Mar 26, 2018

Leaders in the Amateur Cinema League of Nations

Notes by Dan Streible

As we are about to celebrate and screen amateur films from around the world at the Orphan Film Symposium on Love, today Thomas Novotney of Novo Digital Media posted this found compilation of leaders made by the Amateur Cinema League during its run (1926-1954). 




And here's a piece I wrote in 2014, inspired by all the ACL leaders appearing on my radar at the time the Museum of Modern Art host an Orphan Film screening we called "An Amateur Cinema League of Nations"  A session of the same title appears, with all new content, at the 11th Orphan Film Symposium.  A true league of nations with films from Mexico, Estonia, German, and (presented by a Canadian) Czechoslovakia.

Thursday, April 12, 2018
11:20 – 1:15 pm  An Amateur League of Nations

Charles Tepperman (U of Calgary) Příběh vojáka (A Soldier’s Story; Čeněk Zahradníček & Vladimír Šmejkal, 1934) and the 1938 International Amateur Movie Show

Alexander Stark (Philipps U, 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)





Full symposium schedule and registration information at NYU.edu/OrphanFilm.

Mar 25, 2018

Orphans at MoMI, 2012 / 2018



Looking Back: Orphans 8
Made to Persuade (2012)


Notes by Frannie Trempe


In anticipation of the 11th Orphan Film Symposium to be held at Museum of the Moving Image, this post looks back at the last time the biennial event took place at the venue in Queens, New York.

Six years ago, the museum served as home for Orphans 8. As with all iterations of the symposium, Orphans 8 showcased a wide array of rediscovered and once-neglected archival treasures—presented both on celluloid and digital projection. Academics, archivists, students, filmmakers, and other moving image enthusiasts from around the world gathered for four days of screenings, presentations, discussions, and meals—all spent together to foster the unique Orphans ethos regular attendees have come to expect and cherish.

In keeping with the United States presidential election of 2012, the symposium’s theme of “Made to Persuade” set the week’s tone, with a rich four-day program featuring campaign films, propaganda pieces, activism-driven works, and several creative applications of the notion of persuasion. While the election served as an appropriate backdrop for the theme, many Orphans 8 screenings were international in scope. Highlights included Cine Móvil (1976), documentation of an effort to bring films to remote areas throughout Mexico in a fully-equipped RV from Mexico’s Cineteca Nacional, as well as the advertising films of Dutch animator Joop Geesink, presented by Leenke Ripmeester (EYE Filmmuseum) and Julia Noordegraaf (University of Amsterdam).

For the symposium, Colorlab sponsored preservation for the Mexican film, which appeared on the Orphans 8 DVD, and which Cineteca Nacional added to its YouTube channel in 2016.





In another rare screening, five newly-preserved films by groundbreaking computer artist Lillian Schwartz were shown in 16mm at Orphans 8. Schwartz herself attended and spoke in conversation with NYU-MIAP alumnus Walter Forsberg, as part of a program on films made at AT&T/Bell Labs during the 1970s. Forsberg also spoke about computer animation pioneers of the 1960s. (For 2018, collector John Froats continues the conversation about computer-rendered 16mm films from Bell Labs and shares a found fragment of A. Michael Noll’s Patterns from 1964-65).

The Museum of the Moving Image expanded and renovated its space in Astoria only a year prior to Orphans 8, creating an additional layer of excitement for the 2012 event. In the six years since, MoMI has only further cemented its reputation as a powerhouse within the crowded New York City film landscape, both through its exhibitions and year-round curated screenings.

Independent filmmakers Jo Dery and Jeanne Liotta were honored with the Helen Hill Award, honoring the legacy of the New Orleans-based filmmaker and animator. Liotta and Dery each contributed a T-shirt design for the symposium drawn from their work.



