It is a South Florida tradition: With late August come tropical storms, Dolphins pre-season games and the Rewind/Fast Forward Film and Video Festival.

Presented each year by the Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archives, the festival is a late-summer movie season tonic for multiplex-weary souls. Working from its central mission of celebrating Florida's history as seen via film and video, the festival presents an eclectic series of events and screenings of classic films, often presented in beautifully restored prints.

This year, there is 1956's The Girl Can't Help It (8 tonight, The Colony Theater), a rollicking, eye-popping musical shot in the ultra-wide Cinemascope format. Directed by Frank Tashlin, a former animator for Warner Brothers and Walt Disney, the movie has the breakneck pace and humor of a cartoon, along with the lush colors and vibrant images to match.

Edmond O'Brien stars as a gangster intent on turning his bombshell girlfriend (Jayne Mansfield) into a star. Mansfield, never more statuesque or beautiful, struts and shimmies like an early incarnation of Madonna. The soundtrack includes performances by Little Richard, Eddie Cochran, Fats Domino and the Platters, all of whom appear in the film. The movie is ridiculous, rocking good fun, and its larger-than-life images demand to be seen on a big screen.

So do the images of 1965's Major Dundee (7 p.m. Sunday, Colony), which arrives on a freshly restored print containing previously deleted scenes. This was Sam (The Wild Bunch) Peckinpah's first stab at big-budget Hollywood filmmaking, and the director lost control of the project after going over budget while filming in Mexico.

Released to theaters in a shortened version Peckinpah disowned, this new 135-minute cut features found footage that comes closer to recreating his original vision. Set during the waning days of the Civil War, the movie stars Charlton Heston as the eponymous hero, a Union officer leading a seriously ragtag group of men (including James Coburn, Warren Oates, Slim Pickens, Jim Hutton and Richard Harris), several of them war prisoners, on a mission to rescue two boys kidnapped by Apaches in New Mexico.

Marked by several battle setpieces that rank alongside Peckinpah's best work, Major Dundee still feels vaguely unfinished. Dundee seems too two-dimensional and stoic, for example, for a Peckinpah hero, but this new cut elevates the film's status within the director's body of work. And the stunning vistas cinematographer Sam Leavitt (A Star is Born, Carmen Jones) captures deserve to be seen projected onto a big screen. Thanks to the Rewind/Fast Forward Film and Video Festival, we'll have a rare opportunity to do so this weekend.

Here is the complete schedule for the Rewind/Fast Forward Film and Video Festival, which runs through Sunday.

Admission is free unless otherwise noted. For more information, visit wolfsonarchive.org or call 305-375-3505

FRIDAY

8 p.m. The Girl Can't Help It, Colony Theatre, 1040 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach; $10.

SATURDAY

10 a.m.Cut, Scratch, Splice and Spool: The Workshop, Miami-Dade Public Library, Main Auditorium, 101 W. Flagler St., Miami; Hands-on workshop for teenagers and their adult guardians in which participants will make their own short films by scratching, bleaching and manipulating film stock and found footage. The finished films will be screened on Sunday. $20 (registration required; visit wolfsonarchive.org for details).

4 p.m.Painting with Connie Gordon LIVE! at the Miami Beach Public Library, 227 22nd St.; The popular artist and art teacher hosts an In-Person Paint Party with her patented method of art instruction, even for those who have never held a paint brush before. $10 (registration required).

7:30 p.m. Video Art South Florida Redux, Bass Museum of Art, 2121 Park Ave., Miami Beach; A ''repremiere'' screening of Victor Velt's digitally restored 1983 survey of 10 independent video works made by local artists; $10 (includes reception).

SUNDAY

1 p.m. Cut, Scratch, Splice and Spool: The Screening, Historical Museum of Southern Florida, 101 W. Flagler St., Miami; screening of the films produced at Saturday's workshop.

3 p.m. Invasion of the Historians: Interama-O-Rama, the Inside Story; Historical Museum, Miami; local historian Paul George explores the story behind the grand 1960s swindle of a futuristic fair organizers promised would be built in Miami.

7 p.m. Major Dundee, Colony Theatre; $10.

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