Ross McElwee's Bright Leaves probably wasn't one of the more widely viewed films of 2003. Not that a documentary about McElwee's family’s connection to tobacco production would have been intended for a wide audience.

One thing the film does is provide a lively introduction to the voluble film scholar Vlada Petric. In a short but memorable sequence, Petric sits McElwee down in a wheelchair and rolls him around a permanent film set in Winston-Salem, N.C., schooling the young documentarian all the while on the finer points of cinema. Not that I'm a film scholar, but it's hard to imagine a better film scene about filmmaking. McElwee had the good sense to act as Petric’s straight man and ask such questions as “Is this really necessary?” Petric’s answers are priceless.

“I like unnecessary things,” he says in his thick, Eastern European accent (Petric was born and grew up in Yugoslavia), “because only from unnecessary things in art you can expect something unexpectedly to occur, something special.” The tortured syntax sounds better coming from Petric than it does on the page.

Upper Valley cinephiles can hear Petric in person on Monday, March 30, 7 p.m., at Hanover's Howe Library. Petrich, founder of the Harvard Film Archive, will talk about his friend and teacher Slavko Vorkapich.

Although Vorkapich was one of the first people to combine both the practice and theory of cinema into a single career, and was justly celebrated for his experimental films, he is best known for the montage sequences he created for Hollywood films in the 1930s. Petric will talk about the theories underlying Vorkapich's experimental film The Life and Death of 9413, A Hollywood Extra.

Petric didn't just push Ross McElwee around in a wheelchair. He duct-taped a couple of skinny pieces of lumber to the arms of the wheelchair and pushed McElwee backward through the film set, giving McElwee both a low point of view for his camera, and movement.

“Why are you pushing me in a wheelchair, Vlada?” McElwee asked, sounding a bit distressed. McElwee wanted to interview Petric to get his opinion on Bright Leaf, a Hollywood melodrama that tells the story of McElwee's great grandfather, who made a fortune as the founder of Bull Durham tobacco, then lost it all.

“Well,” Petric says, “I want it to be kinesthetic. That's the most important thing. My quote unquote theory of cinema is that everything must be kinesthetic and not only because to move, but that movement has somehow to reveal, expand and enhance what we're doing.” The audience should feel as if it’s being moved along, the movement in service to the narrative, “what Vorkapich called ‘kinesthesia,'” Petric said.

As usual, Bruce Posner, the man behind the Howe's Cine Salon series, will screen a handful of short films or clips, in this case of Vorkapich's work and of Petric’s Symphony of Hands, a 10-minute tribute to Vorkapich.

Admission to Cine Salon is free. Petric's talk is cosponsored by Dartmouth's Department of Film and Media Studies.