Penultimate draft of the Orphans 8 program

Here is a nearly finished draft of the line-up for the 8th Orphan Film Symposium, at Museum of the Moving Image, April 11-14.  Saturday's order and times still need to be adjusted. But this gives an excellent idea of what we will feast upon.  

Register to join in.  http://cinema.tisch.nyu.edu/object/orphanfilm.html

Wednesday, April 11    

8:00 pm  Opening night

Transformations (1968) IBM commissioned Ralph Sargent's film to introduce the CEO's speech to stockholders

Anke Mebold (Deutsches Filminstitut), Thomas Lang (ABC&TaunusFilm), and Tom Gunning (UC) introduce the new restoration

Die Hochbahnkatastrophe aka The Elevated Train Catastrophe, the 16th Sensational Adventure of Master Detective Harry Hill (Valy Arnheim, 1921)

Dennis James pianist  

Thursday, April 12 

Welcome

David Schwartz (Museum of the Moving Image) and Richard Allen (NYU Cinema Studies)

Dan Streible (NYU) Made to Persuade: The Moving Pictures in Our Heads

Campaign films and TV spots

David Schwartz (Museum of the Moving Image) The Living Room Candidate

Charles Musser (Yale U) Three Stories of '48: The Truman Story (Universal), The Dewey Story (March of Time, RNC), and A People’s Convention (Union Films)

Ad Films for Theaters, Television, and the Web

Julia Noordegraaf (U of Amsterdam) and Leenke Ripmeester (Eye Netherlands Film Institute), Joop Geesink’s Dollywood Advertising Films

Annette Groschke (Deutsche Kinematek) Charles Wilp's Sexy-mini-super-flower-pop-op-Afri-cola Campaign, 1968-1974           

Skip Elsheimer (A/V Geeks)  Digitizing Duke U's AdViews: Post's Sugar Crisp Campaign

Devin Orgeron (NC State U)  Sugar Bear Sells Super Sugar Crisp, 1949 to present

+

Walter Forsberg (NYU Libraries) Redating: Let’s All Go to the Lobby (195?)

lunch

Making Films at AT&T/Bell Labs, 1967-1980

Filmmaker Nell Cox, Operator (1969) 14'

Filmmaker Bill Brand Touch Tone Phone Film (1973) 5'

Walter Forsberg (Mellon Fellow) 1960s computer animation

The Artist and the Computer (AT&T, 1980)

Filmmaker Lillian Schwartz in 3-D Pixillation (1970), UFOs (1971), Olympiad (1971), Enigma (1972), Papillons (1973), and Galaxies (1974)

Martin L. Johnson (U of North Carolina) Booster films and the Paragon Feature Film Company:  
         Past and Present in the Cradle of Dixie (Montgomery, 1914) 950' 35mm film

        The Lumberjack (Wausau, 1914)
        Blissveldt Romance (Grand Rapids, 1915)

       

Yvonne Zimmermann (U of Zurich) Sponsored Films by Hans Richter: Die Börse als Barometer der Wirtschaftslage [The Stockmarket] (Swiss Exchange Zurich, 1939) restored by the Swiss Film Archive

Dave Davidson (City College of New York) Hans Richter at the CCNY Institute of Film Techniques: It's Up to You (1944) an Office of Price Control message about blackmarket pork

Dinner

8:00 pm Poetic Persuasion

Danielle Ash and Jodie Mack's 70mm homage to direct animation (2012)

Helen Hill Media Education Center (Whispering Statues, 2011) http://vimeo.com/22887910

Jeanne Burkhardt and Snowden Becker (Center for Home Movies) [Francena Feeding the Chickens] (Charles Camp, 1905) and Muggins the Cow Horse (1904) 

Dwight Swanson (Center for Home Movies) Helen Hill's Home Movies 2003

Jim Bittl (HBO) Fast Facts and Gross Facts [What Happens If You Eat Watermelon Seeds?] (Helen Hill/CBC, 1997-98)

