This fall season, the promise of classic film noir is luring students and Buffalo residents to the Market Arcade Theater despite the colder temperatures and blustery weather.
The Buffalo Film Seminars are co-taught by the SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor Diane Christian and SUNY Distinguished Professor Bruce Jackson. The off-campus seminar classes for UB undergraduate students are also open to members of the Buffalo community.
In 1999, Joseph Ryan, Buffalo's Commissioner of Urban Planning, and Michael McCarthy, attorney for the Buffalo Urban Renewal Agency (BURA), crafted the visionary foundation for what the Film Seminars are today.
Ryan and McCarthy's vision involved a Film Studies course that would take place off-campus at the city-owned Dipson Market Arcade Film and Arts Centre located in downtown Buffalo at 639 Main St.
They wanted the seminars to be an opportunity for university students and city filmgoers to attend the seminars through a unique experience at the historic downtown theatre.
Jeff Simon, The Buffalo News arts editor, recommended the quintessential couple, who met in 1970 and married a few years later, to host the seminars.
"They asked us if we could [bring] a class downtown, and it's always been enormously successful," Christian said. "We keep our class low with 45 students." The class numbers are kept low in an effort to fit the high number of interested filmgoers who join the class in the 324-seat screening room.
The Buffalo Film Seminars hope to draw more UB students who may be distanced from downtown Buffalo and its city life.
"We've been at UB a long time and this puts students in the city," Jackson said. "More and more, the [new] people that come are coming from in the neighborhood. Since we've started, there are a lot more people moving to the area. Apartments are being created. A lot of people love this area and love to go out and do this."
Before every film, handouts are distributed on the cast and production information, awards and other details so the audience can prepare for the film showing. Christian explains that she and Jackson exchange jokes, laugh, and strive to make the seminars a light-hearted intellectual event.
The couple has a great deal of film criticism experience and are also fiction and documentary filmmakers. These popular seminars offer students a valuable experience, as watching them at home with potential distractions can become an impoverished experience, according to Christian.
"The way these [movies] were meant to be watched [is in a theater]," Christian said. "To see it in company and to see it large is not the same experience [as watching it at home]. You hear the breathing, the laughing, you respond in different ways. You see more of the film. You see more of the artistry."
Upon attending these film seminars, students will realize that these two UB professors are a very passionate and interesting couple.
Mayan Cassick, a junior English and geography major, is a student in the "Bible as Literature" course taught by Christian and is interested in attending the film seminars this year.
"She is an amazing and charismatic professor and is full of character," Cassick said. "If her husband [Jackson] is anything like her, as passionate with such broad knowledge, the seminar will be captivating. [Christian] looks at film in a whole new way."
The high number of attendees shows that the film genre speaks to many as an ever-changing art medium.
"Film is our modern mythology and a natural medium," Christian said. "[It's] a way of experiencing other cultures."
The discussions between attendees that begin each week's seminar have been known to carry on past the seminar to attendees' homes and coffee shops hours after the film viewing.
There is no set genre for the film seminars. The films range from the 1923 silent comedy, "Our Hospitality," with piano accompaniment, to the 1998 American comedy, "The Big Lebowski."
Christian enjoys the classics, but she and Jackson have chosen films that range from foreign to horror and small production to big production. Students enrolled in the course, as well as other members of their audience, influence the selections of films. The films presented during the seminars must, in their opinion, be fantastic to showcase.
The Buffalo Film Seminars begin every Tuesday at 7 p.m. and include a 20- minute introduction by Christian and Jackson and a discussion following a short break during the viewing.
The film schedule is available at http://csac.buffalo.edu/bfs.html.
Email: news@ubspectrum.com
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