Since 2012, Dery has continued to create inventive multimedia installations and comics, including a piece titled Still and Still Moving exhibited by Mono No Aware’s at their gallery space in Brooklyn. Liotta has created experimental shorts on both 35mm and 16mm since 2012, as well as multiple newspaper collages, installations, and one projection project about climate change commissioned for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Science on a Sphere platform. This year’s Helen Hill Award recipient continues the tradition of experimental film at the symposium; Nazlı Dinçel will be honored and a selection of her 16mm works screened.


This year’s symposium will see some presenters returning from 2012, including Jacqueline Stewart, Allyson Nadia Field, and Danielle Ash, as well as panels moderated by former Orphans presenters including Jeanne Liotta, Dwight Swanson, and Charles Musser. Just as “Made to Persuade” did six years ago, Orphans 11 will feature a presentation from Museum of the Moving Image curator Barbara Miller, who will showcase a MoMI collection of vintage posters for X-rated movies.

If the success of Orphans 8 (and the numerous Orphans-branded events since 2012) is any indication, the symposium’s return to Museum of the Moving Image from April 11-14 promises to be unmissable. The 2018 theme of “Love” is a fitting follow-up for the Orphan Film Symposium’s return to New York City --- after all, love and persuasion have more in common than not!




Audio recordings of many of the talks given in 2012 can be downloaded from the Orphans 8 website or the Internet Archive's Orphan Film Symposium Collection



 Full program listing and registration information for the 2018 symposium are here





To request copies of the Orphans 2012 DVD, Made to Persuade, write to orphanfilmsymposium[@]Gmail.com. The DVD booklet is downloadable here

Mar 17, 2018

Exploratorium • Symposium • Laserium

Notes by Caroline Z. Oliveira 


Frame from Laserimage  (c)  Laser Images, Inc., 1972.

The little-known film experiment Laserimage (Ivan Dryer, 1971-72) is part of the session called Technophilia at the 11th Orphan Film Symposium. On April 13, Kathleen Maguire introduces the premiere screening of a new 16mm print, preserved by Bill Brand (BB Optics) and his students in NYU MIAP’s Film Preservation class. Coordinator of the Cinema Arts Program at The Exploratorium in San Francisco, Maguire (also a MIAP grad, ’08) brought attention to the film’s preservation needs. 

Ivan Dryer was the originator of commercial laser light shows in 1973, but he had also been an aspiring filmmaker. In the early 1970s, Dryer partnered with Dr. Elsa Garmire, a California Institute of Technology physicist, to create an hour-long show for the Griffith Observatory Planetarium in Los Angeles. As a pitch, Dryer shot Laserimage, an 11-minute 16mm film that attempted to capture the beauty and fluidity of laser lights. Shooting against a black background, he filmed colorful laser lights and synchronized their movement to instrumental music.

The film’s conception allowed Dryer to develop Laserium (“house of the laser”), the first laser display to be featured in planetariums. The show ended up becoming what the Laserium company’s website describes as “the longest-running theatrical attraction in Los Angeles,” remaining part of the Griffith’s attractions until 2001. Laserium shows traveled to cities internationally and has been referenced in Hollywood movies, television shows, comic books, and music videos. InLASERIUM In Popular Culture,” Dryer wrote that Laserium made its mark by appearing in:
TV shows from Mork and Mindy to The Simpsons and Two and a Half Men; in movies from Starman to Star Trek and Disclosure; in music videos for Madonna, Herbie Hancock and Def Leppard, among many others; in magazines such as People and National Geographic World. . . . And Laserium is a frequent metaphor for spectacle in reviews of everything from a Kenny Chesney concert to Tron: Legacy. It even shows up in a song by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.


In 2017, NYU MIAP student Melanie Miller drafted what became a successful proposal to the National Film Preservation Foundation, leading to a $3,380 NFPF grant to preserve Laserimage as a 16mm film. One print will be archived at the NYU Film Study Center, and another at the Exploratorium, where the preservation elements will also be stored. 

Laserimage, the film experiment, had limited circulation, but it helped launch a new art form and the visual-musical spectacle that revolutionized planetarium attractions in the 1970s. • 






Fun Fact: In the Marvel comic book The Amazing Spider-Man, issue 165 (1977), Peter Parker and Mary Jane discuss their relationship during a Laserium performance at the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium in New York. “The Laserium is about to begin,” he says. Followed by this panel:








Photograph from Kathleen Maguire. 


