The Buffalo Film Seminars
Spring
2001 Series
.
Conversations about Great Films
with
Diane Christian & Bruce
Jackson
The Buffalo Film Seminars
Spring 2001 Series
Conversations about Great Films
with
Diane Christian & Bruce Jackson
(free monitored parking in the M&T lot opposite the theater's Washington Street Entrance)
In everything that follows, if you click on the underlined text it will take you somewhere else, sort of like Dorothy clicking her heels only it won't be home, it will be someplace new. If you want to come back here, click on your browser's BACK button.
(for the plain vanilla list of films and screening dates click here)
The links beneath the film entries will take you to sites we found interesting or informative. For actors, crew and other production details, click on the film title itself for the Internet Movie Database listing. Other links will be added throughout the spring. If you come upon useful links to any of these films, their crews, their subjects, or their relations, please send them along so we can add them.
A caveat re the Dirks links: Tim Dirks provides interesting brief comments, then does great summaries of the plots, including accurate extracts from the best parts of the script. If you haven't seen the film before, we'd suggest you DO NOT look at Dirks until after you come to the screening--otherwise he'll spoil the pleasure of the plot.
January 16 THE BIG PARADE King Vidor
131 minutes, 1925The first great realistic war movie, a silent film-classic, and John Gilbert’s greatest starring role. Selected for the National Film Registry. This screening will be accompanied on electronic piano by the great Philip Carli.
January 23 GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933 Mervyn LeRoy
96 minutes, 1933Great chorus girls (Joan Blondell, Ruby Keeler, Ginger Rogers), the Great Depression (played by itself), great songs ("We're In the Money"), great Busby Berkeley numbers, the great Dick Powell, Guy Kibbee and Ned Sparks, and, at the end, a soupçon of reality. A great movie.
January 30 BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN James Whale
75 minutes, 1935Starring Boris Karloff, Elsa Lanchester (great as Mary Shelley and the silver-haired bride) and Colin Clive. “A classic masterpiece of 1930s horror films," wrote Tim Dirks, "a superior sequel to the original Frankenstein (1931).... The macabre film is generally considered one of the greatest horror films of all time—a spectacular, bizarre, high-camp, excessive, humorous, farcical and surrealistic film.” Selected for the National Film Registry. James Whale also directed the 1931 Frankenstein and The Invisible Man; many think this subversive attack on family values (as Gary Morris puts it) is the best of the three. Whale was portrayed by Ian McKellan in a highly-regarded recent biographical film, Gods and Monsters.
Gary Morris' commentary in Bright Lights Film Journal
Tim Dirks' summary and comments
February 6 EXTERMINATING ANGEL Luis Buñuel
89 minutes, 1962Our favorite among the five great films about dinner.* This grand bourgeois dinner party was conceived by the greatest surrealist filmmaker during his second self-imposed exile from Franco’s Spain. He cooked it up between two other great films Viridiana (1960) and Belle de Jour (1967)
Buñuel bibliography and filmography
Bryan M. Papicack, “‘Thank God I’m an atheist’: the surrealistic cinema of Luis Buñuel”
*The others, of course, are Le Grand Bouffe, Babette's Feast, My Dinner with Andre, and The Big Night.
February 13 Spring Double Feature Night!
IVAN THE TERRIBLE part I Sergei Eisenstein
96 minutes, 1943
IVAN THE TERRIBLE part II Sergei Eisenstein
88 minutes, 1946Well, so maybe not a real double feature. Eisenstein conceived these two films as a whole and it wasn't his fault that he had a three-year hiatus between the two parts or that Stalin's displeasure at the portrayal of Ivan's secret police held up public release of Part II for another 12 years. Ivan the Terrible is, as Leonard Maltin puts it, “film spectacle of the highest order.” A great score by Prokofiev. It has been rumored that there will be an intermission between Part I and Part II during which hot tea in glasses will be served out of a tall silver samovar while a balilaika trio plucks tunes evocative of distant steppes. Whether or not this is the least bit true none of us knows, but we do know that this will be a memorable film evening in all other regards.