Award presentation Susan Selig (Kodak)  

Helen Hill Award recipients

            • Jo Dery: The Last, The Rest (2000), Echoes of Bats and Men (2005), Woodpecker in Snow Shoes (2008), Single-Sentence Animation (2009), and Peeks (2009)

            • Jeanne Liotta: Blue Moon (1988) preserved by BB Optics and NYU MIAP; Eclipse (2005), Observando el Cielo (2007), Sutro (2009)

The Florestine Collection (2011) a film by Helen Hill, completed by Paul Gailiunas

Friday, April 13

Other Orphans: Bastards, Fugitives, and Test-Tube Babies

Anna McCarthy (author of The Citizen Machine) Pushing on the Analogy

Hadi Gharabhagi (NYU) The Bastard Files: State "Terrorism" and the Press in the USIS's News of Iran (1954)

Tina Campt (Barnard College) Orphan Photos, Fugitive Images: Family Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe

Citizenship

Susan Courtney (U of South Carolina) Midcentury Screen Maps for Model Citizen-Spectators

            excerpts from Family Camping through Forty-eight States (Robbins Barstow, 1954-1961)

Irene Lusztig (UC Santa Cruz) The Motherhood Archives (work in progress) essay on the construction of motherhood and an archival history of maternal education films 

Jennifer Horne (UC Santa Cruz) Welcome to the Nanny State: Carlyle Ellis and the US Children’s Bureau, 1919-1926. 

Best-Fed Baby (1925) accompaniment by Andrew Simpson (Catholic U) 10’  

Lunch

Ghana Audiovisual Preservation Exchange (APEX)

Mona Jimenez, Manthia Diawara on finding Hamile: The Tongo Hamlet (1964, Ghana Film Industry Corporation)

Louis Massiah on W. E. B. Du Bois funeral footage (1963)

Community Youth Filmmaking

Jay Schwartz (Secret Cinema) and Louis Massiah (Scribe Video Center) introduce

            The Jungle (1967, 12th and Oxford Street Film Makers) digital work by The MediaPreserve

Elena Rossi-Snook (NYPL Reserve Film and Video Collection) The Young Filmmaker’s Foundation Collection (1964-1979)

Race and Rebellion

Mark Quigley (UCLA) One Friday (Rolf Forsberg, 1973) classroom discussion film imagines an all-out race war in the U.S.

Allyson Nadia Field (UCLA) and Jacqueline Stewart (Northwestern) The L.A. Rebellion project: Daydream Therapy (Bernard Nicolas, 1977)

Dinner on your own

8:15 pm  National Memory Reconsidered

Audrey Young (Cineteca Nacional) One Film Survived the Fire: Cine Móvil (Javier Arroyo, 1976) Preserved by Colorlab.

Kyzza Terrazas (filmmaker, Archivo Memoria) Carta a un Ingeniero (Letter to an Engineer, 2011)

Alice Lovejoy (U of Minnesota) Czechoslovak Army Films and Excess of Persuasion

Crooked Mirror (Karel Kachyňa, 1958)  

Metrum (Ivan Balad’a, 1967)  

filmmaker Vojtěch Jasný with Příležitost / Opportunity, (Vojtěch Jasný 1956)  

Michal Bregant (Czech National Film Archive)

Sunniva O’Flynn (Irish Film Archive) a program of short films from Ireland

Saturday, April 14

Colonial Governance   

Jon Gartenberg and Jeff Capp (GME) Tassilo Adam: Moving Image Adventures in Indonesia, 1920s-30s  

Jaime Partsch (Universidad del Este, Puerto Rico) Films by Governor Jesús T. Piñero

Progressive Education

Larry A. Jones (the Arc of Washington) with Laura Kissel (U of South Carolina) Children Limited (1951, Children's Benevolent League)  

Nico de Klerk  The Hands of a Stranger (Richard Heffron, 1966) USIA documentary about a South Vietnam hospital

