Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian
A History of the Buffalo Film Seminars
The idea for the Buffalo Film Seminars originated in late 1999 with Joseph Ryan, Buffalo’s Commissioner of Urban Planning, and Michael McCarthy, attorney for the Buffalo Urban Renewal Agency (BURA).
McCarthy asked Buffalo News arts editor Jeff Simon if he could suggest someone who might teach a university film course at the city-owned Market Arcade theater and open it up to anyone who bought an ordinary movie ticket. The theater was then being operated as part of the Angelika chain, and it was not doing very well. McCarthy thought such a course would draw to the theater filmgoers who would otherwise go to mall-based multiplexes, and that those filmgoers would then continue going to the theater for other films. Simon suggested the two of us.
The Buffalo Film Seminars began in January 2000 with a class of 40 registered University at Buffalo students. The Seminars were an immediate success. We began in one of the Market Arcade’s smaller rooms, with a seating capacity of 154, but by the fifth week of the first season we had to move across the lobby to the theater’s largest room, with a seating capacity of 324, where we have remained ever since. Usually, the room is full, or close to it.
BURA gave us $5000 for the first season’s film rentals and printing of posters. Since then, the series has more than paid for itself. The University at Buffalo has allowed one of us to do the Seminar as part of our assigned teaching load each semester, provided a graduate teaching assistant, and underwritten the cost of printing the handouts we prepare for each film. Many other expenses connected with the series are covered by UB’s Capen Chair in American Culture.
The Seminars are always scheduled for 14 or 15 films, depending on how many Tuesdays there are in that semester’s UB academic calendar, but three series consisted of only 13 films.Our first series, in spring 2000, was supposed to have ended with Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, but Angelika’s New York booking office never ordered the film and didn’t tell their local manager that the print wasn’t coming until thirty minutes before showtime. The fall 2000 series was supposed to end with Joan Chen’s XIU XIU, The Sent-Down Girl (1998), but a blizzard closed the city that night.
Little Caesar was scheduled for September 11, 2001. We cancelled the Seminar soon after the second plane hit the second tower. A few people turned up at the theater that night, so they screened the film to a nearly-empty room. One of the people there, we later found out, was a regular member of the Buffalo Film Seminars audience who had cancelled an appointment in New York City early that morning so he could be back in Buffalo in time for the screening. The appointment he missed had been in the World Trade Center. “I felt no more like going to a movie that night than anyone else,” he told us, “but I felt as if Little Caesar saved my life so I had to go.” Little Caesar opened our spring 2002 series.
All Buffalo Film Seminars begin promptly at 7:00 p.m. The two of us briefly introduce each film, we screen it, we take a short break, then we reconvene for a discussion with the students and anyone else who cares to join us. Usually about half the ticket-buyers stay for the discussion.
Each week we prepare a handout with details about the film’s production and quotations about the film from the directors, critics and historians. These began as one-page information sheets; now they run five or six pages of small type each week. We’ve always printed them on goldenrod paper—at first because that’s what the UB English Department had an extra case of in its xerox room, and then because the goldenrod sheets were what people looked for when they came into the lobby. All the goldenrod handouts are available online in PDF or RTF format on the Seminars’ website: http://buffalofilmseminars.com.
We try to run the films chronologically, although booking problems sometimes require us to show one or two films out of sequence, and sometimes we finish with a spectacular film regardless of its date of production.
We’ve repeated only one film—Luchino Visconti's The Leopard, which we screened in fall 2001 and fall 2005. We have never shown a film we didn’t both think was terrific. Many of the films we choose have been suggested by our students and other members of the audience. The two of us read a great deal of film criticism and visit the major film sites on the web regularly looking for films that might work in the series. When we come across a film that seems appropriate, we watch it once or twice on DVD or VHS, sometimes with other people. Then, midway in the current series, the two of us sit in our kitchen and work up the list for the following series. If after our preliminary screenings and discussions, we don’t both want to include a film, we drop it; there are enough superb films we can agree should be included in the seminars. On a few occasions, we have revisited a film we rejected, changed our minds about it, and included it.
We never organize the Seminars thematically, but we try to make sure that over the fourteen or fifteen weeks we have films that provide occasions for discussion of each of the key aspects of filmmaking: directing, camera work, editing, writing, acting, genre, context, music, sound, and set design.
We often begin the series with a silent film. Almost all moviehouses in the pre-soundtrack years had a pianist or organist and the larger ones had full orchestras, so we usually have the great Philip Carli accompany the silent classics.
The heart of the Buffalo Film Seminars is our UB English Department Contemporary Cinema class, now fixed at 45 students each semester. We’ve had requests from the University to increase the class size, but we think the current mix of a medium-sized class and lots of room for everybody else works very well.The registered students are required to keep notebooks in which they log their reactions to the films, the discussions, the book of readings we prepare each semester, and the web documents we send them via a listserv. We continue to be astonished at how smart many of those notebooks are. Much of the pleasure for us in doing the series comes from how much we learn from those notebooks and from the discussions. We’ve included a few of the fall 2004 students’ notebook comments in this booklet.
