Program for the 11th Orphan Film Symposium

Here's what's programmed for the 11th Orphan Film Symposium, April 11-14, 2018. It's about LOVE. Full schedule will be published very soon.

Registration is open!  And open to all.
Join us at Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, NYC.  Click here to register.

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Love:

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Frontispiece:  Fox Movietone News outtakes [Dr. Fritz] Wittels on This Thing Called Love (1929) from U of South Carolina Moving Image Research Collections

Carolina Cappa (Museo del Cine de Buenos Aires) Films from La Pampa, Argentina: Domingo Filippini’s 

Galería Cinematográfica Infantil  (1927)  

Keynote  Jennifer Peterson (Woodbury U) Love, Loss, and Climate Change: Watching the Historical Nature Film Today (with newly scanned 16mm films from the David Shepard Collection, Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive, University of Southern California)

Roni Grosz Albert Einstein Archive, Hebrew U) & Becca Bender (Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts / NYU MIAP) Elsa and Albert Einstein in Hollywood (1931) and the Leopold Godowsky Jr. Collection
Karen Falk (The Jim Henson Company) & Craig Shemin (The Jim Henson Legacy) The Early Films of Jim Henson

An Amateur League of Nations, A Database 
Charles Tepperman (University of Calgary) Příběh vojáka (A Soldier’s Story; Čeněk Zahradníček & Vladimír Šmejkal, 1934) and the 1938 International Amateur Movie Show
Alexander Stark (Philipps University, Marburg) “Help us help!”: German Postwar Charity Films by Elisabeth Wilms. Schaffende in Not (Working People in Trouble, 1948)
Eva Näripea (National Archives of Estonia) Forbidden[?] Love Behind the Iron Curtain: Peeter Tooming’s Sentimentaalne novell (A Sentimental Short Story, 1966)
Tzutzumatzin Soto (Cineteca Nacional México) Love at the (Permanent) Time of Political Repression in Mexico: Hare Krishna (Alfredo Gurrola, 1973)

Something Good 
Allyson Nadia Field (U of Chicago) & Dino Everett (U of Southern California) Something Good: A Rediscovered “Negro Kiss” (1898-99)
Terri Francis (Indiana U Black Film Center/Archive), Charlene Regester (UNC), & Lina Accurso (Alice B. Russell Micheaux Headstone Project) Looking for Alice: Love as Film Studies Methodology
Ina Archer (National Museum of African American History and Culture) "Someone to Watch Over Me": Newly Preserved Films, Discs, and Tapes from the NMAAHC Collection and the Great Migration Public Digitization Initiative (See and hear Cab Calloway, Elder Lightfoot Solomon Michaux, Ella Fitzgerald, and Kreisler's Bandstand.)

The Subject Is Sex
Barbara Miller (MoMI) The Variety Photo Plays Theater Collection of Posters for X-rated Movies, 1965-1983
Allison Whalen (UCLA Library) Releasing The Ids (1974) Love and Duality in Synanon
Oliver Gaycken (U of Maryland) & Sarah Eilers (National Library of Medicine) Love Doctors and Medical Media: Training Films for Physicians and Psychologists Providing Counseling for Sexual Dysfunction  

Hate and Love in Silent Cinema
Andrés Levinson (Museo del Cine) Premiere of the Rediscovered La Fiera Domada (Ideal Film, 1916/1923?)
Chen Biqiang (China Film Archive) & Zhang Zhen (NYU Asian Film and Media Initiative) Laogong zhi aiqing (Laborer’s Love, aka Romance of a Fruit Peddler, 1922) Restoration of Zhang Shichuan’s comedy, the oldest surviving Chinese film.
Marsha Gordon (NCSU) & Buckey Grimm (independent) A Love Letter to Herself: Camera-Woman Angela Murray Gibson Films Herself into History, 1921-1925

Matt Soar (Concordia U) Love Film Leaders, a compilation (2018)
Danielle Ash premieres her 70mm Love in Dimension 150 (2018)

