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Filmgoers who are either bewitched or bewildered by the mix of raw emotion and knowing artifice in Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves may want to investigate the director’s even more artfully contrived 1991 film. Set in Germany just after World War II, Zentropa (titled Europa in Europe) follows another naif, an American who finds himself ensnared by a cabal of underground ex-Nazis. The film’s politics are harder to follow than the story, but its effect is—as Max von Sydow’s opening attempt at mass hypnosis promises—mesmerizing. Shot in widescreen black-and-white with occasional glimmers of color (a trick pioneered 25 years earlier by Suzuki Seijun and later lifted by Spielberg), the film is scored to the clack of a hurtling train and defined by the tight enclosures of a sleeping compartment. At 7:15 p.m. Friday, 7 p.m. Saturday, and 3:45 Sunday at the Kennedy Center’s American Film Institute Theater. $6.50. (202) 828-4000. (Mark Jenkins)