Buffalo Film Seminars Fall 2006 Schedule

Tuesdays 7:00 p.m. Market Arcade Theater

Each Tuesday night session begins promply at 7:00 p.m. The two of us introduce the film, screen it, take a brief break and then discuss it with the 40 UB students who are the core of these events and anyone else who wishes to join us. Students registered for the class are admitted free; everyone else is admitted for the price of an ordinary Market Arcade ticket (adults $8, students with ID $6, seniors $5.50; discount series tickets available). Goldenrod Handouts--four to eight-page notes on each film--are available in the lobby of the Market Arcade thirty minutes before each screening, and subsequently online at the Buffalo Film Seminars website: http://buffalofilmseminars.com. Free parking in the lighted and fenced M&T lot across the street from the theater's Washington Street entrance (pay the attendant $2, give the parking stub to one of the ticket sellers or someone at the concession stand and get the $2 back).The Main Street entrance of the theater is a few paces from Metro Rail's Theater station.

We choose the media we use in this series on a print by print basis. As more and more classic films are being digitized, fewer and fewer of them are available in decent 35mm prints. The disadvantage of DVD projection in a large theater is that, even with the best projection equipment, the colors are never as vivid or the blacks as deep as they are on a newly-struck 35mm film print. But newly-struck 35mm prints of classic films are very rare these days, and recent DVD versions of classic films are often much better technically, even when projected in a large theater, than any available 16mm or 35mm film prints, and many DVDs include important scenes missing from all film versions. If, overall, a DVD version is, in our opinion, better than the available print versions, we'll use a DVD for our screening and discussions; if film is better, we'll either show the film version or wait until we can get one.

Our desiderata in the Buffalo Film Seminars remain unchanged: the best prints we can find of the best films there are, shown on a big screen with a terrific sound system in the company of a lot of other people who love good movies, just as they were meant to be experienced. In the list that follows, asterisked films will exhibited in DVD, the others in 35mm.


Aug 29 Raoul Walsh The Thief of Bagdad 1924 (accompanied on electronic piano by the great Philip Carli)
Sept 5 Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, King Kong 1933*
Sept 12 Michael Curtiz Mildred Pierce 1945
Sept 19 no screening
Sept 26 Howard Hawks The Big Sleep 1946
Oct 3 Satyajit Ray, Aparajito/The Unvanquished 1956*
Oct 10 Jean-Pierre Melville Le Samourai 1967*
Oct 17 Roman Polanski Chinatown 1974
Oct 24 Robert Altman M*A*S*H 1970
Oct 31 Fred Zinnemann, The Day of the Jackal 1973*
Nov 7 Emile de Antonio In the Year of the Pig 1969*
Nov 14 Bob Rafelson, Five Easy Pieces 1970
Nov 21 Nicolas Roeg The Man Who Fell to Earth 1976*
Nov 28 Spike Lee Do the Right Thing 1989
Dec 5 Peter Greenaway Prospero's Books 1991

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