Helen Hill Award presented to filmmaker Nazlı Dinçel
A 16mm film program of her works including Her Silent Seaming (2014), Solitary Acts #4, 5, & 6 (2015), Shape of a Surface (2017), Between Relating and Use (2018) and others, along with Sharing Orgasm: Communicating Your Sexual Response (Lin Yeiser, 1977)
Susan Courtney (U of South Carolina) moderator

The Center for Home Movies presents
Rob Anen (Old Westbury Gardens, Long Island) The 35mm Home Movies of John S. Phipps, 1916-1930
Louisa Trott (U of Tennessee) Self-fascination in Walther Barth’s Home Movies, including Fee (Germany, 1929)
Matt Malzkuhn (Gallaudet U) & Ted Supalla (Georgetown U)  Sign Language in Home Movies
Dwight Swanson (CHM) moderator

Technophilia
John Froats (collector) Computer Rendering on 16mm: A. Michael Noll at Bell Labs, Patterns (1964-65)
Jacqueline Stewart (U of Chicago) & Candace Ming (South Side Home Movie Project) Robert Patton Filmed Helicopters, 1969-1970s
Kathleen Maguire (The Exploratorium) Ivan Dryer’s Laserium and Laserimage (1972)
Simon Tarr& Evan Meaney (U of South Carolina) VRchive : Finding Archival Moving Images with Tactile Technology
Bill Brand (BB Optics) moderator

Patriotism and World Citizenship
Mila Turajlic (filmmaker, Belgrade/Paris) The Labudović Files: Tito’s Cinematographer Stevan Labudović (1926-2017), Yugoslav Newsreels, and the Non-Aligned Movement in Algeria

From Brazil with Love 
Rafael de Luna (Federal Fluminense U, Brazil) A 9.5mm film of the Rio beach resorts:  Balneario da Urca (Brazil, ca. 1933) from the Collection of LUPA-UFF
Beatriz Rodovalho (U Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3) & José Quental (U Paris 8) Family Films from the Alberto Sampaio Collection (1920-1930), Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro
Paola Prestes Penney (U of São Paolo) Fifty Years of Partnership: Dance Films from the Herbert and Maria Duchesnes Collection (1943-1990)

Small-gauge Loves
Isabel Wschebor Pellegrino (U de la República, Montevideo) Rescuing the Science Film Comportamiento Sexual y Reproducción de Bothriurus Bonariensis (Plácido Añón, Uruguay, 1959)
Maria Fernanda Arias Osorio (U de Antioquia, Colombia) Excerpts from the Restored 8mm Experimental Romantic Narrative María (Enrique Grau, Colombia, 1966)
Juana Suárez  (NYU APEX) moderator

Archival Education about Orphan Works
Howard Besser (NYU MIAP) moderator
Dimitrios Latsis, Isaac Prusky (Ryerson U)

Amateur Collectors and Collections
Brigitte Paulowitz (Lichtspiel / Kinemathek, Bern) The Richard Ernst Collection of 17.5mm and 35mm Family Films, 1914-1932
Brian Meacham (Yale U) The “Cynniewink” Sets Sail: The Films of S.W. and Cynthia Childs -- I’d Be Delighted To! (1932)
May Haduong & Sean Savage (Academy Film Archive) Together Un/Known: Archival Ethics and the Case of Acquisition 6130 
Lindsay Zarwell (USHMM) Robert Gessner Films the Rise of Anti-Semitism in Europe and the Middle East, 1934-35 

Liz Czach (U of Alberta) “The Girls,” Lisa Chickering and Jeanne Porterfield: Trailblazers of Travel Lecture Filmmaking,1959-1979
Ting-Wu Cho (NYU) Screen Representations of Taiwanese Aborigines: Wild Men of Formosa (US, 1921), Going South to Taiwan (Japan, 1937), and Happenings in Ali Shan (China, 1949)
XFR Collective (Marie Lascu, Michael Grant, & Brendan Allen) New Video Rescues from the Surry (Maine) Arts at the Barn, 1986-88 (and the Leningrad Amateur Opera Company)

Comparing editions of Three American Beauties (Edison, 1906) from Museum of Modern Art, Library of Congress, National Library of Norway, and BFI National Archive, + EYE’s Buona Sera Fiori! (1909)

Jeff Lambert (National Film Preservation Foundation) & Frank Roumen (EYE Netherlands Filmmuseum) with the newly preserved short comedy Cupid in Quarantine (1918)

Closing screening Todd Wiener (UCLA) introducing recent restorations from the UCLA Film & Television Archive, including Nikolai Ursin's Behind Every Good Man . . . (ca. 1967) and a very special surprise screening TBA

Moderators and respondents include Alia Ayman (Zawya Cinema, Cairo), Anna McCarthy (NYU), Charles Musser (Yale), and Michael Loebenstein (Austrian Filmmuseum).


