BUZZon - Moving Pictures

A March day in Toronto, the CN Tower disappearing into the clouds that drop their heavy showers on the chilled streets: I stare out the window of my hotel room and plan my comings and goings for the day. I am here on my own, and given the weather, first snow, then rain, I have found myself returning to my room each night and dumping a sodden umbrella into the bathtub to dry.

I used to get to Toronto more frequently. Now I visit my daughter once or twice a year. This trip I am also doing a couple of readings, but I have time on my hands to visit and explore, and I’ve been reminded to drop in and see the Bell Lightbox, the new headquarters of the Toronto International Film Festival, which was founded in 1975, back when I was working here for the CBC, and which has since grown to be a major city event every September. Now it has a permanent home, with its own cinemas.

I have already made my usual visit to the AGO, studying a large and splendid exhibition of the prints of the Newfoundland artist David Blackwood, and the Lightbox is now at the top on my list of places to see. Decide to have a look around before actually making arrangements to attend a movie. In the display windows facing King Street sits a cartoon monster advertising an exhibit of material by and about the film-maker Tim Burton. Johnny Depp as The Mad Hatter in Burton’s Alice in Wonderland grins from the cover of Tiff’s current flyer. Inside the Lightbox, on the main floor, is the TIFF shop selling videos and books about film, also the large box office.

Above, on the fourth floor, in a display space outside some private offices, is a free exhibition of material from the film career of Mary Pickford. Just inside the door hangs a painting of the small Toronto house on University Avenue where she was born. Two storeys, red brick, and somehow familiar, as if it might have been found in one of the Toronto paintings of Albert Franck, or one of the early cityscapes of Lawren Harris. In spite of all the growth and development in the city, there are still streets in downtown Toronto where I come upon houses just like this.

The character that emerges from the Pickford exhibit is an interesting one. Little Gladys Smith (her real name) began to perform on stage at six years old, and as she went on to films she seems often to have been cast as years younger than she was. A cute little thing with blonde curls, Mary Pickford became a famously tough negotiator and one of the founders of United Artists.

A few days after I saw the Pickford exhibition I went back to the Lightbox to catch one of the movies—some are current, some of historic interest—playing in the five cinemas. The film I chose, the Québecois movie, Incendies, was, as it turned out, one that was playing at the same time at Charlottetown’s City Cinema, which has a link with the TIFF movie circuit. Based on a play, it is a beautifully made film about the events and echoes of the Lebanese civil war, though the story does perhaps display its theatrical roots in a melodramatic resolution.

Coming out of the theatre, another discovery: the upper floors of the Lightbox, which overlook the lobby, also reveal a small glass-walled room hanging in mid-air. Inside it flash the bright lights and colours of a dozen or more small video screens, closed circuit feeds from security cameras and the theatre’s digital projections, a magical and perfect nucleus, I decide, for this new palace of images.

And then I’m off through the rainy streets back to the hotel to watch from my window the old movie of winter dark coming down over the city.

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The Other Notebook
by David Helwig