Submit poster designs for Orphans Midwest: Materiality and the Moving Imag

Poster contest! (Win free registration to the symposium.)

The IU Cinema, IU Libraries Film Archive, and the Orphan Film Symposium invite aesthetically-minded fans of the moving image to submit poster designs for Orphans Midwest: Materiality and the Moving Image. This three-day symposium hosts an impressive gathering of scholars, archivists, and media artists, screening dozens of cinema rarities and rediscoveries, as well as new productions, music performances, and curated presentations. “Orphan films” are all manner of neglected and ephemeral cinematic artifacts, ranging from home movies to outtakes to educational movies to newsreels. More information:

Design Details:

All information below must be included in the poster

● Size: 12in x 18in
● Title: Orphans Midwest: Materiality and the Moving Image
● Dates: September 26-28, 2013
● IU Cinema website: http://www.cinema.indiana.edu/
● Additional Information number: 812-856-2503
● IU Cinema logo: Download versions here.
● Sponsors (can be in small print if needed): Presented by IU Libraries Film Archive, Indiana University Cinema and NYU Cinema Studies. This project is supported by Indiana University’s New Frontiers in the Arts & Humanities Program and the College of Arts and Humanities Institute (CAHI). Other partners include IU’s Department of Communication and Culture’s Film and Media Studies Program, Black Film Center/Archive, The Kinsey Institute, Lilly Library, and the Media Preservation Initiative.

NOTE: Design contest winners may need to make minor edits to design prior to printing

Winning Design

● Will be printed and distributed around campus and community, and will be included in promotional materials online and at conference
● Designer will receive their choice of a framed copy of the poster or a pass to the 2013 Orphan Film Symposium

Submission Deadline and Technical Specifications

● Design submissions are due by August 12, 2013
● Design must not include copyrighted images, characters, or clip art
● Submissions should be in the form of a high resolution (150 dpi minimum) .pdf file
● Submissions can be sent to orphansmidwest@gmail.com.
● If submissions are too large to email, submissions can be in the form of a downloadable file, with a link provided

No. 147: "Co-presented this year by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the NYU Orphan Film Symposium"

Page one of the Society of California Archivists Newsletter (Summer 2013) is devoted to "Introducing Orphans," Cornelia Emerson's report on the May 10-11 Orphan Film event presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

http://www.calarchivists.org/Resources/Documents/Newsletter/2013summer.pdf 

Midnight Mishkin Midwest

As Friday night, September 27, 2013, becomes the 28th, the Orphan Film Symposium at Indiana University will enjoy a bonus screening.

A one-sheet for sale at movieposters.ha.com.

Courtesy of the IU Kinsey Institute film collection, the Indiana University Cinema will project the feature film The Orgy at Lil's Place (William Mishkin Motion Pictures, Inc., 1963). It's reputed to be like nothing -- but nothing -- you've seen before - EVER!

The screening is open to all. It falls two-thirds of the way through the symposium "Materiality and the Moving Image" aka Orphans Midwest. Since exploitation film scholar (yes, you heard me) Eric Schaefer (author of Bold! Daring! Shocking! True: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959) will be part of the daytime session on sexploitation films, I have a feeling we won't be able to stop him from introducing the midnight show (even if we wanted to, which we don't).  Also on hand for the Kinsey session at Orphans Midwest will be Joseph Slade (Pornography and Sexual Representation: A Reference Guide, vol. 1-3), filmmaker-scholar Russell Sheaffer, and Liana Zhou (Director of Collections, Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction).

SEE the "ART" Class! 

The name to noted here is distributor William Mishkin. His company handled dozens of burlesque and exploitation films in the 1950s and 60s.  The AFI Catalog online edition lists 40 feature films credited to Mishkin. However, Orgy is not one of them.

(For reasons unknown, but perhaps easily inferred, the American Film Institute deleted numerous sexploitation films from its otherwise invaluable catalog when it migrated from the print edition to the online edition most us currently use. This according to Michael Bowen, an expert on the genre. See, for example, mooninthegutter.blogspot.com/2010, and Stefan Elnabli's profile of Michael Raso in alternativecinema.blogspot.com/2010, which, by the way, Elnabli published the same week he was co-producing the 2010 Orphan Film Symposium and its award-winning DVD -- and defending his NYU master's thesis, "Lowbrow Longevity: An Examination of Commercial Video Distribution's Unique Role in the Preservation of Independent Exploitation Horror Film." Whew!)