Saturday, before dinner,

A Screening in  Tribute to Stephen Parr and His Oddball Films and Videos 

Stephen Parr at the 2012 Orphan Film Symposium. 

Programmed by Skip Elsheimer, Andrew Lampert, Regina Longo, Greg Pierce, Antonella Bonfanti, Jeff Lambert, Genevieve Havemeyer-King

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Registration is open!  Join us at Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, NYC.


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Keynote talk: Jennifer Peterson on Love, Loss, and Climate Change

The theme of the 11th Orphan Film Symposium is Love. 

In her keynote talk, film historian Jennifer Peterson will take us in a direction surprising and wondrous.

Registration is open for the April 11-14, 2018, gathering of archivists, scholars, artists, curators, preservationists, collectors, programmers, distributors, tech experts, students, and other enthusiasts.  All events for this NYU Cinema Studies symposium will be at Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, New York.

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Jennifer Peterson
Love, Loss, and Climate Change: 
Watching the Historical Nature Film Today

As the scope and scale of climate change and ecological collapse become ever more apparent, old films about the environment take on new meaning. Nature films were prevalent in the classrooms of the twentieth century. Generations of children watched these simple films about ecosystems, seasons, animal and plant species. How do these films display (and attempt to foster) a love of nature? What is the cinematic form of a love for nature?  (And what do we mean by “nature” anyway?) Finally, what does it mean to love nature and watch its slow death? What happens to love when the object of our love goes away?

Nature films from the 1920s and 30s are particularly interesting today, for many of them depict natural landscapes, animals, and ecosystems that are now threatened or on the verge of obliteration. This presentation engages in a strategic ahistoricism to explore how we experience these historical images of nature today. What does it mean that historical nature films have preserved images of species or landforms that may soon no longer exist? How have these images been changed by the concept of the Anthropocene?

Anthropocene is a term for a new geological era in which human actions have altered the planet so drastically that we have exited the Holocene Era. Scientists debate whether the new era began with the advent of James Watt’s steam engine in 1784 (powered by coal), or if it began with the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Whatever the case, it is undeniable that many of the forms of ecological collapse we are currently facing (the bleaching of coral reefs, catastrophic rates of mammalian and insect extinction, glaciers melting, temperatures rising, more frequent hurricanes, and so forth) are new since the mid-twentieth century. What does it mean to feel love of nature, or more generally a love for the earth, and face this accelerating catastrophe? For those of us who are not scientists but film historians and archivists, we turn to our cinephilia, and examine our current responses to historical nature films.

This talk will include screenings from the David Shepard Collection of educational films held by the Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive at the University of Southern California. Thanks to archivist Dino Everett for digitizing numerous films for this project.

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woodbury.edu/faculty/jennifer-peterson

Jennifer Peterson is associate professor and interim chair in the Department of Communication, School of Media, Culture, and Design, Woodbury University in Los Angeles. Her research and teaching interests center on cinema and media history, experimental and educational films, aesthetics, and ecocriticism. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. She previously taught in the Film Studies Program at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she earned tenure in 2013. She has also taught at UCLA, UC Riverside, the California Institute of the Arts, and the University of Southern California.

In the early 2000s she worked as an Oral Historian at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and briefly at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. She was a scholar in residence at the Getty Research Institute in fall 2012. She has served as the editor of Cinema Journal’s “Archival News” and as chair of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Media Archives Committee.

Peterson is the author of Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film (Duke University Press, 2013). Her new book project focuses on the visualization of nature in American film history before 1960.