Free art-related films will be screened at the Harris Theater, Downtown, during the next week courtesy of Pittsburgh Filmmakers in conjunction with the Three Rivers Arts Festival. A list of all 10 ran in Thursday’s PG (read it here).

Following are reviews of three films:

One exploring secret, private and public collections of erotic art.

Another recalling the feminist art movement, which challenged the secret power structures that excluded women’s art from prestigious national conversations.

And the third, a sleeper that may be the best offering of all, visiting contemporary origami from elementary classrooms to university offices.

3 stars = Good Ratings explained

There are two major audiences for director Lynn Hershman Leeson’s “!Women Art Revolution”: Feminists who were involved in the 1960s activist movement that demanded gender equity in arts institutions, and young female artists born after the struggles documented here.

But this historically rich, well-made film also speaks within the broader context of the re-evaluation of the social contract in the U.S., when racial, class and gender equality were on the table, as was the unpopular Vietnam War.

In 1966, Ms. Hershman Leeson borrowed a camera and began filming people who stopped by her Berkeley living room. Then she forgot about the footage, which had been stored in boxes in her studio, until 2004. Partly because she’s a filmmaker (“Teknolust,” “Conceiving Ada,” “Strange Culture”) and partly because she has a conscience, she began to look for the story inside that raw footage. She wanted to honor the women, she says of the film, who introduced the concepts of social protest, collaboration and public art that addressed the political imperatives of social justice and civil rights.

The film’s on-the-spot segments from the director’s own files provide a rawness and intimacy often missing from newsy researched works. It’s also very personal, with much of the material reading more like conversation than interview.

Represented are seminal voices such as the Guerrilla Girls and artists Judy Chicago, Faith Ringgold, Carolee Schneemann, Miriam Schapiro, Rachel Rosenthal and Howardena Pindell.

Ms. Hershman Leeson includes film of these individuals from the 1960s to recent years, offering immediacy as well as reflection. She captured the emotive, intellectual and political, through those interviewed, performance works and protests.

The film is of significance as reminder and as record, incorporating priceless archival material and making historians aware of more that is extant. Ms. Hershman Leeson says that she debated whether to include her own artwork but decided to do so to avoid continuing the legacy of omission. It was a good choice, as she is witness and participant as well as documentarian, one of a chorus of voices that will eventually, as with World War II soldiers and others who represent a specific era, be gone. (2010, 83 min.)

Not rated but contains nudity, lewd language

7:15 p.m. today and Saturday

3 stars = Good Ratings explained

There are ample naked and cavorting figures in “Secret Museums” but the real subject matter of Peter Woditsch’s provocative film is the arbitrary line between acceptance and condemnation of such imagery.

Viewers may be surprised to learn how prevalent erotic art has been throughout history, and that is Mr. Woditsch’s point. That discovery is surprising mainly because such art has generally been hidden away in private collections or locked museum vaults.

However, just as he makes a convincing case that seclusion prevails, he wryly shows that eroticism is all around us in our culture palaces.

The film begins with collectors whose passion for knowledge and the hunt parallels that of collectors of less controversial objects. It moves to public collections accessed only by prearranged permission for scholarly use, and takes a side trip to the Vatican, which interviewees claim has the world’s largest collection of pornography.

Mr. Woditsch concludes by presenting explicit examples of not just nudity but erotica “laid bare, unchecked and in full view” in some of the globe’s most prestigious museums.

Touched upon are issues of censorship, power, gender and the importance of preserving such works as manifestations of their period. But central is that the way sexuality is perceived varies by culture, time and individual, and that the line is constantly shifting.

I’d like to have seen more on household-name artists such as Picasso, who was featured, and on original patrons. Also, this Belgian film concerns itself only with Western art history, but it would have been counterproductive to try to squeeze anything more into this solid overview of such a wide-reaching subject. (2008, 77 min.)

Not rated but contains nudity and sexuality. Some subtitles.

9 tonight; 5:30 p.m. Saturday

3 1/2 stars = Very good Ratings explained

This informative and delightful look at origami in the 21st century dissolves all preconceptions about the traditional Japanese art of paper folding, from complicated artworks such as a dragon with approximately 1,000 scales that took hundreds of hours to fold, to industrial applications such as the design of air bags.

Homage is paid to Akira Yoshizawa (1911-2005), dubbed the father of contemporary paper folding, who was self-taught and left a factory job to devote himself to his art. Paper first became sculpture in his hands, the film says, crediting him with developing such techniques as “wet folding,” during which the paper is kept wet while working.

Artists in the U.S. and abroad discuss how they’ve pushed the edges of the form to more unexpected and complex realistic works, and how they’ve sometimes retrenched, simplifying and turning to abstraction. Each piece derives from a single square. No scissors, tape or glue is used.

Artist and papermaker Michael LaFosse calls paper folding a “metamorphic process,” noting that one doesn’t add or take away material, as one would do in traditional sculpture. “You change it.”

Erik Demaine, the youngest professor ever hired by M.I.T., says that “when you put a crease in a sheet of paper, you’re essentially changing the memory of that piece.” The film credits him as the top origami theorist in the world, and he won a MacArthur “genius award” for his research in folding.

Physicists and mathematicians have been lured by the insights to be gained, and three-dimensional objects are often preceded by diagrams and computer models.

Tom Hull, a mathematician at Merrimack College in North Andover, Mass., holds up a large square of paper, folded into many concentric squares. When he sets it upon a table, it settles into a bulgy, much changed shape. “When it’s collapsed down, it looks like it wants to form a hyperbolic paraboloid,” the smiling professor says.

Others foresee application in space, biology, nanotechnology and the design of new drugs.

A far cry from the elegant cranes that two decades ago were the origami norm. But still refreshingly beautiful, emanating from the hand. (2008, 56 min.)

Not rated. All ages, no restrictions.

3 p.m. Sunday; 6:30 p.m. Wednesday

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