We've drawn tonight from the Library of Congress' ongoing preservation efforts for two 1947 features in a fascinatingly contradictory genre-the open-air film noir. Shunning rain-drenched pavements and dark alleyways, The Red House and Out of the Past are peopled with tortured types for whom the countryside proves no haven from buried sins. Perhaps its dull title as much as its generic rural setting accounts for the inexplicable obscurity of The Red House, ignored even by admirers of its writer-directer Delmer Daves. And no doubt the schoolboy Freudianism of incestuous jealousies can be laughable if one doesn't fall in with the old dark house spirit, the dank woods and screams in the night. Edward G. Robinson, limpid eyes gleaming, gives a great understated performance as a reclusive farmer settled in with his steely sister Judith Anderson and their adopted daughter-until a wholesome hired hand stirs up the past. Miklos Rozsa, at his best with such overwrought material, provides a lush score to counterpoint Bert Glennon's crisply dark cinematography. If it's not a great noir, The Red House is at least a thoroughly mad one, worthy of Edgar Ulmer on a doubled budget. To open tonight's two shows, we've settled on favorite silent shorts from among this year's new Library of Congress preservation. The First Circus, color-tinted silhouette animation from 1921, looks like the Barnum-and-Darwin show and was well described by Moving Picture World as "the most artistic bit of fooling around so far devised for the screen." Scott Simmon