Eisenstein bio, links, and filmography
February 20 BICYCLE THIEVES Vittorio de Sica
93 minutes, 1947A poor Italian spends long days seeking work. A job turns up for someone with a bicycle. He’s got a bike, he gets the job, he rejoices. His bike is stolen. With his young son he spends his Roman weekend looking for it. Simple, huh? It’ll break your heart. When Bicycle Thieves came out, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had no category for best foreign film, so they gave it a special Academy Award. The Hayes Office censors wanted two scenes cut; the producers refused and in fact used a still from one of the scenes in their promotion of the film. The film did well, but the Hayes censors didn’t last much longer. Long on Sight & Sound’s greatest-films-of-all-time list, this masterpiece of Italian neorealism was re-released last year, which is why we're able to include it. The film is often referred to as "The Bicycle Thief," but that's a mistranslation of the Italian title ("Ladri di biciclette") and obscures what the movie is all about.
Italian neorealism in film and literature
In Black and White's Italian Neorealism Page
NeoWeb Italian Neorealism Page
February 27 Les Enfants du paradis Marcel Carné
1945, 188 minutesOne of the greatest films about theater ever made. And about love triangles. The title is usually translated "Children of Paradise," but more properly it's "Children of the Gods," people who occupy the worst seats in the theater, all the way at the top, all the way at the back, the segment of the audience most vocal in its praise or displeasure. A“timeless masterpiece of filmmaking (and storytelling),” writes Leonard Maltin, focusing on a rough-and-tumble theatrical troupe in 19th-century France. Barrault plays the mime whose unfulfilled passion for the free-spirited Arletty dominates his life, even when he achieves great fame on stage.Wise, witty, and completely captivating. Written by Jacques Prévert. Filming began in 1943 in Nazi-occupied France but wasn’t complete until 1945.” According to the Washington Post, “Many of the ‘Paradise’ actors were members of the Resistance and, in fact, a certain Monsieur Robert Le Vigan (later replaced in the movie by Pierre Renoir) was reportedly a Nazi collaborator and disappeared under mysterious circumstances.”
Marcel Carné bio and links
Girish Shambu's excellent article on this film from sensesofcinema.com
Annette Lust's article on the Art of Mime
[March 6 no screening–UB spring break]
March 13 KISS ME DEADLY Robert Aldrich
106 minutes, 1955Ralph Meeker plays Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer in this no-big-name-star film noir classic. Tim Dirks calls it “the definitive, apocalyptic nihilistic film noir of all time....Kiss Me Deadly is rich with symbolic allusions, labryinthine and complex plot threats, and Cold War paranoia about the atomic bomb. The film is a masterpiece of cinematography, exhibited in the camera angles and compositions of Ernest Laszlo. It has all the elements of great film noir– destructive femme fatales, low-life gangsters, expressionistically-lit night-time scenes, a vengeful quest, and a dark mood of hopelessness."
Tim Dirks' summary and comments
Film noir links
film noir images
Cinematography notes on KMD by Michael E. Grost
(Grost, a system architect with a PhD in mathematics, also has a terrific site on mystery writers)
R.J. Thompson, “Robert Aldrich: an independent career”
Rose Capp, "B-Girls, dykes and doubles: Kiss Me Deadly and the legacy of "late noir"
Alain Silver, "Kiss Me Deadly: Evidence of a Style"
Alain Silver, “So what’s with the ending of Kiss Me Deadly?” from Images
Glenn Erickson, “The Kiss Me Mangled Mystery: Refurbishing a Film Noir,” from Images
March 20 ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST Sergio Leone
165 minutes, 1968The so-called "spaghetti westerns" didn't just revive a genre that was then moribund in America; they also helped the rest of us understand what westerns were all about. No European filmmaker understood them better than Sergio Leone, first with his Clint Eastwood man-with-no-name trilogy (which made an international superstar out of a guy best known for playing a secondary roles in a tv series), and then with Once Upon a Time in the West (Italian title: C’ere una volta il West), which some critics consider not only Leone's masterpiece but also one of the greatest westerns ever made. It has a rhythm and sensibility that are exquisitely European, and an operatic relationship between elements that could never have been achieved by an American director. But it partakes of the American landscape and the western film history with sensitivity and brilliance. The great character actors Jack Elam and Woody Strode are in and out of this epic before it’s ten minutes old. Henry Fonda is the evilest badguy you ever saw. Claudia Cardinale is consistently beautiful in soft focus, wearing a single slightly-ripped dress for a story that takes months. Charles Bronson plays the harmonica. Jason Robards, Jr., competes for something. There's another magnificent score by Ennio Morricone--this one with hummable leitmotifs for each major character. And an ending that is, simply, elegant in all regards.