Craig Kridel (U of South Carolina), Ivan von Sauer (BBC Worldwide), Eugene Perl (Hessian Hills School, Croton-on-Hudson), and Bill Ayers (UIC) School: A Film about Progressive Education (1939, Lee Dick)  

Dan Friedlaender (Temple U) & Adrianne Finelli (U of Michigan) Men and Dust (1940, Lee Dick) labor advocacy film about diseases plaguing zinc and lead miners; 17’

Lunch

Live Report from the Orphan Works Symposium (UC Berkeley)

Jason Schulz, Howard Besser, and Rick Prelinger 

Popular Science

Heather Heckman and Mark G. Cooper (U of South Carolina) Roman Vishniac microcinematography

Michael Aronson and Elizabeth Peterson (U of Oregon) "You Are Getting Sleepy/Hungry/Horny…": Lester Beck, Filmmaking Psychologist

            Human Growth (Sy Wexler, 1948)  

Sergei Kapterev (Moscow Research Institute of Film Art) The Flight to Thousands of Stars (USSR, 196?)  

Hollywood Outreach

Catherine Jurca (CalTech) The “Motion Pictures’ Greatest Year” Campaign: The World Is Ours (MPPDA, 1938)

Ethan de Seife (Hofstra U) The Cartoon at the End of the World: Frank Tashlin and The Way of Peace (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, 1947)

On newsfilm

Mark J. Williams (Dartmouth) Local TV news on 16mm: KTLA, WGBH, WIS, WALB

and films from the Bill Birch Collection

Nancy Suniewick (Colorlab) and Greg Wilsbacher (U of South Carolina) honoring Bill Birch

Dinner

Final Screenings  [order and content subject to change]

Karl Heider (Tokyo U) Study of a Parent's Behavior: Studies of Apparent Behavior (1943, Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel)

Jodie Mack (Dartmouth) and Simon Tarr (U of South Carolina) student remakes of the Heider-Simmel film in color 16mm and in digital video

Russ Suniewick (Colorlab) Remembering Alan Stark: Film Technology Test Films

Robert Martens and Walter Forsberg Auroratone's When the Organ Played "O Promise Me" (Cecil Stokes, 194?) Preserved by Film Technology Co.

Marsha Orgeron (NCSU) Sam Fuller's "home movie," How to Light a Cigar (1945) new preservation from the Academy Film Archive

Lydia Pappas and Yongli Li (USC MIRC) introduce Light Cavalry Girl (Jie Shen, Central Newsreel and Documentary Film Studio, Beijing, 1980)

Elizabeth Peterson and Michael Aronson (U of Oregon) Adaptive Behavior of Golden-Mantled Ground Squirrels (Lester Beck, 1942) original Kodachrome print

             

Rachael Stoeltje (Indiana U) title TBA  

Bill Ferehawk (Society for Moving Images about the Built Environment) Rediscovering Buddhist Temples of Hawaii, on 16mm color film, 1946-1950s

PRESERVATION WEEK: April 22-28, 2012

The "American Library Association" is in full preparation for the anual "Preservation Week".

Some 630 million items in collecting institutions require immediate attention and care. Eighty percent of these institutions have no paid staff assigned responsibility for collections care; 22 percent have no collections care personnel at all. Some 2.6 billion items are not protected by an emergency plan. As natural disasters of recent years have taught us, these resources are in jeopardy should a disaster strike. Personal, family, and community collections are equally at risk.

ALA encourages libraries and other institutions to use Preservation Week to connect our communities through events, activities, and resources that highlight what we can do, individually and together, to preserve our personal and shared collections. Last year, over 65 events took place nationwide. 

Get updates on Preservation Week 2012 events in Facebook:
 http://www.facebook.com/preservationweek.  

For more info, please visit their official "Preservation Week" website:

http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/alcts/confevents/preswk/index.cfm


Posted by DaphnaJ

transition from 7 to 8: 83 days

With the 8th Orphan Film Symposium now 83 days away, we've suggested tweeters use the Twitter handtag #orphans8 . 

