Brooklyn Underground Film Festival Weds.Sun., April 20-24 For more than four ...

round Film Festival

Weds.?Sun., April 20-24

For more than four decades, Alan Abel has operated under a wide variety of names: G. Clifford Prout, Dr. Herbert Strauss, Omar Rockford, Harrison Rogers. He has also championed a motley stew of causes: clothing nude animals, the consumption of human hair, laws against public breast-feeding, euthanasia cruises, a school for Manhattan panhandlers.

Every one of these was a hoax perpetrated by Abel and his wife Jeanne, intended to fleece a gullible media and a public that feasts on outrageous stories. With Abel hardly a household name, his daughter Jenny (along with Jeff Hockett) has directed Abel Raises Cain, a film that gives her father a long-delayed moment in the sun.

Opening this year's Brooklyn Underground Film Festival (which also includes Home, directed by my New York Press colleague Matt Zoller Seitz), Abel Raises Cain is a lively, bittersweet portrait of the master prankster's career, including his diminished golden years. Providing a tour of Abel's greatest stunts-including staging Idi Amin's wedding to a Jewish girl from Long Island and a fake Richard Nixon interview film-Abel Raises Cain also follows Alan and Jeanne as they travel the country after losing their Connecticut home. Such are the rewards for a lifetime of bucking the system, but the Abels have lost none of their itch to prick the pomposities of American life. Alan's hilarious pranks, and his remarkable ability to appear on television and straight-facedly utter the most outrageous nonsense, makes him the secret, great character actor of our time.

Caroline Martel's The Phantom of the Operator approaches the media history of the 20th century from a different angle, taking its found footage from an unlikely source: American and Canadian industrial films produced by telephone companies. Are human telephone operators, today a dying breed, a worthy metaphor for alienation in the modern world? The film seems to think so, but Phantom emits a faintly musty odor, like a rotary phone that's spent one year too many in the closet.

Alan Zweig's I, Curmudgeon is to be applauded for allowing its interview subjects to condemn practically everything under the sun while capturing the depth of their contrarian impulses. Zweig's personal tete-a-tetes with the camera, in which he explores the disappointments and rejections that burnished his dyspeptic attitude, are illuminating and moving.

Brooklyn Lyceum, 227 4th Ave. (Union St.), Park Slope, www.brooklynlyceum.com