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Buffalo Film Seminars

L'Atalante

Last Tuesday, the Buffalo Film Seminars commenced its 15th series at the Market Arcade Film & Arts Center with a screening of Charlie Chaplin’s 1931 masterpiece, City Lights. The screening began the same way they all have since the series began in January 2000: with an introduction by University at Buffalo professors Diane Christian and Bruce Jackson, who also lead a conversation about the film afterward. The audience comprises 40-odd students enrolled in Christian and Jackson’s class, and a couple hundred more who come to see terrific films on a big screen and to talk about what makes them great.

The schedule for this fall follows (along with selections from other screening series). All shows begin at 7pm. The whole story of the Buffalo Film Seminars is available at its Web site (http://csac.buffalo.edu/bfs.html) and in a beautiful booklet brought out this year that includes illuminating about film as an aesthetic and intellectual experience.

We spoke to Christian and Jackson about the hugely popular series, their film selections and their audience, which includes a host of regulars who rarely miss a screening. The seminars, in fact, have made celebrities of the two UB professors…

Bruce Jackson: People come over to us at Wegmans and they apologize for not coming to a screening, or they continue conversations they started in the theater.

Diane Christian: Or they suggest films.

Artvoice: How do you prepare for a screening?

BJ: We watch the film on DVD and do a lot of reading; Diane does more than I do. We do all the mechanical stuff—prepare the handouts, send out the email—then every week we watch the movie once or twice and we talk about it, so when we go down there we really are pretty well prepared. It looks very casual; it’s not.

Then we have this discussion afterwards, invariably an hour or two hours—and we regularly run into people who say, “We went home afterward and continued talking about it.” So the series does just what it’s supposed to do: It brings movies to a big screen, it brings people downtown to a theater that otherwise wasn’t getting a lot of people downtown, and it puts movies in a context where people can look at them as the useful objects of intellect they in fact are.

AV: How do you choose films?

DC: We try to get 14 or 15 great films over a range of time, starting with silent and usually coming up into the ’80s or occasionally the ’90s, very rarely past 2000; in 2003 we did [Pedro Almodovar’s 2002 film] Talk to Her, because we both loved that film. We try to do things that are various—that is, maybe a screwball comedy, maybe a silent, maybe a Western, maybe a this, maybe a that. Maybe a musical. But we also try to have them be able to talk to each other. Like when we showed M by Fritz Lang—from the ’30s, a spectacular film—we showed Contempt, in which Godard uses Fritz Lang, who plays an old director.

BJ: He plays an old director whose name is Fritz Lang.

DC: Right. But the films are all so rich that any one film, in a sense, can talk to another one.

BJ: Since there is a class at the core, we try in every series to have films in the discussions of which we can talk about what we think are all the key points of filmmaking. We’ll always talk about the film as a film, but one week we might talk about music, one week about editing—there might be a film in which one element is exceptionally good. So without seeming like we’re doing it, in the course of the semester we cover all the essentials of filmmaking. If you come in one week, it’ll seem like we’re talking about just that one film. If you reflect on the 14 or 15 weeks, we will have talked about screenwriting, cinematography, editing, music, acting, locations, directing—we will have covered all of those, but we do it, I think, in a nondidactic way.

DC: But the didactic sense of it—that is, that we have a class at the center of it—is fabulous, because then nobody thinks we’re preaching at them when we say, “Look at this” or “Pay attention here.” I think a lot of people enjoy that, they feel like they’re really learning something.

AV: Do you recall any especially memorable post-film discussions?

DC: Well, when we did Triumph of the Will for the first time, we had a bunch of neo-Nazis sitting in the front row with swastikas tattooed on the backs of their scalps. They freaked out the kids from Amherst.

BJ: The kids in their notebooks wrote, “I watched this film and I thought a lot of this was abstract. And then I looked at the front row and I saw those swastikas tattoed to those skulls and I realized those guys weren’t kidding.” It brought the film right into the present for them.

Intolerance

DC: Normally it’s pretty darn civilized, but after Raging Bull, a guy got up and said, “I hope you’re not going to say some kneejerk, politically correct, liberal thing about him beating up his wife.” And this girl in the class just decked him.

BJ: She tore him a new one. She said, “Yes, I am going to say something about him beating up his wife.”

DC: But mostly we get really smart, complicated responses to stuff. People people make the most perceptive remarks. They surprise us with their acuity. Buffalo has a fabulously smart film audience.

BUFFALO FILM

SEMINARS FALL 2007

September 4:

L’Atalante (1934), directed by Jean Vigo. A beautiful, unsentimental story about a barge pilot and his new wife traveling down the Seine.

September 11:

The Letter (1940), directed by William Wyler. Bette Davis in a noirish story of love, murder and betrayal.