The Internet Movie Database credits Mishkin's company with distributing 75 works of art. Most are titles bearing the classic rhetoric of the age, such as Naked in the Wind (1954), Skin Game (1962), or Caught in the Act! (1966). The seventies saw the addition of horror and more violent flicks to the Mishkin catalog, including eleven directed by Andy Milligan (Bloodthirsty Butchers, Torture Dungeon, et al.). William Mishkin Motion Pictures also hyped European pictures in the U.S., including the outlier Bob le Flambeur (1956), directed by Jean Pierre Melville!

It's fair to say that Orgy, like several of the Andy Milligan features, was a "thought lost" movie. In his essay "Issues in Preservation of Exploitation Films" (2011), Casey Scott says specifically: "Titles like Orgy at Lil’s Place (1963), Wild Is My Love (1963), and Caught in the Act (1966) remain elusive, their posters and pressbooks the only tantalizing tastes left of these films." 

New addition to de ORPHANS MIDWEST film list

Even after several years of deep research into the documentaries, life, work, and worlds of Emile de Antonio, I admit I was surprised (and delighted) to see a trailer for his debut film Point of Order (1963) projected during Ross Lipman's presentation at the 6th Orphan Film Symposium in 2008.  [Listen to the audio recording of "Order, Disorder, and Point of Order! (The Cropping of the Spectacle)" here.] He'd seen it while restoring Point of Order  at the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Seeing it for the first time (and I've not seen it since), reminded me how much historical material remains un- and under-explored. The archive is a growing, expanding thing, often revealing more as it gets inventoried, catalogued, described, preserved, accessed, migrated, and re-examined.

Very soon the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research will make a great new resource available: a finding aid and container list for the voluminous, funky, Dada, woolly, invaluable, but 'til now imperfectly deposited materials in the Emile de Antonio "Papers"* [i.e., papers, films, audiocassettes, videotapes, LPs, photographs, ephemera, plastic knives, etc.].

Best known as a documentary filmmaker whose works date from 1963 to 1989, de Antonio (d or de to his friends) didn't begin making films until he was 43 years old. He had an amazing set of experiences prior to that and continued to live the life of a radical fabulist, raconteur, bon vivant, arts animateur, critic (of everything), political activist, military veteran, public intellectual, speaker, mentor, correspondent, interview subject, drinker, diarist, scrapbooker, and FBI target. And he kept sporadically sending much of his ephemera, paraphernalia, and impedimenta to Madison, up until the unaccessionable can of ashes left from his cremation appeared after his death in 1989.

Film historian and UW professor Vance Kepley (Director of the WCFTR) used a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to hire project archivist Emil [as it turned out] Hoelter to process everything. They sent me a draft of the finding aid and container list Hoelter created, "a thorough intellectual arrangement of all records" in the collection.

Two items that caught my eye immediately were GA 118 and M89-414 (of course!).

GA 118  POINT OF ORDER. TrailerPhysical description: 35mm film reel 

M89-414 POINT OF ORDER. German and English trailer pre-print.Physical description: 2 35mm film reels

Our Madison colleagues quickly agreed that at the very least we could and should show some de Antonio film trailers at the Sept. 26-28 Orphan Film Symposium on Materiality and the Moving Image at Indiana University  So we've added the trailers for Point of Order trailer and the Millhouse: A White Comedy (1971) to the Hoosier mix.

The 35mm German-language trailer for Point of Order! must be seen and heard! (If it's actually in any of the cans that have arrived piecemeal from DuArt labs in New York over the years. The container list, after all, is a list de Antonio submitted with the shipments; it's not yet an inventory or catalog of everything item in the various containers. And even though DuArt has been clearing out its film storage vaults for a couple of years now, cans of film, some unlabeled, continue to find their way to WCFTR -- and other archives across the U.S.)

Here's how to get tickets to the IU Cinema screenings of the POO! trailer and a few dozen other films during "Orphans Midwest."
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Meanwhile, if you need to see or hear an interview with de recorded on U-matic videotape in Austin, Texas, in 1989 -- with Afrikaans subtitles added -- you can do so here.