The 2 rolls of 16mm film -- the master printing negative and a positive optical soundtrack -- that went to BB Optics for preservation. Maguire's Exploratorium colleague Ron Hipschman got them from Pyramid Media, a distributor deaccessioning the elements. For the completist: the NFPF grant to NYU Cinema Studies - MIAP Program was used to create a 16mm interpositive,  internegative, negative optical soundtrack, answer print, and release print. 




Registration and full program listing for the 11th Orphan Film Symposium. 






Mar 14, 2018

La Fiera Domada (1916/1923)

Notes by Shahed Dowlatshahi

Left: Museum of Modern Art 35mm nitrate. Right: Museo del Cine 16mm acetate. 

Long considered a “lost film,” The Aryan is a 1916 western starring and co-directed by William S. Hart, produced and distributed by the Triangle Film Corporation. No complete copies are known to survive of the movie that was released in 5 reels and running about 50 minutes. However, as with some other presumed-lost films (such as the director’s cut of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis), the only known copy has been found at the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires. Fernando Peña, with the assistance of Kevin Brownlow, identified the museum’s La Fiera Domada (The Tamed Beast) as a Spanish-language re-release version of the original. The Museo’s Andrés Levinson and Paula Félix-Didier will premiere the restoration-in-progress at the 11th Orphan Film Symposium on April 13.

Here’s a summary of the archival research and technical work with which I’ve been helping for the past month as part of my education at NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) master’s program. The symposium presentation will be a reconstruction from various available elements and a historical contextualization of it in light of the blatantly racist sentiments and title of the 1916 English-language release. (The latter obviously requires far more discussion than this short initial post can offer.)

The Museo del Cine’s Peña-Rodriguez Collection holds two reels of 16mm duplicating negative from an alternate version entitled La Fiera Domada. These are believed to have been made from a 1923 Argentine 35mm release print, but cover only 35 minutes or so of the original running time. The 16mm negs were recently scanned at 2K. In addition, the Library of Congress holds two fragments of The Aryan (with English intertitles), about 3 minutes of a 35mm negative element and a minute-long 16mm print. Only a few frames of the LOC footage are not found in the Museo del Cine copy but these 4 minutes are of better quality than the severely distressed images in La Fiera Domada.

Two other pieces of archival footage are currently being researched, both in imperfect condition. A Blackhawk Films compilation from 1959, The Saga of William S. Hart, has scenes from The Aryan. The Academy Film Archive confirms its Blackhawk Films Collection holds preservation elements of this. Scanning of the 16mm fine grain master positive is underway. (Thanks to the Academy, archivist Dino Everett at the University of Southern California’s Hefner Moving Image Archive, and Serge Bromberg, business partner with the late David Shepard, who owned the Blackhawk library.) Interestingly, the William K. Everson Collection at NYU contains information about Everson having programmed The Saga of William S. Hart when it was new. In his screening notes of October 1959, he remarks about The Aryan “how we'd like to see all of that one!” -- confirming the long-lost status of the 1916 film even in the 1950s. In addition, the Museum of Modern Art, holds an extensive collection of Hart films made from original nitrate negatives lent or donated by Hart himself (Anne Morra, “William S. Hart: A Pioneer Cowboy,” Inside/Out MoMA blog, Feb. 2, 2016). The Aryan is not among them. However, MoMA holds a 35mm tinted nitrate segment of the film, 140 feet long, acquired from collector Anthony Comanda in 2011. It is not clear whether any of the Academy or MoMA footage is unique or duplicates LOC and Museo footage. We shall see. Meanwhile, the search for any footage from the film continues -- and tips are appreciated.

