Hop shines light on short films with Black Maria Festival

"The shorts will range from interesting avant-garde to more conventional narrative cinema," Dartmouth Film Society director AJ Fox '09 said in an interview with The Dartmouth.

Black Maria is a traveling film festival that allows each host to have input in selecting its own unique lineup of short films. According to Fox, festival director John Columbus who will be at Dartmouth to introduce the festival Friday evening works with institutions, including museums and universities, to choose a playlist from this year's repertoire of 70 award-winning films that is specifically tailored to the interests of the expected audience.

This unusual setup makes sense for the festival, given its dedication to increasing the accessibility of films that are usually only available to the small portion of the population that frequents film festivals. According to a press release for the event, the festival aims "to bring films to the people in their own communities, close to home and where they live, rather than the more common fixed location strategy of most film festivals which require audiences to travel to them."

Started in 1981, the annual festival takes its name from the world's first motion picture studio, built by Thomas Edison in 1893, which was nicknamed the Black Maria due to its resemblance to a police paddywagon. A pioneer of celluloid film, Edison was one of the first people to make short films, according to the festival's program.

"I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear, which is the recording and reproduction of things in motion," Edison said.

Based on the idea that motion could be captured having one camera that would take repeated pictures at high speed, Edison applied George Eastman's newly invented celluloid film to the process of film making, according to the festival program.

"Edison had this little film studio, more a laboratory than studio, before features even existed. Filmmaking was basically at the Cro-Magnon stage people were just discovering what a camera was," Fox said.

According to Fox, the first films were usually shorts, but the form eventually lost out to feature-length productions.

"This is one of the few times Dartmouth has a program composed entirely of shorts," Fox said. "The way film distribution works in this country, it is almost impossible to see short non-feature films in a theatrical setting."

Fox dispelled the myth that all shorts are low-budget films made in hopes that a production company will pick it up and finance the production of a feature-length version, saying that many shorts are made simply to remain as shorts.

Part of the 90-minute program is reserved for the films of Black Maria's Jury Stellar Selection, which are played at each of the festival's locations. The Jury Stellar Selection includes this year's winners for best documentary, animation, experimental and narrative short, according to the program.

This year, the documentary award went to "The Solitary Life of Cranes," a film that looks at life in London from the dizzying perspective of construction cranes. "Pickles to Nickles," which enters a cardboard world where monkeys steal storefront items from zany vendors, received the award for best animation.Recognition for the best experimental short was awarded to "La Muerte en Tres Actas" (translated from Spanish as "Death in Three Acts"), which describes the story of a matador's struggle between his performance identity and his role in the bullfighting arena. "Gordita," which follows an overweight girl as she tries to regain her lost confidence, was selected for the best narrative short.

"I encourage people to come," Fox said. "The festival will introduce people to some really exciting films they will love when they discover them, but would not have been able to see in any other way."