From the long-running access cable television series Alternative Views. Interviewer Frank Morrow. Doug Kellner (co-editor of the book Emile de Antonio: A Reader, Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2000) was the co-host, co-founder, and co-producer of the series. Produced at Austin Community Television. Alternative Views was a notable part of slacker life in the Slacker days of Austin.
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* The call number for the Emile de Antonio Papers is (I kid you not): 

 U.S. Mss 117AN; Micro 988; Audio 1100A; AB 779-AB 780; CA 570-CA 573; CA 647; DC 968; DC 996-DC 997; DF 654; DF 786-789; FA 005-FA 007; FE 095-FE 097; FE 280-FE 282; FG 793-794; FH 138-142; FH 144-151; FH 236-241; FH 243-256; FH 279-281; GA 002-GA 006; GA 074; GA 096-GA 101; GA 118; GA 579; HA 001-HA 010; HA 078; HC 391-396; HC 547-562; HC 579-583; VBA 502; VBA 621; VBB 700; VBC 248-249; VBC 275-276; VDA 124; VDA 144; VDA 261; VEA 036-039; VHA 002; VHA 005; VHA 007; VHB 335; VHB 339; VHB 428-432; VTA 032-041

NYU + IU: Orphan Film Symposium

NYU and  IU co-present an Orphan Film Symposium

Orphans Midwest @ Indiana University Bloomington September 26-28, 2013

Theme: Materiality and the Moving Image

Keynote: Tom Gunning (U of Chicago)

REGISTER NOW for this 3-day Orphan Film Symposium.

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Special opening night program

Films for Cello

An evening with
filmmaker Bill Morrison  +  Opus 3 artist Maya Beiser 

 

Light Is Calling (2004) music by Michael Gordon
Cello Counterpoint (2005) music by Steve Reich for Maya Beiser
Just Ancient Loops (2012) music by Michael Harrison for Maya Beiser
and
world premiere of the film All Vows (2013) music (2006) by Michael Gordon

Indiana University Cinema and the Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program commissioned the film All Vows. The project is supported by Indiana University’s New Frontiers in the Arts and Humanities Program and College of Arts & Humanities Institute (CAHI).

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. . . . . Other premieres at Orphans Midwest include:

 ■ ▲ Newly restored A Frontier Post (Fox, 1925) a never-released short about the "buffalo soliders" of the U.S. 10th Cavalry; with a commissioned score performed by Gabriel Gutierrez Arellano. Presented by Greg Wilsbacher (University of South Carolina Moving Image Research Collections).

● ■ LOC's digital restoration of the newly-realized complete version of Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze (1894), presented by Mike Mashon (Library of Congress) and Dan Streible (NYU Cinema Studies/MIAP).

■ + New excerpts of work in progress on reconstructing the fragments of Hell Bound Train (1929-30) and Verdict Not Guilty (1930-33) in the Eloyce Gist Collection at the Library of Congress. 

. . . . . And

+ ● "Placing Orphan Films," a full day of presentations examining how new categorizations are affecting media studies, organized by SCMS's Nontheatrical Film and Media Scholarly Interest Group. Led by Martin Johnson (Catholic U) and Andy Uhrich (IU).

▲ ▲ An evening of musical wonders captured on film and video from regional archives and private collections of the American Midwest and South, curated by archivist and musician Kelli Hix (Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum)

Hear more than 40 presenters, see dozens of resurrected films!
Live music by LYLAS, Josephine McRobbie, and others

Click to
JOIN US in Bloomington!

. . . . . p.s.

 © Love and Shame LLC

• • with introduction by suitcase discoverer and archivist Albert Steg (Center for Home Movies). 

• • Jeff Martin (video conservator and exec. director of IMAP — Independent Media Arts Preservation) moderates a session with presentations by Casey, Elnabli & Jimenez:  

 . . . . . Mona Jimenez (NYU Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program) on early video processing tools by artists and technologists of the 1960s and 1970s
 . . . . . Mike Casey on IU’s Media Preservation Initiative 
 . . . . . Stefan Elnabli (Northwestern U) The Open-Source Avalon Media System: Digitizing 2,425 Wildcat 16mm Football Films (1929-89)

• • Heddi Vaughan Siebel on Anthony Fiala’s Arctic Expedition Films, 1901-1905

+  a 35mm screening of A Dash to the North Pole (Charles Urban, 1909) partially retitled with Swiss German intertitles. From BFI National Archive.

