Fade out on FILMS ON THURSDAY for Professor Jeff Miller

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Fade out on FILMS ON THURSDAY for Professor Jeff Miller

Black and white image of Professor Jeff Miller looking at the camera

While he looks back fondly on his decades of directing FILMS ON THURSDAY, Miller sees his decision to bow out in a positive light – something more in the way of a door opening than one closing.

For more than 60 years, Utica University’s film series has brought a world of cinema to the doorsteps of the campus and local community. Through different names and different guiding hands, it has allowed students, faculty, staff, and anyone from the surrounding area to experience films from around the world.

It all began in 1964 when student Jurji Savyckj and other students, annoyed that they couldn’t find European films at any of the multitude of theaters in the Utica area at the time, began making weekly trips to New York City to see foreign films. The crew would take notes on what they watched and when they’d return to Utica, they’d rent the film and show it on campus for other students.

Different clubs attempted to keep this series of film screenings going after Jurji graduated until Professor Scott MacDonald took over the film series in 1974, running it for roughly 24 years. Though McDonald would retire in 1999, Professor Jeff Miller, relatively new to the Utica campus (arriving in 1997) stepped up to keep the project alive. He has now been coordinating FILMS ON THURSDAY, as it is now called, longer than even MacDonald, devoting a remarkable 26 years to curating this lively and often provocative series.

And now, after decades under his care, Miller is running the closing credits on his management of the series.

“It pays to remember that the first film series at the school was created and run by students for students, but sadly, most of our students today no longer have an interest in international film, or in the arts in general,” Miller says. “Streaming services make it somewhat easier to watch a wider variety of films, including independent films and documentaries, at home. And the rising cost of renting films and shrinking budget on campus also contributed to my decision.”

Despite these headwinds, Miller has always striven to challenge the audience. No matter the year, the season, or the semester, the slate of films in the series always seems relevant to the times in which we live, something that’s a testament not only to the films themselves, but to the amount of work that Miller puts into each selection.

“I'm certain that many filmmakers reflect the times in their work, and to some extent I then chose among what's available in ways that can provide a lens through which the audience can think about our present circumstances. I do not claim to be an artist by curating the series, but I do try to choose and arrange films into a sequence or sequences that have meaning — sometimes connecting similar films and sometimes connecting contrasting films.”

TIBETAN TREASURE HUNT

This fall, Utica University and the FILMS on Thursday series had the unique honor of playing host to a rare screening of Pig at the Crossing, the latest from award-winning and internationally-recognized filmmaker and Tibetan monk Khyentse Norbu.

“I've shown his work before (Travellers and Magicians, Looking for a Lady with Fangs and a Moustache),” says Miller. “He’s been a leading figure and mentor in the Himalayan filmmaking community across Bhutan, Nepal, and Tibet. This, his most recent and most ambitious film, was rejected by over 30 film festivals, from Sundance to Cannes to Venice to Tokyo to Dharamshala.”

Norbu then chose the unorthodox route of premiering the film online with what seemed to be no plans to distribute in the United States or elsewhere. For Miller, the hunt was on.

“Knowing the quality of his work, I scoured the internet for clues as to how I might reach him,” he says. “I reached out to fellow Himalayan filmmakers whom I've come to know through programming the series, and then discovered the email address of the film's producer, Druksel Dorji. I emailed him asking whether I could secure the rights to screen the film and included the list of the ten or so Himalayan films that I have included in the campus film series in recent years, and much to my surprise I received a response within two weeks — and he immediately said yes!”

FROM REELS TO MP4

A lot changes over the course of 60 years – not only the content of the films themselves, but the way in which audiences watch them. When the film series began, film reels would be rented and shipped in canisters that would be spliced together and strewn through a projector.

“Nearly every film is now sourced as a digital download, typically an mp4 file, whereas back in the day films had to be shipped to me on DVDs or more recently BluRay disks,” says Miller. “Shipping films back and forth comes with added costs and disks that travel around from venue to venue can arrived damaged, but downloading digital files also gives me anxiety because a corrupted file or an incomplete download can ruin a screening and leave you without a backup. Many smaller film distributors now simply provide me with a link in an email that allows me to access the film from somewhere in the cloud and, although this saves the trouble of downloading, I get nervous about the WiFi going down or glitching. I'm in the habit of always bringing a backup film on BluRay, just in case!”

PLAYING FAVORITES

Ask someone to name their favorite film and chances are they’ll be hard-pressed to limit it to just one. Similarly, with two and a half decades of programming and more than four hundred films behind him, it’s difficult for Miller to pinpoint the personal stand-outs among the series many seasons of screenings.

“There’s too many to mention,” he muses. “But a few do come to mind.”

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg - “…honestly one of my top three most favorite films of all time, and which is the final film in my final season. It's beautiful, it's endearing, it's heartbreaking, it's painterly, it's an undeniable classic, and I cannot help but feel choked up at the end.”
Cool Hand Luke – “…which speaks to me on so many levels — I watch it at least twice a year and never grow tired of it. Some films just express something that you don't always have the words for, and I find Cool Hand Luke to be iconoclastic, funny, poetic, inspiring, and cautionary.”
State of Dogs – “…mostly because the narrator was the soul of a street dog who was awaiting his rebirth as a human while his mother-to-be made the difficult journey from rural Mongolia to a hospital in the capitol city. The mother's struggle felt sharply visceral and personal to me because my wife was expecting our first child at the time and I wasn't able to separate my own feelings of anticipation, worry, and fear from those of the mother in the film.”
Three Seasons – “…an absorbing Vietnamese film from starring Harvey Keitel as a veteran who returns to Vietnam to find his adult daughter whom he's never met. The scene is which he finally recognizes her across the table in a restaurant with another man is truly devastating; Keitel's emotional performance is raw and heartbreaking and I feel choked up just thinking about it. I could go on and on.”

While he looks back fondly on his decades of directing FILMS ON THURSDAY, Miller sees his decision to bow out in a positive light – something more in the way of a door opening than one closing.

“I’m forever grateful to Scott McDonald for all the years he worked to establish the film series at Utica University, and I’m fortunate to have accidentally arrived around the time when he chose to move on to his next chapter. Now it’s time for me to move on to my next chapter, knowing that I accomplished something worthwhile in curating a film series for 26 years.”

On his final evening hosting FILMS ON THURSDAY, Professor Miller presented a short history of the Film Series at Utica University:

History of the Film Series Presentation

Professor Miller's Film Series Remarks