Francisco Lezama edits an image of actress Bessie Love in THE ARYAN. Francisco Lezama edits Bessie Love in Buenos Aires. (Museo del Cine)

Over the last few months Andrés Levinson and his team at the Museo del Cine, in cooperation with Dan Streible and NYU’s MIAP Program, have been working towards the presentation of a preliminary reconstruction of the film at Orphans 11. Levinson, Sebastián Yablon, and Francisco Lezama are currently integrating the LOC and Museo footage. Among the challenges is consolidating footage with different aspect ratios, speeds, and physical conditions into one edition. We continue to locate items relating to the film and to discuss how they will be integrated into the reconstruction and used to contextualize the presentation at the Orphan Film Symposium. These include original script or synopses in LOC’s Gatewood W. Dunston Collection relating to William S. Hart, 1914-1955; 16 stills from the Bibliothèque du Film at the Cinémathèque Française; a short story published in Picture-Play Magazine in May 1916, from Kevin Brownlow’s personal collection; and ephemera that historian Richard Koszarski has generously shared from his collection. Also helpful are a few decades-old but significant references by film pioneering critics. French writer-cineastes Louis Delluc and Jean Mitry, both of whom saw the film in the silent era, considered The Aryan a cinematic masterpiece!

Another challenge is the translation of the Spanish intertitles in La Fiera Domada. MIAP classmate Erica Lopez has been assisting with the translation and interpretation of these, which differ in meaning and arrangement from the English text in the original release. In fact, the story told in La Fiera Domada is quite different. This becomes apparent when comparing the 3-minute LOC fragment with the same sequence in the Museo version. As Levinson notes, in the English intertitles the heroine pleads with the “good bad man” to rescue her because he is “Aryan.” These are not translated into Spanish. They are simply cut out.

Questions faced by the team preparing this presentation are what to reconstruct? and how to frame this first public presentation? Will this be a composite of the incomplete La Fiera Domada with new English subtitles or intertitles? Or a reconstruction of The Aryan using available footage and photographs, anchored by La Fiera Domada? The current goal is to present La Fiera Domada, a version of the original American film highly modified in the early 1920s for distribution in Argentina, while utilizing material from Aryan fragments to fill in missing pieces. In any case, before anything is screened for our 2018 audience, the undeniable racism of the story and the charged word in it title require proper framing and discussion, such as is the case when screening problematic works such as The Birth of a Nation (released only a year before Hart’s movie) or Gone with the Wind in any context today.





Mar 6, 2018

The Program for Orphans 11: Love

NYU Cinema Studies presents the
11th Orphan Film Symposium, April 11 – 14, 2018
 Museum of the Moving Image
Theme: Love.
Wednesday, April 11, 7:00 pm Reception for registered symposiasts
8:00 pm Opening Screening
Becca Bender (Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts / NYU MIAP) Discovering the Leopold Godowsky Jr. Collection: Home Movies of the Co-inventor of Kodachrome + with the first screening ever of [Elsa and Albert Einstein in Hollywood] (1931)  with Roni Grosz (Albert Einstein Archive, Hebrew U)
Frannie Trempe (NYU MIAP) Nitrate in the Girl Scouts Archive

Karen Falk (The Jim Henson Company) & Craig Shemin (The Jim Henson Legacy) The Early Films of Jim Henson, including the newly-restored Time Piece (1965)
Anna Tantillo (NYU) moderator





Thursday, April 12
9:30am  Welcomes
David Schwartz (Museum of the Moving Image) & Anna McCarthy (NYU Cinema Studies) 
Dan Streible (NYU) Why Love? 
[Dr. Fritz] Wittels on This Thing Called Love (Fox Movietone News, 1929) U of South Carolina Moving Image Research Collections
Observations on Romantic Love (with Stephen Parr and George Willeman, 2010)

Thursday, 10:00 -- 11:00 am Keynote
Jennifer Peterson (Woodbury U) Love, Loss, and Climate Change: Watching the Historical Nature Film Today (with newly scanned films from the David Shepard Collection, USC Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive)


Thursday, 11:20 – 1:15 pm An Amateur League of Nations: A Database
Charles Tepperman (U of Calgary) Příběh vojáka (A Soldier’s Story; Čeněk Zahradníček & Vladimír Šmejkal, 1934) and the 1938 International Amateur Movie Show