• • Amy Beste on EB Films: The Living City (John Barnes, 1953)
• • Alex Kupfer (NYU) History of University Extension Programs and as Nontheatrical Film Producers and Distributors
• • Natasha Ritsma (Kenyon College) History of the IU Audio-Visual Center
• • Marsha Gordon (NCSU) and Allyson Nadia Field (UCLA) on Felicia (ca. 1965) a teenage perspective on living in Watts

• • Donald Crafton (Notre Dame) and Andrew Beckman (Studebaker National Museum) on Partnership of Faith (1949, Studebaker Corp.)
• • Gregory A. Waller (IU) a home movie from Brown County
• • James Paasche (IU) on Transportation Underground: The Story of a Pipeline (Robert Young, for Indiana Farm Bureau Co-Op Association, 1953)

• • Jennifer Reeves (Cooper Union) My Anti-Landfill Film: Landfill 16 (2011), a hand-painted 16mm film derived from 16mm film fragments excavated from a landfill.

• • Outtakes from . . .

. . . . . Eyes on the Prize, Henry Hampton Collection, Nadia Ghasedi (Washington U)

. . . . . Kartemquin Films, Carolyn Faber (Kartemquin Archive project)

. . . . . Peter Bogdanovich Collection, IU Lilly Library, Noelle Griffis and Rachael Stoeltje (IU)

• • from the Kinsey Institute Film Archive:

. . . . . Eric Schaefer (Emerson College), Liana Zhou (IU), Russell Sheaffer (IU), Joseph Slade (Ohio U) on William Mishkin, Sexploitation Orphans, and The Orgy at Lil’s Place (1963) -- including a special midnight screening [!] of this rediscovery from the Kinsey Institute film collection.

• • from the IU Black Film Center/Archive:
. . . . . Brian Graney and Jacqueline Stewart (Chicago U) Early Black Film Artifacts as Material Evidence: Digital Regeneration
. . . . . S. Torriano Berry (Howard U) on reconstructing James and Eloyce Gist’s Hell Bound Train (1929-30) and Verdict Not Guilty (1930-33) at the Library of Congress

• • Craig Kridel (Museum of Education, University of South Carolina) Alice Keilher and the Human Relations Film Series, 1937-1942.
       Screening: a rare original 16mm print (from the IU Film Archive) of an HR series entry:  Fury (lynching) (1939, edited by Helen van Dongen, from Fritz Lang's 1936 MGM film, Fury)  17’

• • Andy Uhrich (IU) The Film Group of Chicago: Advertising Films and Verité Documentary of the 1960s and 70s

• • Greg Wilsbacher (IU alum and USC MIRC curator) introduces a screening of Fox Movietone News outtakes, Indiana University Graduation (June 10, 1929), featuring the IU Marching 100 and commencement remarks by IU President (later governor) Paul V. McNutt.

• • Andrea J. Kelley (IU) Hoagy Carmichael Soundies from the Archives of Traditional Music: Lazy Bones and Hong Kong Blues (1941, with Dorothy Dandridge, directed by Dudley Murphy).

• • Skip Elsheimer (AV Geeks) Science Movie Medley Projections

PDFs of DVD booklets recently added to the Orphan Film Symposium Collection at the Internet Archive

PDFs recently added to the Orphan Film Symposium Collection at the Internet Archive (http://archive.org/details/OrphanFilmSymposium). 

• Orphans 7: A Collection of Orphan Films. Stefan Elnabli, Walter Forsberg, and Jonah Volk, prods.  >New York University Libraries, 2010.

      Limited-edition compilation of eleven annotated works in partnership with NYU Libraries, Library of Congress, University of South Carolina, Broadway Video, and Colorlab. Recipient of DVD Award, “Most Original Contribution to Film History,” from Il Cinema Ritrovato Film Festival, Bologna, Italy.

Cover notes: http://archive.org/details/Orphans7DVD.