Buffalo Film Seminars XIV, Spring 2007

Screening 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 an excellent 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, two films will exhibited in DVD—Triumph of the Will and Contempt—the others in 35mm.

In the first 13 Buffalo Film Seminars, we repeated only one film, Lucino Visconti's Il Gattopardo/The Leopard, which we screened in Fall 2001 and Fall 2005. In Fall 2006, we asked the audience to vote on their favorites of the 182 films we had screened and discussed previously. The films in Buffalo Film Seminars 14, Spring 2007, are their top choices.

Jan 16 Clyde Bruckman and Buster Keaton, The General 1927

Jan 23 Jean Cocteau, Beauty and the Beast/La Belle et la bête 1946

Jan 30 Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will/Triumph des Willens 1935

Feb 6 Georg Wilhem Pabst, Pandora’s Box/Die Büchse der Pandora 1929 (accompanied on electronic piano by Philip Carli)

Feb 13 Jean Renoir, Rules of the Game/La Règle du jeu 1939

Feb 20 Vittorio De Sica, Bicycle Thieves/Ladri di biciclette 1948

Feb 27 Yasujiro Ozu, Tokyo Story/Tokyo monogatari 1953

March 6 Orson Welles, Touch of Evil 1958

March 20 David Lean, Lawrence of Arabia 1962

March 27 Jean-Luc Godard, Contempt/Le Mépris 1963

April 3 Stanley Kubrick, Dr. Strangelove 1964

April 10 Sergio Leone, The Good the Bad and the Ugly/Il Buono, il brutto, il cattivo 1966

April 17 Robert Altman, Nashville 1975

April 24 Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, Singin’ in the Rain 1952

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