Alexander Stark (Philipps U, 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)

Lunch in the museum, 1:15 – 2:30 pm

Thursday, 2:30 - 4:10pm  Small-Gauge Love from South American Archives
Rafael de Luna (Federal Fluminense U, Brazil) A 9.5mm film of the Rio beach resort:  Balneario da Urca (Brazil, ca. 1933) from the Collection of LUPA-UFF

Beatriz Rodovalho (U Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3) 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)
Isabel Wschebor Pellegrino (U de la República, Montevideo) Rescuing the Science Film Comportamiento Sexual y Reproducción de Bothriurus Bonariensis (Plácido Añón, Uruguay, 1959) 

Juana Suárez  (NYU MIAP) moderator

Thursday, 4:30 – 6:00pm The Subject Is Sex
Barbara Miller (MoMI) The Variety Photo Plays Theater Collection of Posters for X-rated Movies, 1965-1983

Michael Loebenstein (Austrian Filmmuseum) Risque Super 8s and Amateur Scopophilia
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 
+

Danielle Ash (Helen Hill Award 2010)  70mm screening:  Love in Dimension 150 (2018) 

 Dinner break 6pm

Thursday, April 12, 8:00 pm  The Helen Hill Award
Bill Brand (BB Optics) Helen Hill’s Super 8 home movies of New Orleans (ca. 2001-2005)
Susan Courtney (U of South Carolina) Helen Hill Award presented to filmmaker Nazlı Dinçel
An all-16mm program of Her Silent Seaming (2014), Solitary Acts (4, 5, 6) (2015), Inability (2016), & Between Relating and Use (2018)

Jeanne Liotta (UC Boulder) moderator




Friday, April 13, 9:30 – 11:00 am The Languages of Home Movies
Dwight Swanson (Center for Home Movies) Introductions: Fee (Germany, 1929)
Rob Anen (Old Westbury Gardens, Long Island) The 35mm Home Movies of John S. Phipps, 1916-1930

Louisa Trott (U of Tennessee) Picturing Himself: Walther Barth in Walther Barth’s Home Movies 
Matt Malzkuhn (Gallaudet U) & Ted Supalla (Georgetown U)  Sign Language in Home Movies

Friday, April 13, 11:20 – 12:50 pm Technophilia
John Froats (collector) Computer Rendering on 16mm at Bell Labs: Patterns (A. Michael Noll, 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
Walter Forsberg (Laboratorio Experimental de Cine - CDMX) moderator

Lunch in the museum, 12:50 -2:15pm

Friday, 2:15 – 4:00 pm 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
Charles Musser (Yale U) moderator


Friday, 4:20- 6:00 pm Cameraman, Camerawoman
Marsha Gordon (NCSU) & Buckey Grimm (independent) Camerawoman Angela Murray Gibson Films Herself into History, 1921-1925

Mila Turajlic (filmmaker, Belgrade) Tito’s Cameraman: Stevan Labudović (1926-2017), Yugoslav Newsreels, and the Non-Aligned Movement in Algeria
Alia Ayman (Zawya Cinema, Cairo) moderator


Dinner break 6:00 pm

Friday, April 13, 8:00 pm  Hate and Love in Silent Cinema
Dino Everett (USC Hefner Moving Image Archive) & Allyson Nadia Field (U of Chicago) The Premiere of the Rediscovered Something Good -- Negro Kiss (Selig, 1898)

Chen Biqiang (China Film Archive) & Zhang Zhen (NYU Asian Film and Media Initiative) U.S. premiere of the restoration of Laogong zhi aiqing (Laborer’s Love, 1922) the oldest surviving Chinese film
Andrés Levinson Paula Félix Didier (Museo del Cine) Premiere of the Reconstructed La Fiera Domada (1916/1923) with W. S. Hart and Bessie Love
Two Three American Beauties (Edison, 1906) Museum of Modern Art & National Library of Norway
Stephen Horne (UK) piano accompaniment




Saturday, 9:30 am  Something Good
Terri Francis (Indiana U Black Film Center/Archive), Charlene Regester (UNC), & Lina Accurso (Alice B. Russell Micheaux Headstone Project) Looking f
or Alice: Love as Film Studies Methodology

Allyson Nadia Field (U of Chicago) & Dino Everett (U of Southern California) Black Intimacy in Early Cinema: Another Look at Something Good -- Negro Kiss (1898)
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.)

