Film history

The Cinetopia International Film Festival is currently in progress in Ann Arbor and Detroit. It started on Thursday and continues through tomorrow in five venues. A few films interested me, but only two were at times I didn't have other commitments. Those two were today in Ann Arbor, so I had a pleasant day there.

The first was actually a series of short films starring Mary Pickford from 1909 to 1912. She was just a teenager then and movies were just making a start. A woman who had written a book on Mary Pickford introduced the films and told us some of the interesting things to look for. That included such things as reminding us the industry was so new they hadn't yet figured out titles to describe the next scene, so those didn't appear until the third movie we saw. Pickford's mother, sister, and brother also appeared in some of the films. Each one was about 5-8 minutes and there was a theater organist to accompany them. This was in the Michigan Theater, which has a good organ.

I noted how still the cameras were. One scene showed a car parking outside a church. Eventually the occupants come around the car and go up the steps into the church. But the camera doesn't move to keep them in the frame. By the time they open the church door all we see is the bottom of their long coats and their shoes.

The second offering was Pit Stop, about gay men in a small Texas town. Gabe lives on his own but spends a lot of time with his ex-wife and daughter. He even takes care of the girl while the ex-wife goes out on a date. She tries to set Gabe up on a date, which doesn't work well. Ernesto still has his ex-lover living in the house and frequently visits the lover before that who is comatose in a nursing home.

It was obvious that Ernesto and Gabe were going to get together. The clue is in the first scene where Gabe enters a convenience store just after Ernesto leaves. And they do -- in the last 10 minutes of the film. We see them in bed eyes locked on each other, having breakfast the next morning in a restaurant and sharing a joke, and Gabe in his truck with a love-struck smile on his face. And -- that's it. Sigh.

One of the movie's producers was there and answered a few questions afterward. One person in the audience noted that most scenes in this movie were done with a still camera, just like the Pickford shorts. But in this movie the frame is carefully composed and the actors know how to hit their marks.