Turning alienation into art has long been a boffo European pastime, but while malaise works on the page, screen boredom can get boring. It hasn't stopped filmmakers from trying, of course, as indicated by two similar new tapes. More rarefied and satisfying is 1983's In The White City, which tells of a Swiss ship's mechanic (the wonderfully guileless Bruno Ganz) gone physically and emotionally AWOL in a spectral Lisbon. It's the kind of sl-o-o-ow, meditative art release that collects dust on the bottom of video-store shelves, but if you can slow down your metabolism and just watch, Alain Tanner's oblique style yields torrents of blue pleasure. A-
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