Saturday, 11:20 am  - 12:20 pm Archival Education about Orphan Works
Prelude: Matt Soar (Concordia U) Love Leaders (2018)

Dimitrios Latsis, Isaac Prusky, David Emery, & Blanche Joslin (Ryerson U)

Howard Besser (NYU MIAP)

Lunch in the museum, 12:20 – 1:30 pm

Saturday, 1:30 pm - 3 pm Seeing the World
Lindsay Zarwell (US Holocaust Memorial Museum) 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, with Taiwan Film Institute) Screen Representations of Taiwanese Aborigines: Wild Men of Formosa -- outtakes (US, Fox, 1921), Native Trading Post -- outtakes (Fox Movietone News, 1930), Going South to Taiwan (Japan, 1937), and Happenings in Ali Shan (China, 1949)
Tami Williams (UW Milwaukee) moderator

Saturday, 3:15 – 4:10 pm Cultural Exchanges and Music
Marie Lascu, Michael Grant, Brendan Allen (XFR Collective) Video Rescues from the Surry (Maine) Arts at the Barn, 1986-88 (and the Leningrad Amateur Opera Company)

Maria Vinogradova (Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia) A Soviet Amateur Film about a Leningrad Amateur Accordion Ensemble, Tvorchestvo est' tvorchestvo (Creativity Is Creativity, 1975)

Saturday, 4:30 pm A Screening in Tribute to Stephen Parr and His Oddball Films
Programmed by Skip Elsheimer, Genevieve Havemeyer-King, Jeff Lambert, Andrew Lampert, Regina Longo, & Greg Pierce
including 

* Albanian animation, Koha e Dashurisë së Akrepave (The Lovetime of Scorpions, Ergys Faja & Bertrand Shijaku, 2003)
I Reminisce (Veronica Majano, 2004)
Living in a Reversed World (Austrian Ministry of Education, 1958)
and others


Dinner reception, 6:00 pm

Saturday, 8:00 pm  Last Loves . . .  and a Wow Finish

Frank Roumen (EYE Netherlands Filmmuseum) Buona Sera Fiori! (Italy, 1909)
Jeff Lambert (National Film Preservation Foundation) with the newly preserved Cupid in Quarantine (1918)
Carolina Cappa (Museo del Cine) Domingo Filippini’s Galería Cinematográfica Infantil  (General Pico, La Pampa, Argentina, ca. 1927) 
Katy Martin introduces her Super 8 love poem Daffodils (1977) 

Sarah Keller (UMass Boston) & filmmaker Barbara Hammer with Super 8 projections of Aldebaran Sees (1969) & Contribution to Light (1968)
Courtney Stephens (Veggie Cloud) & KJ Relth (UCLA) premiere  Mating Games (2018) with 1963 home movies by Muscle Beach legend Russell Saunders
Todd Wiener (UCLA Film & Television Archive)  Nikolai Ursin's Behind Every Good Man . . . (ca. 1967)  16mm restored print courtesy of the Outfest UCLA Legacy Collection. Restoration funding provided by the National Film Preservation Foundation
David Schwartz (MoMI) shares . . . .

 The schedule may be subject to change. 




Mar 3, 2018

Films and Presenters slated.



Here's the list of films and presenters slated for the 11th Orphan Film Symposium, April 11-14, 2018. It's about LOVE. Final scheduled coming first week of March.

Events begin Wednesday, April 11, with a 7pm reception for registrants and an 8pm screening. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday: begin with panels at 9:30am; lunch and coffee breaks in the museum; panels end at 6pm. After dinners, 8pm screenings each night.