To receive the discounted rate for early registration, register by January 31. 
http://www.nyu.edu/orphanfilm/orphans8/attend.php


Audio, text, and video documentation of the 2010 Orphan Film Symposium is now online. See the listings at http://www.nyu.edu/orphanfilm/orphans7.

Included are video interviews with 25 symposiasts, recorded during April 7-10, 2010. These are short (generally about 3 minutes) and edited. The full unedited footage will be posted to the Internet Archive as well. These recordings were made by Intelligent Television with aid of the Library of Congress. Supervising producers were Alexandra Frank, Peter Kaufman, Isabel Muruzábal Lamberti, and Hayley Roberts. Editing was done by Ioannis Papaloizou. Funding camer from NYU's Visual Arts Initiative Award ("Orphan Film and Video Access Project"), with the aid of Bill Brand (BB Optics)  and Ron Sadoff (NYU Film Scoring Program). Footage is downloadable and available for use under a Creative Commons licence agreement (attribution-noncommercial).


Here is a sample, with Colorlab's VP Russ Suniewick explaing how he became involved in the orphan film movement ten years ago.

#orphans8

Two 2012 Orphan Symposia Run Simultaneously

Just to avoid confusion:

The NYU Orphan Film Symposiun is April 11-14, 2012.
The UCB Orphan Works Symposium is April 12-13.

Yes, there are two orphans symposia happening simultaneously. Let a hundred flowers bloom. "Orphan Works & Mass Digitization: Obstacles and Opportunities" is hosted by the University of California Berkeley School of Law and the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology.

NYU's moving image copyright instructor, Rina Pantalony, recommends the white paper on orphan works published this week: David Robert Hansen, "Orphan Works: Definitional Issues," (December 19, 2011). Berkeley Digital Library Copyright Project White Paper No. 1. Available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1974614. 

"Orphan Works & Mass Digitization" features 6 sessions and a keynote by the recently appointed Register of Copyrights, Maria Pallante.

Sessions are built around these questions and their "and why?" follow-ups:

• Who wants to make use of orphan works?
• Who is concerned about broader access to orphans?
• What is the best approach to addressing the orphan works problem?
• What role should registries play in averting orphan work problems?
• Who wants to do mass digitization?
• Should data mining of in-copyright digital works be permissible?

The symposium's home page is www.law.berkeley.edu/orphanworks

Below is the event's precis, quoted in full.

In 2006, the US Copyright Office recommended legislation to allow unlicensed reuses of in-copyright works whose rights holders cannot be located through a reasonably diligent search to solve the "orphan works" problem. Contributing causes to this problem are a lessening of copyright formalities (such as notice of copyright claims on copies of works and voluntary registration of copyright claims) and several extensions of copyright terms. The European Commission has recently proposed a directive that would also open up greater access to orphan works in Europe.

Although orphan works legislation made some headway in Congress in the late 2000s, its progress was stalled for several reasons, including Google's announcement in the fall of 2008 of a settlement of a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by the Authors Guild and five trade publishers over Google's scanning of in-copyright books from the collections of major research libraries for purposes of indexing their contents and serving snippets in response to user search queries.

The Google Book settlement proposed an innovative way to provide greater access to orphan books. Under the settlement, Google would have been entitled to commercialize all out of print books in the Google Book corpus, including orphans, as long as it provided 63 per cent of the revenues to a new collecting society whose job would be to track down rights holders so these rights holders could collect money for Google's uses of their books.

In March 2011, Judge Chin rejected the proposed settlement on the ground that it was inconsistent with copyright rules that require that rights holders give permission before commercial uses are made of their works. In Judge Chin's view, solving the orphan work problem should be done by Congress, not through a class action settlement.

The Register of Copyrights has written to key members of Congress to indicate that the Office would be willing to consider how to address the orphan works problem now that the Google settlement has been rejected.