Some members of the audience have been attending the Seminars since the beginning and many others have been attending for two or three years. Frequently, people tell us that after a screening they went home and continued talking about the film and things said in the discussion for hours. We do that every week as well.
We have had a great deal of help in promoting the Seminars from the UB Reporter, WBFO, WNED, Artvoice, the Buffalo News and the John R. Oishei Foundation.
Our mentor in film was James Card, who developed the film program at George Eastman House in Rochester. Jim always insisted that films were meant to be seen on a big screen in the company of other people, and that the kind of concentration and focus that comes naturally in the theater is impossible to achieve in a home. We are more and more convinced of that. People regularly say to us, “I’ve seen this on television but I never realized...” or “I’ve watched this at home three times but until tonight I never saw....”
Almost all Buffalo Film Seminars presentations are in film, but on rare occasions when a classic film is no longer in 16mm or 35mm distribution or when the available prints are in poor shape we use DVD versions instead.
On two occasions—Fritz Lang’s Metropolis 1927 and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc 1928 (Spring 2005)—we chose to use DVDs so the audience could hear the excellent orchestral scores written and recorded for those films. The digital equipment and a DVD saved us the night we were scheduled to screen Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once and the distributor delivered instead You Only Live Twice, a James Bond film.
Because of the great distances from projector to screen, the contrast and number of gradations from white to black or in the color scale will never be as good or as subtle with a DVD as a film print in good condition, nor will the colors be as bright as on a tv set, where the disk’s information has to fill a much smaller area. We used DVD for our screening of The Red Shoes (Fall 2004) because no prints were available anywhere in the United States. The shoes were a little less brilliant than they would have been in a fresh print, but they looked good enough for the audience to have been delighted with the presentation. So long as a decent print is available, film is always our first choice.
We realized we would have to have an alternative to film projection when we had to screen a terribly faded and scratched print of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in our Fall 2000 series. The soundtrack on older films is optical, so when the image is degraded, the audio is degraded as well. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor performed Edward Albee’s script for Virginia Woolf brilliantly (earning her a best actress Academy Award and him a best actor nomination), but the audience made out hardly a word they said. The two actors sounded as if they were underwater or in another room. If we received a print in such poor condition now, we would project a DVD.
DVD is a sometime alternative, not a continuing solution. We knew we couldn’t use DVD for wide-screen color films, but we were comfortable using DVDs as an alternative to a nonexistent or deteriorated film print in Academy ratio (older films with the same frame as a tv set). Our DVD screening of John Ford’s My Darling Clementine turned a great western into a comedy of errors and taught us that things were not nearly so simple as we wished. The DVD we had seemed to contain only a pre-release version of the film, several minutes longer and different in some important regards from the version the studio released, which had been edited by producer Darryl Zanuck after John Ford was through with it. We told the audience about some of the differences in the two versions, then started the DVD. Everything was fine until about 30 minutes before the end when there were glitches and flashes, then freeze-frames while dialog continued, then visual and aural gibberish. Then everything froze while a character was being operated on for a gunshot wound in the saloon: the sound stopped, she stopped. For a few seconds we couldn’t tell if it was a long hold on a character who had just died or if we were looking at a still picture. We were at the movies but we were looking at a still picture. When the audience realized that the image had frozen, a moment of pathos turned into a burst of the giggles. The rest of the disk was completely unplayable.It was the only time the two of us hadn’t previewed a DVD before going to the theater and the first time we had a DVD that was broken. Someone in the audience said, “Play the other side, that’s got the release version on it, maybe that will work.” We said there was nothing on the other side. We knew that because there was no label on that side and the box said nothing about two versions. “It’s there,” the man said. One of us said, “Maybe on the version you have, but not on the one we have.” He shrugged. Someone else said, “Just tell us what happens in the rest of the film,” which we tried to do. We also said that we’d try to find a DVD that worked properly and would show the ending of the film before the start of the following week’s presentation.
Afterwards, someone in the audience said he had the DVD and he would lend it to us. He did. We watched this one at home and found that it malfunctioned in exactly the same places and exactly the same way as our disk. They were all broken. We turned it over and put the other side into the DVD player even though there was no label on it. And we watched, from start to finish, a perfect DVD print of the release version of John Ford’s My Darling Clementine.The following week we played the last ten minutes of that disk for the audience. We asked if the person who had told us about the other side was there. He raised his hand. We thanked him for his advice the previous week, apologized for not having taken it, and said we’d learned several things. One was, be sure to listen carefully to what the audience was telling us. Another was, check everything beforehand. And a third was, no matter how good the technology, sometimes you wind up telling the stories the old-fashioned way.
Some DVDs of classic films are superb, and we will continue to use them when we can’t get quality film prints or when such prints no longer exist or when they offer something important that is not available in the film versions. But film remains our first choice in the Buffalo Film Seminars because film contains more visual information than any digital format presently available. That may change, but the change hasn’t happened yet. No electronic projection system compares to a good print of a fine film projected well onto a large screen, especially when that projection takes place in an auditorium full of people who love good movies.
for further information and all past Goldenrod Handouts visit our website: http://buffalofilmseminars.com