jean-Luc Godard in his post-1968 Marxist-Leninist period, when with Jean-Pierre Gorin he formed the Dziga-Vertov collective in the service of the Revolution. Vladimir et Rosa (1971; February 12 at 7 p.m.) is for its first hour a lively, formally inventive take on the notorious Chicago 7 Trial of American anti-war activists, and it includes a brilliant interlude in which a guy and a girl activist argue, male/female, about women’s liberation. It gets as icy as the husband-wife spiff in Godard’s Le mépris/Contempt. Godard in America (1970; February 12 at 9 p.m.) is a 40-minute documentary in which Godard and Gorin cross America trying to raise money (unsuccessfully) for a film in support of the Palestinians. Godard, a rhetoric machine, actually smiles twice. Playing with it is See You at Mao/British Sounds (1969), which is for believers only: Chinese Red Guard members and advanced Godardians.

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