Given the failure of the Google Book settlement and the newly proposed orphan works directive in the EU, the time is ripe for renewed consideration about how best to solve the orphan works problem. Among the kinds of questions that may be addressed in the symposium are: Is legislation necessary to achieve a solution to the orphan works problem, or can fair use achieve some of the goal? Should orphan works legislation be aimed at creating an exception for reuses of orphan works, or should reusers of orphan works only be subject to more limited remedies if a rights holder later shows up? What other solutions should be considered? To what extent is ambiguity about who as between authors and publishers own ebook rights contributing to the orphan work problem? What factors should be considered in determining what constitutes "a diligent search"? Should every potential user of an orphan work have to do such a search, or can users rely on searches conducted by others?

REGISTRATION is now open for both symposia.

However, www.nyu.edu/orphanfilm/orphans8/attend.php is the place to begin your comparison shopping.

a new Sam Fuller film to premiere

Add to the list of screenings and speakers at the 8th Orphan Film Symposium this: a newly preserved film shot by young Samuel Fuller during his service with the Big Red One. Thanks to Christa Fuller and the Academy Film Archive, Fuller scholar Marsha Orgeron will introduce the first screening of a silent amateur film the emergent auteur shot shortly after the end of WWII. Unlike the harrowing and powerful film Sam Fuller shot of the liberation of Falkenau concentration camp in April 1945 (screened at Orphans 2008), this one is playful and parodic, bearing the title How to Light a Cigar. A most apropos title for the famously cigar-chomping cineaste.

Can't wait.

Third draft of the 2012 Orphan Film Symposium lineup

Symposium registration is open and online. Seats sell quickly, so register for the April 11-14, 2012 Orphan Film Symposium before 2011 expires. 

 *  *  *  *

•  Michael Aronson & Elizabeth Peterson (U of Oregon) "You Are Getting Sleepy/Hungry/Horny...": The Life and Times of Lester Beck, Filmmaking Psychologist; with screenings of the newly-preserved, pioneering sex education film Human Growth (Sy Wexler, 1948), and the sole Kodachrome print of Adaptive Behavior of Golden-Mantled Ground Squirrels (Beck, 1942)
•  Marsha Orgeron (NCSU) on Sam Fuller's "home movie" How to Light a Cigar (1945)
•  Devin Orgeron (NCSU) & Skip Elsheimer (U of Oregon) The Post Sugar Crisp TV ad campaign and AdView Digital Access
• Yvonne Zimmermann (U of Zurich / NYU Visiting Scholar) Sponsored Films by Hans Richter: Die Börse als Barometer der Wirtschaftslage [The Stock Market] (Swiss Exchange Zurich, 1939) restored by la Cinémathèque suisse
• Making Films at AT&T/Bell Labs, 1967-1974: filmmakers Lillian Schwartz, Nell Cox, and Bill Brand screening newly preserved 16mm works: including Schwartz's UFOs, Galaxies, Pixillation, Enigma, and Googolplex, Brand’s Touch Tone Phone Film (1973), as well as Cox and Leacock's Operator (1969)

 • Other Orphans: Fugitives, Bastards, and Test-Tube Babies
            * Anna McCarthy (The Citizen Machine), Pushing on the Analogy
            * Tina Campt (Columbia U) Orphan Photos, Fugitive Images: Family Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe
          * Hadi Gharabhagi (NYU) The Bastard Files: State "Terrorism" and the Press in the USIS's News of Iran (1954)
• Sunniva O’Flynn (Irish Film Archive) curates a program from the IFA collections
• Jay Schwartz (Secret Cinema) and Louis Massiah (Scribe Video Center) on The Jungle (1967, 12th + Oxford Street Filmmakers) 
• David Schwartz (Museum of the Moving Image) The Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign ads
• Anke Mebold (Deutsches Filminstitut) newly restored feature: Die Hochbahnkatastrophe, aka Elevated Train Catastrophe: 16th Sensational Adventure of Master Detective Harry Hill (Germany, 1921), introduced by Tom Gunning (U of Chicago)
• Jon Gartenberg & Jeff Capp (GME) Tassilo Adam: Moving Image Adventures in Indonesia

