From an essay of mine about Terrence Malick:

In 1978, the year I turned twenty, I was a film buff — a cinephile, a cinéaste. Though this was long before the coming of VHS tapes and Blockbuster, and though I lived in Birmingham, Alabama, my learned nerdiness wasn’t as dramatic an achievement as one might think. Local colleges and universities all had regular film series with cheap or free admission. More important, I took a course at the University of Alabama at Birmingham on film in the sound era, taught by an astonishingly knowledgeable man named Abe Fawal, who chose films less for their fame than for what they could show us about the technical development of the medium. An older friend of mine who moved in Birmingham’s arty circles listened to me wax ecstatic about the class and then asked if I knew that Fawal had been an assistant director of

Lawrence of Arabia

. I did not believe this tale, but later discovered that

it was true

.

I was sorry to learn, recently, that Abe Fawal died last year at the age of 87. God rest his soul.

As the years have gone by I have been increasingly aware of how remarkable his class was, and how influential it was on my later life. I don’t remember all the movies we watched in that class, but you may get some sense of the range when I tell you that the first one was Gold Diggers of 1933 —

— and a later one was Carl Dreyer’s Ordet:

It was just one amazing experience after another, and gave me an exceptionally vivid sense of the sheer variety of filmmaking techniques and styles, of the ways to tell a story in cinema; of the kinds of stories one might tell.

I don’t watch a lot of contemporary films, but in Dr. Fawal’s class I developed a lasting fascination with the history of cinema. It was fed early on by ongoing film series at his alma mater, Birmingham-Southern College, where I saw my first films by Renoir, Fellini, Kurosawa, Ozu, Satyajit Ray, Truffaut, Resnais, Bresson, De Sica, Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges … so, so much that still forms my understanding and love of film today. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Dr. Fawal had inaugurated that film series at BSC.

All that said, Dr. Fawal was a modest man, and didn’t show us, or even talk about, Lawrence of Arabia. But that would’ve been a treat.