Harvard Film Archive. Dec. 9-17.
Students can purchase tickets to any show for $6, or can purchase a five show pass for $25.

“Sunset Boulevard,” “Some Like It Hot,” and “Sabrina” are some of Billy Wilder’s most famous films as a writer and director. Yet none of these will be shown at the Harvard Film Archive’s upcoming “Major and Minor Notes: A Billy Wilder Centennial” series.

This is not a coincidence. Harvard Film Archive’s (HFA) series, running Dec. 9 through 17, celebrates Wilder’s oeuvre by showing his lesser-known films, many of which are unavailable on video or DVD.

Twelve of Wilder’s feature films and one of his short pieces will be shown at the HFA in the evenings of the upcoming weeks. Ted Barron, senior programmer at the HFA, said “Wilder is one of the great writers of cinema of all time. We wanted to do something for the works that might have been considered minor but that we think are hidden jewels.”

“Major and Minor Notes” will celebrate Wilder’s accomplishments as a screenwriter. Throughout his career Wilder wrote screenplays for over 70 films and directed close to 30. While most of the films in this series were also directed by Wilder, some, such as “Hold Back the Dawn,” were directed by outside directors working from his screenplays.

Wilder was born in what is now Poland in 1906. His writing career first began in Berlin in the late 1920s. After writing as a journalist for the German tabloids, Wilder turned to screenplays. During the rise of Hitler, Wilder, who was Jewish, fled from Berlin to Paris. When he left Paris for the United States in 1933, he landed fortuitously in Hollywood.

In 1939, Wilder had his first commercial success with the comedy “Ninotchka,” a film that garnered his first Academy Award nomination and starred Greta Garbo. Wilder is credited with pioneering the genre of film noir with “Double Indemnity,” a 1944 collaboration with vaunted noir novelist Raymond Chandler.

One of the films being shown at the series, a short piece called “Death Mills,” was found in a defunct military base outside of Boston. There were no credits on the piece to identify Wilder as its creator. An anti-Nazi propaganda piece made for the U.S. Office of War Information, the short was recently traced to Wilder when an interview was discovered in which he mentioned the film.

Much of Wilder’s family was killed in the Holocaust—this had a profound influence upon his work. One of the films being shown in the series, “Five Graves to Cairo,” is a thriller that examines the conflicts of World War II within the verbal skirmishes between two military officers. “Here Wilder addresses the issue of the German camps of genocide, but it is done in a very comic way,” says Tom Conley, Lowell professor of Romance languages and literatures.

Pieces like this are the jewels of the HFA’s collection. Barron pointed out that Wilder’s better-known films such as “The Apartment” or “Sunset Boulevard” are frequently shown in art theatres around the country, but most audiences have no opportunity to see his more obscure films. The Wilder Centennial seeks to expose viewers to Wilder films that they’ve never seen before.

“The thing that’s always stood out about Wilder’s work is his dialogue,” says Barron. “It’s fast and you don’t know what the next line will be, so it’s explosive,” says Conley. Wilder’s directorial style reflects his emphasis on dialogue. Preferring to film in black-and-white whenever possible, Wilder’s films eschew elaborate shots that he felt would distract from the dialogue and plot.

“Wilder is known for his light touch. He is a director who takes extremely difficult subject matter and then treats it with a light touch that does not trivialize,” says Conley.