• Elena Rossi-Snook (NYPL for the Performing Arts) The Young Filmmakers Foundation Collection 

 
• Karl Heider mini-tribute: [Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior: The Moving Film] (1943, Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel), with remakes of the Heider-Simmel film by University of South Carolina students of Simon Tarr (in digital video) and by Dartmouth College students of Jodie Mack (in color 16mm)


• Julia Noordegraaf (U of Amsterdam) and Leenke Ripmeester (Eye Film Institute Netherlands) on Joop Geesink’s Dollywood Advertising Films
• Mona Jimenez (APEX Ghana) and Manthia Diawara (NYU) on finding Hamile: The Tongo Hamlet (1964, Ghana Film Industry Corporation) 
• Susan Courtney (U of South Carolina) on how orphan films impact media scholarship
• Nico de Klerk on The Hands of a Stranger (Richard Heffron, 1965) documentary about a hospital in South Vietnam; appropriated by Friends of Vietnam (Belgium)
• Yongli Li (Beijing Film Academy & U of South Carolina) introduces Light Cavalry Girl (Jie Shen, Central Newsreel and Documentary Film Studio, Beijing, 1980)  

Light Cavalry Girl (1980), Chinese Film Collection, USC Moving Image Research Collections

• Ivan von Sauer (BBC Worldwide) and Craig Kridel (U of South Carolina) on School: A Film about Progressive Education (1939, Lee Dick)
• Dan Friedlaender (Temple U) & Adrianne Finelli (U Mich) Men and Dust (1940, Lee Dick) labor advocacy film about diseases plaguing zinc and lead miners
• Sergei Kapterev (Moscow Research Institute of Film Art) Soviet space films, including Flight to a Thousand Suns (1963)
• Alice Lovejoy (University of Minnesota) Czechoslovak Army Films and Excess of Persuasion, with filmmaker Vojtěch Jasný
       * Opportunity (Vojtěch Jasný, 1957) agitational drama warning soldiers about infidelity
       * Crooked Mirror (Karel Kachyňa, 1958) on proper military dress
       * Army Newsreel 3/65 (Karel Vachek, 1965) liberation of Ostrava
       * Metrum (Ivan Balad’a, 1967) transportation in Moscow
• Mark G. Cooper (U of South Carolina MIRC) Roman Vishniac microcinematography
• Mark J. Williams (Dartmouth) television newsfilm from KTLA, et al.
• Mark Quigley (UCLA) One Friday (Rolf Forsberg, 1973) classroom discussion film imagines an all-out race war in the U.S.

One Friday (1973) courtesy of Rolf Forsberg and UCLA Film and Television Archives

• Allyson Nadia Field (UCLA) and Jacqueline Stewart (Northwestern) The L.A. Rebellion Project: Daydream Therapy (Bernard Nicolas, 1980)
• Walter Forsberg (NYU Libraries) A Second Date: Let’s All Go to the Lobby (195?) and Snipe History 
• Robert Martens presents Auroratone's When the Organ Played 'O Promise Me' (Cecil Stokes, 194?) with Bing Crosby. [with great thanks to Ralph Sargent and Alan Stark of Film Technology Co.]
• Jaime Partsch (Universidad del Este, Puerto Rico) Films by Governor Jesús T. Piñero <archiveswiki.historians.org/Piñero_Collection>

• Martin L. Johnson (U of North Carolina) Booster films and the Paragon Feature Film Company: The Lumberjack (Wausau, 1914), Past and Present in the Cradle of Dixie (Montgomery, 1914), and The Blissveldt Romance (Grand Rapids, 1915)
• Catherine Jurca (CalTech) The “Motion Pictures’ Greatest Year” Campaign: The World Is Ours (MPPDA, 1938)
• Audrey Young (Cineteca Nacional) The Film that Survived the Fire: Cine Móvil (1976) [thanks to Colorlab]
• Irene Lusztig (UC Santa Cruz) The Motherhood Archives (work in progress) documentary essay film on the construction of motherhood and an archival history of maternal education films

from Best-Fed Baby (U.S. Children's Bureau, 1925)