September 18:

The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944), directed by Preston Sturges. Farce about a woman who gets married and pregnant at a party—and can’t remember which soldier is the husband and father.

September 25:

Sansho the Bailiff (Sanshô Dayû) (1954), directed by Kenji Mizoguchi. Classic Japanese film about an exiled governor whose family pays a terrible price for his offenses.

October 2:

Army of Shadows (L’Armée des ombres) (1969), directed by Jean-Pierre Melville. Classic about the French underground, just re-released.

October 9:

Ikiru (1952), directed by Akira Kurosawa. The story of a Japanese bureaucrat, dying of cancer, who spends his last months helping others build a playground.

Full Metal Jacket

October 16:

Closely Watched Trains (1966), directed by Jirí Menzel. Comedy/drama about a young man looking for love in wartime.

October 23:

That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), directed by Luis Buñuel. A story told almost entirely in flashback, leading up to the bizarre opening scene.

October 30:

Aguirre: the Wrath of God (Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes) (1972), directed by Werner Herzog. Conquistadors travel up the Amazon; the characters, like Herzog’s cast and crew, start to go mad.

November 6:

Killer of Sheep (1977), directed by Charles Burnett. A film exploring everyday life Watts in the mid 1970s, a new release of the 1977 classic.

November 13:

Full Metal Jacket (1987), directed by Stanley Kubrick. One of the great Vietnam War films.

November 20:

Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), directed by Woody Allen. Parallel stories about adultery.

November 27:

Divine Intervention (Yadon Ilaheyya) (2002), directed by Elia Suleiman. A rare cinematic glimpse at Palestinian life in the the Occupied Territories.

December 4:

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), directed by Ang Lee. A martial-arts fantasy that Jackson says provides the sort of abstract experience no other medium can. “We like to do at least one musical,” he says. “This is about music.”

SCREENINGS @

Strange Culture

SQUEAKY WHEEL

September 8 @ 8pm:

Intolerance (1916), directed by D.W. Griffith. A free outdoor screening of a 16-millimeter print of this silent epic in the parking lot next to Squeaky Wheel. Live music accompaniment composed and performed by David Kane.

September 20 @ 6:30pm:

Buffalo Youth Media Institute Screening. Thought-provoking videos about Buffalo’s waterfront by Squeaky Wheel students.

October 5th @ 8pm:

Films and videos by Yvonne Buchanan, R.M. Vaughan and Julie Perini. Short work by three contemporary artists.

October 10 @ 8pm:

Open Screening. Show your own work or work-in-progress, less than 15 minutes in length, and hear what folks think.

October 26th @ 8pm:

Filmmaker Jill Johnston-Price in Person. A night of cross-species encounters, surreal journeys and science-fiction-inspired fairytales.

November 2nd @ 8pm:

Filmmaker Deirdre Logue in Person. Toronto-based filmmaker presents two multi-part series of short videos.

November 16th @ 8pm:

Artists-in-Residence Screening. Australian filmmakers Dan Monceaux and Emma Sterling premiere their work Supermarket.

December 1st @ noon:

Channels: Stories from the Niagara Frontier. At Market Arcade, a new program matching documentary filmmakers with grassroots initiatives and groups to collaboratively create documentary films.

Why We Fight

SEPTEMBER

SCREENINGS @ HALLWALLS

September 4 @ 8pm:

FALLING TOGETHER IN NEW ORLEANS (2006). Solo journalist and documentary artist Farrah Hoffmire on grassroots organizing and volunteer efforts after Hurricane Katrina.

September 8 @ 7pm:

STRANGE CULTURE (2007). At Market Arcade, Lynn Hershman Leeson’s critically acclaimed new documentary about Buffalo artist Steven Kurtz. Proceeds benefit the Critical Art Ensemble Trial Fund.

September 14-20:

PUNK’S NOT DEAD (2007). At Market Arcade Film & Arts Centre, Susan Dynner search for the soul of a subculture and celebration all things loud, fast and spiked.

September 20 @ 8pm:

RAW TACTICS OF THE SUBVERSIVE BODY. Work by 20 video makers working with the human body as a form of individual expression.

September 25 @ 7pm:

Why We Fight (2005). WNY Peace Center presents Eugene Jarecki’s polemic on the American war machine.

SCREENINGS @ THE RIVIERA

October 5-8 @ 5pm & 8pm:

Harold Lloyd Film Festival. Films by the great comic genius of th silent era.

October 26:

Rocky Horror Picture Party. Come in costume. 9pm dance party, 11:45pm movie.

October 30 & 31@ 7pm & 9pm:

Halloween Silent Film Classics. A double feature of seminal fright flicks Nosferatu and Phantom of the Opera.