Some call it Jay-Diff....
From the Irish Times, this description of an interesting sidebar at the upcoming Dublin International Film Festival (Feb. 18-28, www.JDIFF.com):
ORPHANAGE
An orphan film is one that no longer officially belongs to any individual or corporate entity. This intriguing event – Installation? Exhibition? – will put a number of the oddest orphan films before visitors to a specially designed space at Cultivate on Saint Andrews Street. Savour such curious delights as a Turkish Wizard of Oz and a North Korean Godzilla. Cultivate at The Greenhouse, St Andrews Street, runs throughout festival.
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And then this, from the festival catalog:
An ‘orphan film’ is any motion picture that has been abandoned by its owner or caretaker. Usually, the term refers to all manner of films outside of the commercial mainstream: public domain materials, home movies, outtakes, alternate endings, undeveloped reels, unreleased material, industrial, medical and educational movies, CCTV footage, just about anything that’s unloved, unwanted or forgotten. To celebrate these parentless films, the festival will be hosting a unique installation at the Greenhouse on Andrews Street. In keeping with the Greenhouse’s green ethic – it is part of the Cultivate community – the setting will be composed entirely of recycled elements. Indeed, the Orphanage could be seen as a celebration of the possibilities of recycling. The furniture, decorations and art works that decorate the space will all be composed from found objects. Most significantly, the films themselves are, in some sense, all needlessly discarded objects. Among the delights on display will be Planet Wars, the famous (perhaps notorious) Brazilian remake of Star Wars, released just five, barely legal months after Lucas’s film hit South America.
Also have a glance at utterly hilarious Turkish takes on ET (Badi) and The Wizard of Oz (Aysecik in the Land of Magic Dwarfs). If you want something semi-respectable then visit when The Old Dark House, James Whale’s follow-up to Frankenstein, is occupying the monitor. If you’d like to witness a legendary folly then check out Pulgasari, a North Korean version of Godzilla. Shin Sang-ok, the film’s South Korean director, was famously kidnapped by Kim Jong-il and forced to do the film-mad dictator’s weird bidding. Odd.
Credits: Remakes by Evan Doherty. Space by Alan Kelly. Curated by Tara Brady. Hosted by Cultivate.
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Odd. Fun. Interesting. Something for everyone. And this Orphanage installation certainly shares the funky diversity of the Orphan Film Symposium generally.
Should the symposium be flattered that the first two sentences are taken verbatim from its own website and longstanding descriptive definition of 'orphan film'? No doubt. It all derives from National Film Preservation Act language anyway.
In a similar vein, the Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science (lu.com/ODLIS) by Joan M. Reitz alludes to and borrows from SC.edu/orphanfilm/definition.html:
orphan film
Narrowly defined, a motion picture abandoned by its creator, owner, or caretaker, or lacking the commercial potential to assure preservation. Broadly speaking, a film outside the commercial mainstream, including public domain materials, industrial and educational films, newsreels, independent documentaries, scientific and ethnographic films, experimental films, silent-era productions, amateur works, and films of small or unusual gauge. The National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF), a charitable affiliate of the National Film Preservation Board (NFPB) of the Library of Congress, awards federally funded grants to archives for the preservation of historically, culturally, or aesthetically significant orphan films. Click here to learn more about orphan films.
It's all true.
And click here to register for the 7th Orphan Film Symposium, April 7-10, 2010, in New York. Only 68 days before we kick off on that Wednesday evening with an 8:00 pm screening at the SVA Theatre.
About 230 people have already signed up for the 267-seat space.
Maybe Jameson is interested . . . .