Phillipe St. Germain’s review praising it as “un des grands western de tous les temps”
an interesting review of Morricone’s score
March 27 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW Peter Bogdonavich
118 minutes, 1971This is American Graffiti set in Larry McMurtry’s West Texas home town, with a lot less rock and roll and a lot more insight and soul. The Last Picture Show is probably Bogdonavich's best film and it's based on one of McMurtry's two best novels; the two of them collaborated on the superb screenplay. Excellent performances by a cast of mostly newcomers (who later became familiar names and faces) and some great older actors: Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd, Ben Johnson, Cloris Leachman, Ellen Burstyn, Eileen Brennan, Clu Gulager, Sam Bottoms, Randy Quaid. Selected for the National Film Registsry. 8 Academy Award nominations and 2 wins. Gorgeously photographed by Robert Surtees.
April 3 THE FRENCH CONNECTION William Friedkin
104 minutes, 1971Eight Oscar nominations and five wins for best actor, director, editing, picture, screenplay. Based on a real-life NYC narcotics case in which two of the film’s minor actors, Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso, were the real cops portrayed by the film's stars, Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider. Fernando Rey is a great bad guy. One of filmdom’s great cops-and-badguys films, and one of the two all-time-great film car chases (the other was across the country in San Francisco in Peter Yates’ Bullitt, 1968, which had the same producer, Phillip D’Antoni). The French Connection chase is still being imitated--e.g. last year’s Ronin with Robert de Niro at the wheel--but the fancier fin-de-siecle technology doesn't touch what Billy Friedkin and his editor Gerald B. Greenberg did on the streets of Queens 29 years earlier. And that's only one sequence in a film that is terrific throughout.
Tim Dirks' summary and comments
Friedkin's comments at the Harold Lloyd Master Seminar
April 10 THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING John Huston
129 minutes, 1975John Huston was the most literary of American film directors: Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Maltese Falcon, Moby Dick, and his last film, The Dead, based on James Joyce’s short story, are only a few of the literary masterpieces he brought to the screen. When he started trying to make this film in the 1950s he wanted to star Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart. Time passed and so did Gable and Bogart, so when he finally did get to make it, Daniel Dravot and Peaches Carnahan were portrayed by Sean Connery and Michael Caine. They're fabulous, as is this entire gorgeous and brilliantly achieved movie.
brief notes on all of Huston’s films
Charles Taylor’s Salon.com review
April 17 KILLER OF SHEEP Charles Burnett
83 minutes, 1977A superb fiction film about Black life in LA’s South Central that looks and feels like a documentary. Burnett made this as his graduate film in the UCLA film school for about $10,000 when he was 23 years old. The actors are people he knew in his own Watts neighborhood. Selected for American Film Registry. So what’s the difference between the “real” and the recreation of the “real” when they’re both up there on the screen, little bits of light projected on a flat screen in a darkened room? Join us April 17 and we'll talk about it.
Chris Dashiell, “Charles Burnett”
April 24 DERSU UZALA Akira Kurosawa
138 minutes, 1984If you had to list the four or five most important world film directors you could not omit Akira Kurosawa. And this is one of his most resonant films. It was made made in Russia's Arctic north. It's beautiful, it's human, it's rarely screened, it's never been on North American tv, it's a fabulous movie. It won the Academy Award for best foreign language film made in 1984, but the film transcends language. We could tell you why and how it's good and important, but this is one of those movies the heart of which exists outside of words. It's a film the seeing of which transcends talk about seeing, which is to say, it's a movie worth your getting out of the house, into the car, driving to downtown Buffalo, and joining us for this fitting conclusion to this season's Buffalo Film Seminars.
Kurosawa filmography
Kurosawa database
Carmen Ficcara, “The Director’s Heart: Akira Kurosawa 1910-1998"
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