Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian

Buffalo Film Seminars VIII/Spring 2004

The Buffalo Film Seminars have been offered at the Market Arcade Film and Arts Center (MAFAC) since January 2000. (Click here for a complete listing of films exhibited in the series.) MAFAC is a non-profit corporation directed by a volunteer board of directors and operated by Dipson Theaters. The Seminars are a joint production of MAFAC and University at Buffalo.

All sessions begin promptly at 7:00 p.m. The two of us briefly introduce each film before it is screened. After the film is done, we take a short break, then have an open discussion with the students in our UB Contemporary Cinema class and other members of the audience who care to join us. For current information, visit our website: http://buffalofilmseminars.com.

Free parking is available in the fenced M&T Bank parking lot opposite the theater’s Washington Street entrance. The Market Arcade is directly opposite Metrorail's Theater station. Click here for driving directions and maps.

All sessions of the Buffalo Film Seminars are open to the public. Tickets are required. Students registered in our Contemporary Cinema class (ENG401-JAC) receive series passes as part of their class registration. Tickets for everyone else are available at the box office at MAFAC's ordinary prices: $7.50 regular, $5.50 for students, $5 for  62-and-over. Series tickets for all remaining films in the Buffalo Film Seminars can be purchased any time at a 15% discount.

In the list of Spring 2004 films that follows, click on the film title for its IMDb listing. An asterisk on the date indicates an American film selected by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry.

 

*January 13

Erich von Stroheim, Greed, 1925. 140 minutes. Zasu Pitts, Gibson Gowland, Jean Hersholt. Based on Frank Norris’s novel, McTeague. This screening will be accompanied on electronic piano by Philip Carli. 

Greed is “often voted one of the greatest films of all time.” Roger Ebert. “Orson Welles, an admirer, described his art as Jewish baroque and that tells some of the story. But Greed was more than that. It was a morality tale about the dehumanising influence of money, the realism, detail and complex characterisation of which made it unforgettable.” Derek Malcolm
 

*January 20

Lewis Milestone, All Quiet on the Western Front, 1930. 131 minutes. Louis Wolheim, Lew Aires, Zasu Pitts. Adaptation by Maxwell Anderson of the novel by Erich Maria Remarque.

“The first major anti-war film of the sound era,” Tim Dirks. The “most thoroughgoing exposé of the absurdity of war, and the most explicitly pacifist movie ever made.” Philip French

January 27

Fritz Lang, You Only Live Once, 1937. 86 minutes. Sylvia Sydney, Henry Fonda, Barton Mclaine, Ward Bond, Jack Carson.  

“…about an outlaw couple on the run…sometimes cited as one of the prototypes of Bonnie and Clyde. But Lang's themes are moral and mystical whereas Penn's are social; Lang's film, consequently, seems more genuinely timeless despite the topicality of the story. Lang directs in a stripped-down expressionist style that had a tremendous influence on the postwar film noir: it's always night, usually raining, and the camera hovers over the characters like the heavy hand of fate.” Dave Kehr

*February 3

Preston Sturges, The Lady Eve, 1941. 97 minutes. Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda, Charles Coburn.

“If I were asked to name the single scene in all of romantic comedy that was sexiest and funniest at the same time, I would advise beginning at six seconds past the 20-minute mark in Preston Sturges' The Lady Eve, and watching as Barbara Stanwyck toys with Henry Fonda's hair in an unbroken shot that lasts three minutes and 51 seconds….A movie like The Lady Eve is so hard to make that you can't make it at all unless you find a way to make it seem effortless. Preston Sturges does a kind of breathless balancing act here, involving romance, deception and physical comedy.” Roger Ebert

*February 10

Michael Curtiz: Casablanca, 1942. 102 minutes. Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, S.Z. Sakall, Dooley Wilson.

“Casablanca is one of the most popular films ever made. It is about a man and a woman who are in love, and who sacrifice love for a higher purpose. This is immensely appealing; the viewer is not only able to imagine winning the love of Humphrey Bogart or Ingrid Bergman, but unselfishly renouncing it, as a contribution to the great cause of defeating the Nazis…. Seeing the film over and over again, year after year, I find it never grows over-familiar. It plays like a favorite musical album; the more I know it, the more I like it. The black-and-white cinematography has not aged as color would. The dialogue is so spare and cynical it has not grown old-fashioned. Much of the emotional effect of Casablanca is achieved by indirection; as we leave the theater, we are absolutely convinced that the only thing keeping the world from going crazy is that the problems of three little people do after all amount to more than a hill of beans.” Roger Ebert

 *February 17

William A. Wellman, The Ox Bow Incident, 1943. 75 minutes. Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Anthony Quinn, Harry Morgan. Based on the novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark.

“…A grim, low-budget Western masterpiece…an intense, blunt, and downbeat examination of frontier 'justice' with simple characters that represent various philosophical stances, opinions, or attitudes. It is an authoritative indictment of angry mob rule and violence that lead to a brutal lynching of three suspicious outsiders - all innocent of the trumped-up charges.” Tim Dirks

 February 24

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, The Life & Death of Colonel Blimp, 1943. 163 minutes. Roger Livesey, Deborah Kerr.

