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  “Grave of the Fireflies” is the first animated film to be shown in the Buffalo Film Seminars.

By SUE WUETCHER

Published: August 16, 2012

The Buffalo Film Seminars, the popular, semester-long series of film screenings and discussions hosted by UB faculty members Diane Christian and Bruce Jackson, will open its 25th season with a screening of “Wings,” the World War I flying epic that became the first silent film to win the Academy Award for best picture.

Each session of the Buffalo Film Seminars (BFS) will begin at 7 p.m. on Tuesdays, beginning Aug. 28 and running through Dec. 4, in the Market Arcade Film and Arts Center, 639 Main St. in downtown Buffalo.

Christian, SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of English, and Jackson, SUNY Distinguished Professor and James Agee Professor of American Culture in the Department of English, will introduce each film. Following a short break at the end of each film, they will lead a discussion of the film.

The screenings are part of “Film Directors” (Eng 438), an undergraduate course being taught by the pair. Students enrolled in the course are admitted free; others may attend at the Market Arcade’s regular admission prices of $9 for adults, $7 for students and $6.50 for seniors. Season tickets are available any time at a 15 percent reduction for the cost of the remaining films.

Free parking is available in the M&T fenced lot opposite the theater’s Washington Street entrance. The ticket clerk in the theater will reimburse patrons the $3 parking fee.

“Goldenrod handouts”—four- to eight-page notes on each film—will be posted on the seminar’s website the day before each screening, and will be available in the theater lobby by 6:15 p.m. the day of the screening.

This fall’s lineup of films may not be familiar to all but the most ardent filmgoer, but Jackson says that means it’s a good lineup.

Three films—“Russian Ark,” “Come and See” and Grave of the Fireflies,” the first animated film in the BFS—are not well-known in the U.S., he says. And some of the others haven’t been available in quality prints for years and only recently came out in high-quality Blu-ray.

By coincidence, Jackson says, the series will screen “Come and See,” a Russian film about World War II, just before the Buffalo visit of Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who will give a reading at UB and appear with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra Nov. 2-3. The orchestra will be performing Dimitri Shostakovich’s “Piano Concerto No. 2” and “Symphony No. 13,” which was inspired by “Babi Yar,” Yevtushenko’s 1961 poem memorializing the nearly 100,000 Jews massacred by the Nazis in a ravine near Kiev during World War II.

Jackson says that while he and Christian avoid building film lineups around themes, they sometimes do emerge.

“This time we are doing two of the most powerful films about the awfulness of war ever made: ‘Come and See’ and ‘Grave of the Fireflies,’” he says. “Three other films in the series deal with war and battle in very different ways: ‘Wings,’ ‘Fail-Safe’ and ‘The Four Feathers.’ And ‘White Material’ deals with the violent end of a colonial empire.

“We didn’t plan it that way, but that’s what we had when we’d picked those films for other reasons entirely,” he says.

Jackson explains that since the film series is a UB class, he and Christian try to select films that they like and that, over the course of the semester, illustrate the best of the several arts that go into filmmaking.

“Not all films will be stellar in all of them, but by the end of the semester, we’ll have had the opportunity to talk about acting, directing, cinematography, editing, set designing, music, etc.—usually several times in different ways.

“If themes emerge, it is a collateral benefit, not part of the primary design,” he says. “Sometimes we’ve changed some of our final selections because they were thematically too close. But these are all so different we didn’t feel it was a problem.”

To celebrate the 25th season of BFS, Jackson and Christian plan to publish a new edition of “Seeing in the Dark: The Buffalo Film Seminars 2000-2010” that will feature the 75 films screened in the BFS since “Seeing in the Dark” went to press. The book will be published through Center Working Papers—work presented by the Center for Studies in American Culture at UB.

The 25th season of BFS opens on Aug. 28 with “Wings,” a 1927 silent film directed by William Wellman. Starring “The It Girl” Clara Bow, Charles “Buddy” Rogers and Richard Arlen, “Wings” tells the story of two young men—one rich, one middle class—who fall in love with the same girl and become fighter pilots in World War I.

The remainder of the BFS schedule, with descriptions culled from the IMDb online movie database:

• Sept. 4: “M,” 1931, directed by Fritz Lang. When German police are unable to catch a child-murderer, other criminals join the manhunt.
• Sept. 11: “The Four Feathers,” 1939, directed by Zoltán Korda. A British army officer who resigns his commission before being sent to Egypt receives white feathers accusing him of cowardice. He proves his bravery and returns the feathers to his accusers.
• Sept. 18: “Children of Paradise,” 1945, directed by Marcel Carné. The tragic tale of ill-fated love between a theater mime and an actress who also is loved by three other men.
• Oct. 2: “Kiss Me Deadly,” 1955, directed by Robert Aldrich. A doomed female hitchhiker pulls Mickey Spillane’s signature detective Mike Hammer into a deadly whirlpool of intrigue, revolving around a mysterious “great whatsit.”
• Oct. 9: “Lonely are the Brave,” 1962, directed by David Miller. A cowboy has himself locked up in jail so he can then escape with an old friend, who has been sentenced to the penitentiary. Starring Kirk Douglas, Gena Rowlands and Walter Matthau.
• Oct. 16: “Fail-Safe,” 1964, directed by Sidney Lumet. Walter Matthau stars with Henry Fonda. An electrical malfunction sends American planes to launch a nuclear attack on Moscow. Can all-out war be averted?
• Oct. 23: “The Stunt Man,” 1980, directed by Richard Rush. A fugitive who stumbles onto a movie set takes a job as a stunt man to hide out and falls for the leading lady.
• Oct. 30: “Come and See,” 1985, directed by Elem Klimov. After finding an old rifle, a young boy joins the Soviet Army and experiences the horrors of World War II.
• Nov. 6: “Grave of the Fireflies,” 1988, directed by Isao Takahata. A young boy and his little sister struggle to survive in Japan during World War II. The first animated film in the BFS.
• Nov. 13: “Magnolia,” 1999, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. An epic montage of several interrelated characters in search of happiness, forgiveness and meaning in the San Fernando Valley.
• Nov. 20: “Russian Ark,” 2002, directed by Alexander Sokurov. A 19th-century French aristocrat, famous for his scathing memoirs about life in Russia, travels through the Russian State Hermitage Museum and encounters historical figures from the past 200 years.
• Nov. 27: “White Material,” 2009, directed by Claire Denis. A white French family outlawed in its African home and trying to save its coffee plantation connects with a black hero also embroiled in the turmoil.
• Dec. 4: “A Separation,” 2011, directed by Asghar Farhadi. A married couple is faced with a difficult decision: improve the life of their child by moving to another country or to stay in Iran and look after a parent with Alzheimer’s disease.

For more information, visit the Buffalo Film Seminars’ website.