• Jennifer Horne (Catholic U) Welcome to the Nanny State: Carlyle Ellis and the U.S. Children’s Bureau, 1919-1926. Screening Best-Fed Baby (1925) neo-natal health hygiene

 
• Larry A. Jones (The Arc of Washington State; Seattle Disability Law) with Laura Kissel (U of South Carolina) Children Limited (1951, Children's Benevolent League) advocacy film about children with developmental disabilities and their families; rediscovered in 2011 at the Library of Congress

+
• Helen Hill Media Education Center fundraising video (Whispering Statues, 2011)

Helen Hill Media Education Center from Whispering Statues.


• Jeanne Burkhardt and Snowden Becker (Center for Home Movies) [Francena Feeding the Chickens] (Charles Camp, 1905) and Muggins the Cow Horse (Colorado roundup footage, 1904) [Are these the oldest surviving amateur films in the U.S.?]

"What happens if you eat watermelon seeds?"  (Helen Hill, 1997)

• James Bittl (HBO) introduces “Fast Facts” and "Gross Facts,” Helen Hill’s interstitial animations for Street Sense (1997-98, CBC-TV)
• Danielle Ash & Jodie Mack (2010 Helen Hill Awardees) a commissioned 70mm film
• Helen Hill Award recipient films, TBA
• The Florestine Collection (2011) a film by Helen Hill, completed by Paul Gailiunas

and more . . . .

UPDATE: ∆ • Perceptions of the Heider-Simmel Film • ∆

Here's a followup to the posting of May 2008 about Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior: The Moving Film (1943), aka the Heider-Simmel film.

At the time, I was unable to find out much about psychologist Fritz Heider's student, co-investigator, co-author, and, presumably, co-filmmaker, Marianne L. Simmel. But her obituary reveals she would have been 20 years old when the film was made (about the same age as the experiment's movie-viewing subjects). Turns out she was still alive when I first wrote about the film, but only the appearance of her online obituary alerted me to the fact that she died in 2010.

"In Memoriam - Marianne Simmel," Cape Cod Modern House Trust blog, April 9, 2010, http://ccmht.blogspot.com/2010/04/in-memoriam-marianne-simmel.html.

Here we read that Simmel "survived the Holocaust in Europe, grew up on Manhattan's Lower East Side, went to Smith College, got a PhD at Harvard, and taught psychology for many years at Brandies University." Many readers will perhaps be amused to learn that, "getting fed up with the academic life," she moved on to a successful career in textile design. Simmel "produced a large body of designs, in some cases informed by her previous work in human perception and the brain."

Simmel's later work as a designer indicates she was probably responsible for the animation produced for the Heider study of apparent behavior.

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Below: Simmel design in her online obit.

 





 




       










Above: cel from the 1943 film. (From American Journal of Psychology)
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The Simmel textile rediscovery rhymes well with the fact that it is animator Jodie Mack who has done, with her Dartmouth students, a 2011 color film remake of Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior. Here are some frames she scanned from the 16mm. 

Professor Mack too is fond of textiles and geometric forms. Here's a sampler of frames from four Mack films. 

And if there were any doubt about Jodie Mack's fondness for geometry, here she is in costume. 

While the Orphan Film Project looks to the University of South Carolina's Moving Image Research Collections to preserve the Heider-Simmel film, it turns out that the Cape Cod Modern House Trust has the same interest in Marianne Simmel's orphaned art.

The blog post concludes:

After searching unsuccessfully for an institution interested in preserving her work CCMHT has arranged to archive her art work and textile designs which will be stored at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum in its secure art storage facility. We hope to exhibit her work in the future and preserve if for scholars and admirers.

Looking forward to seeing the Heider-Simmel film and its progeny, when admirers at the Orphan Film Symposium honor Fritz Heider's son Karl in April 2012.