Allegheny Commencement speaker Anthony Buba

MEADVILLE, Pa. - May 12, 2002 - "His artistic ambitions have been founded on an unglamorous commitment to a community of local lives. For us, as for so many, he has been a great and generous neighbor."

In Allegheny College’s 187th year, Associate Professor Ben Slote spoke these words today about documentary filmmaker Anthony Buba as he presented Buba to receive a doctor of arts degree, honoris causa, at Allegheny’s Commencement services this morning.

"Tony Buba’s thirty-year career in independent documentary filmmaking has been marked by an insistence on showing us what most of us avoid noticing - the towns and lives that American ‘progress’ has left behind," said Slote. "Today we honor him for these accomplishments. But we honor him, too, for his career itself and for the path into the world his career represents."

Buba and Allegheny President Richard J. Cook addressed 384 graduates during the Commencement ceremony, which was held this morning on the lawn of Bentley Hall.

With humor, compassion and dedication to the working-class heroes of his hometown of Braddock, Pa., Buba has created a body of work that chronicles life in the Monongahela Valley after the demise of the area’s steel industry. He started his career in the early 1970s with "The Braddock Chronicles," 12 short documentary portraits of the mill-town, and continued with several films on the culture and economic history of the area, including Sweet Sal and the PBS documentary Voices from a Steeltown.

In 1985, Buba received the Hazlett Award for Pennsylvania Media Artist of the Year, which acknowledged his growing body of work. He also found support for his projects through a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in the Media Arts, which led to his first feature-length film, Lightning Over Braddock: A Rustbowl Fantasy.

Establishing Buba as an innovative filmmaker, Lightning Over Braddock serves as an exploration of the psychological realities of post-industrial working-class life in his hometown. Featured at the Toronto International Film Festival and the Sundance Film Festival, the 1988 film was nominated for Best First Feature Film and the Independent Spirit Awards.

Associate Professor of English Ben Slote (left) with Commencement speaker Anthony

"Tony’s art of recognizing and capturing material is yoked to the high art of editing, of knowing what to cut and where to splice, how to sequence scenes and images and sound," explained Slote. "And these results, produced through years of mostly solitary, under-funded labor, have earned him acclaim in the documentary film industry and a very long list of awards at the regional, national and international level.

Buba’s most recent feature-length documentary project, Struggles in Steel: A Story of African-American Steelworkers, is a moving tribute to the 100-year struggle of African-American steelworkers for equal rights in the mills. Co-produced with Raymond Henderson, the PBS documentary received the Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Award for excellence in broadcast journalism in 1999 and was featured at the Sundance Film Festival.

After the completion of Struggles in Steel, Buba was named Artist of the Year by the Pittsburgh Center of the Arts in 1998. "Buba stands out, not only as an artist firmly rooted in Pittsburgh, but as an artist who has garnered international recognition and critical acclaim for his distinctive filmmaking," reported the Center in presenting Buba with the award.

Throughout his career, Buba has completed more than 20 films, 17 of which are rooted in his hometown. He has received more than 40 awards from various film festivals - including the American Festival, Sinking Creek Festival and the Three Rivers Film Festival - and various awards from his community. Buba holds a bachelor of arts degree from Edinboro University and a master of fine arts degree from Ohio University.

Founded in 1815, Allegheny College is a nationally recognized, selective college of the liberal arts and sciences in northwestern Pennsylvania and is one of forty colleges featured in Loren Pope’s Colleges That Change Lives. Within eight months of graduating from Allegheny, 98 percent of the College’s job-seeking alumni are employed, and the College claims acceptance rates of nearly 100 percent at medical/dental, law and business graduate schools.