‘Citizen Kane,’ ‘Body Heat’ among offerings in film series

"Citizen Kane," considered by many to be one of the greatest films ever made, is among the offerings in the fall 2015 edition of the Buffalo Film Seminars, the popular, semester-long series of film screenings and discussions hosted by UB faculty members Diane Christian and Bruce Jackson.

Each session of the Buffalo Film Seminars (BFS) will begin at 7 p.m. on Tuesdays, beginning Sept. 1 and running through Dec. 8, in the Amherst Theatre, 3500 Main St. in the University Plaza, directly across the street from the South Campus.

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 theater’s regular admission prices of $9.50 for adults, $7.50 for students and $7 for seniors. Season tickets are available any time at a 15 percent reduction for the cost of the remaining films.

“Goldenrod handouts” — featuring production details, anecdotes and critical comments about each week’s film — are available in the theater lobby 45 minutes before each session. The handouts also are posted online one day before the screening.

The series opens on Sept. 1 with Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s controversial 1929 social drama “Diary of a Lost Girl.” Legendary silent screen actress Louise Brooks stars as young girl who is raped by the clerk in her father’s pharmacy. She becomes pregnant, is rejected by her family and must fend for herself in a cruel world.

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

• Sept. 8: “Petrified Forest,” 1936, directed by Archie Mayo. A waitress, a hobo and a bank robber get mixed up at a lonely diner in the desert. Stars Leslie Howard, Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis.
• Sept. 15: "Citizen Kane," 1941, directed by Orson Welles. The story of fictional multimillionaire newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane.
  

• Sept. 22: “Lady in the Lake,” 1947, directed by Robert Montgomery. The editor of a crime magazine hires Philip Marlowe to find the wife of her boss. The private detective soon finds himself involved in a murder.
  
• Sept. 29: “Le Beau Serge,” 1958, directed by Claude Chabrol. Francois returns to his home village in France after more than a decade away and tries to find out what happened to his old friend, Serge.
• Oct. 6: “Ivan’s Childhood,” 1962, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. During World War II, 12-year-old Ivan works as a spy on the Eastern Front, where three Soviet officers try to take care of him.

• Oct. 13: “Body Heat,” 1981, directed by Lawrence Kasdan. In the midst of a scorching Florida heat wave, a woman convinces her lover, a small-time lawyer, to murder her rich husband. Starts Kathleen Turner and William Hurt.
• Oct. 20: “Missing,” 1982, directed by Costa-Gavras. When an idealistic writer disappears during the right wing military coup in 1973 Chile, his wife and American businessman father try to find him. Nominated for Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Actor (Jack Lemmon) and Best Actress (Sissy Spacek)
• Oct. 27: “The Mission,” 1986, directed by Roland Joffé. Eighteenth-century Spanish Jesuits try to protect a remote South American Indian tribe in danger of falling under the rule of pro-slavery Portugal.
• Nov. 3: “Mississippi Masala,” 1991, directed by Mira Nair. An Indian family expelled from Uganda when Idi Amin takes power moves to Mississippi, where the daughter falls in love with a black man and the respective families have to come to terms with it.

• Nov. 10: “Princess Mononoke,” 1997, directed by Hayao Miyazaki. In this Japanese anime film, a young warrior finds himself involved in a struggle between forest gods and the human who consumes the forest’s resources.
• Nov. 17: “The Time that Remains,” 2009, directed by Elia Suleiman. An examination of the state of Israel from its founding in 1948 through the present day.
• Nov. 24: “The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus,” 2009, directed by Terry Gilliam. A traveling theater company gives its audience much more that it was expecting.
• Dec. 1: “The Turin Horse,” 2011, directed by Béla Tarr. A farmer is forced to confront the mortality of his faithful horse.
• Dec. 8: “A Matter of Life and Death/ Stairway to Heaven,” 1946, directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. A British wartime aviator who cheats death must argue for his life before a celestial court. Stars David Niven and Kim Hunter.