“One of the many miracles of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is the way the movie transforms a blustering, pigheaded caricature into one of the most loved of all movie characters….Rarely does a film give us such a nuanced view of the whole span of a man's life. Is is said that the child is father to the man. Colonel Blimp makes poetry out of what the old know but the young do not guess: The man contains both the father, and the child.” Roger Ebert

March 2

John Huston, The Asphalt Jungle, 1950. 112 minutes. Sterling Hayden, Louis Calhern, Jean Hagen, James Whitmore, Sam Jaffe, John McIntire, Marilyn Monroe.

“…a naturalistic film noir crime film classic of the early 1950s…. The sparse, gritty and tense film with a linear narrative is often considered the definitive heist or caper film, often copied and paid homage to by later films (e.g., Kubrick's The Killing (1956) also with Sterling Hayden, Mackendrick's British film The Ladykillers (1955), Jules Dassin's French-made Rififi (1954), Ocean's Eleven (1960), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and The Usual Suspects (1995)).” Tim Dirks

*March 9

Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, Singin’ in the Rain 1952. 103 minutes. Gene Kelley, Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynolds, Jean Hagen, Cyd Charisse, Rita Moreno, Millard Mitchell.

“Singin' in the Rain has been voted one of the greatest films of all time in international critics' polls, and is routinely called the greatest of all the Hollywood musicals. I don't think there's any doubt about that…. Although Singin' in the Rain has been on video in various versions for a decade and is often seen on TV, a big-screen viewing will reveal a richness of color that your tube may not suggest. The film was photographed in bold basic colors—the yellow raincoats are an emblem—and Donen and his cast have an energy level that also bold, basic and playful. But is this really the greatest Hollywood musical ever made? In a word, yes.” Roger Ebert

*March 23

Fred Zinneman, From Here to Eternity, 1953. 118 minutes. Burt Lancaster, Deborah Kerr, Frank Sinatra, Ernest Borgnine, Montgomery Clift, Donna Reed, Jack Warden, Merle Travis.

“The 1953 Fred Zinnemann classic—winner of eight Academy Awards, including best picture, best director, and supporting actor and actress—may be a Hollywood gloss on the bottomless James Jones novel on which it was based, but it was a shocker when it came out and remains a brooding, spiky experience. ‘From Here to Eternity'’ is so clear-eyed and three-dimensional that it makes the recent Pearl Harbor look like a bunch of kids playing dress up. Aspects of the film have dated, but in the important things it's more mature than anything proposed lately by modern Hollywood. Go, and take the teenagers.” Ty Burr

March 30

Akira Kurosawa, Kumonosu jo/Throne of Blood, 1957. 97 minutes.  Toshiro Mifune.

Kurosawa’s “vision of Macbeth as a samurai is still a stunning reading, not merely of Shakespeare, but of history, power and sexual politics. Toshiro Mifune is exquisitely brash and extravagantly mad as the ambitious Washizu; Isuzu Yamada is coldly brilliant and manipulative as his wife, for whom Kurosawa imagines a stillborn pregnancy. He abolishes the pedantry of Macduff's caesarian section, but has a superb scene of Birnam Wood ­ here the Cobweb Forest ­ on the march. The final sequences showing Washizu's last stand, cackling insanely and getting his terrified subjects to cackle as well, before they all turn on him, is gripping.” Peter Bradshaw

April 6

Luchino Visconti, Rocco e i suoi fratelli/Rocco and his Brothers, 1960. 177 minutes. Alain Delon, Renato Salvatori, Annie Giradot, Katina Paxinou,

“Rocco,which was banned in Milan, where it is set, and cut by Italian censors because of its violence, is important precisely because it is a reflection of the contradictions within its creator. Rocco, which uses realistic settings as a backdrop for its story, points not to the simplicity and naturalism of Visconti's earlier films, but ahead to his later work. It marks the point in the director's career at which neo-realism meets grand opera, where the humble and the everyday is overrun by grandiloquence and spectacle. You could say that Rocco designates the moment at which Visconti's aesthetic compass wavered. Or it could be seen as the film in which the Marxist posturing of his youth was set aside for interests closer to his true self; that it marks the emergence of the real Visconti. In either case, it is the tension between the real and melodramatic that makes the film so rare and powerful,” Hal Hinson.

April 13

François Truffaut, Jules et Jim/Jules and Jim, 1961. 100 minutes. Jeanne Moreau, Oskar Werner, Henri Serre.

“Set during the advent of World War I, Jules and Jim is an allegorical film about the turmoil between French nationalism and the German occupation of World War II. As with the characters' doomed love triangle, the film is a scathing indictment of a country led to ruin by lack of conviction and feigned neutrality…. It is a desperate, hopelessly impossible situation that entraps, rather than liberates. Jules and Jim is a deeply profound film about the devastating consequences of indecision on three people... and a nation.” Acquarello

April 20

Sergio Leone, C’era una volta in America/Once Upon a Time in America, 1984. 227 minutes. Robert deNiro, James Woods,  Elizabeth McGovern, Treat Williams, Joe Peschi, Tuesday Weld, Danny Aiello, Burt Young.  Score by Ennio Morricone.

Warner Brothers mutilated this film beyond recognition on its initial release: not only did they slash a third of the footage, but they rearranged the fragments that remained into a film that was flat and dull. European critics raved about the film and American critics panned it—neither realizing at first that they were writing about radically different films. The current version restores the cut  scenes and Leone’s plot, so American audiences can now see the masterpiece that Leone created. “Legendary Italian director Sergio Leone made six important films during his career, five of which were westerns. The exception was his final film, Once Upon a Time in America, which instead explored the cinematic mythology of American organized crime. It proved to be the best film of his career….” Brian Koller.