Galería Cinematográfica Infantil  (1927)  
Museo de Cine
Registration is open!  And open to all.
Join us at Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, NYC.  Click here to register.



Wednesday, April 11, 8:00 pm
Roni Grosz (Albert Einstein Archive, Hebrew U) & Becca Bender (Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts / NYU MIAP) with the first screening ever of  [Elsa and Albert Einstein in Hollywood] (1931) and the collection of  Leopold Godowsky Jr., co-inventor of Kodachrome
Karen Falk (The Jim Henson Company) & Craig Shemin (The Jim Henson Legacy) The Early Films of Jim Henson

Thursday, April 12, 9:30am  Introductions
David Schwartz (Museum of the Moving Image) & Anna McCarthy (NYU Cinema Studies) Welcomes
Dan Streible (NYU) Why Love?  + [Dr. Fritz] Wittels on This Thing Called Love (Fox Movietone News, 1929)  from U of South Carolina Moving Image Research Collections

Thursday, Keynote, 10:00 -- 11:00 am 
Jennifer Peterson (Woodbury U) Love, Loss, and Climate Change: Watching the Historical Nature Film Today (with newly scanned films from the David Shepard Collection, Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive, University of Southern California)

Thursday, April 12, 8:00 pm  
Danielle Ash (Helen Hill Award 2010) premieres her 70mm animation Love in Dimension 150 (2018) 
Bill Brand (BB Optics) new scans of Helen Hill's Super 8 home movies of pre-Katina New Orleans (2001-2005)
Katy Martin introduces her Super 8 love poem Daffodils (1977)
Helen Hill Award presented to filmmaker Nazlı Dinçel
         An all-16mm program of her works including Between Relating and Use (2018), Her Silent Seaming (2014), Solitary Acts #4, 5, & 6 (2015), 
Sharing Orgasm: Communicating Your Sexual Response (Lin Yeiser, 1977)
Susan Courtney (U of South Carolina) moderator

Friday, April 13, morning The Languages of Home Movies
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 (Center for Home Movies) moderator

Friday, April 13, 8:00 pm  Hate and Love in Silent Cinema
Dino Everett (USC Hefner Moving Image Archive)  & Allyson Field (U of Chicago) premiere the newly preserved and rediscovered Something Good -- Negro Kiss (Selig, 1898), a new 35mm print projected via old hand-cranked projector
Andrés Levinson Paula Félix Didier (Museo del Cine) Premiere of the Reconstructed La Fiera Domada (Ideal Film, 1923) and The Aryan (William S. Hart, 1916)
Chen Biqiang (China Film Archive) & Zhang Zhen (NYU Asian Film and Media Initiative) U.S. premiere of the restoration of Laogong zhi aiqing (Laborer’s Love, aka Romance of a Fruit Peddler, 1922) 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
+
Live piano accompaniment by Stephen Horne

Saturday, morning Something Good
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
Allyson Nadia Field (UC) & Dino Everett (USC) Black Intimacy in Early Cinema: A Close Look at the Rediscovered Something Good -- “Negro Kiss” (Selig, 1898) 
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.)

Saturday, 4:30 pm A Screening in  Tribute to Stephen Parr and His Oddball Films
Programmed by Regina Longo, Skip Elsheimer, Andrew Lampert, Greg Pierce, Antonella Bonfanti, Jeff Lambert, Genevieve Havemeyer-King
including 
* Albanian animation, Koha e Dashurisë së Akrepave (The Lovetime of Scorpions, 2003) by Ergys Faja & Bertrand Shijaku
* Living in a Reversed World (Austrian Ministry of Education, 1958)
I Reminisce (Veronica Majano, 2004)

Saturday, 6pm Dinner reception 

Saturday, 8:00 pm  Last Loves . . .  and a Wow Finish

Carolina Cappa (Museo del Cine) introduces Domingo Filippini’s Galería Cinematográfica Infantil  (General Pico, La Pampa, Argentina, ca. 1927) 
Jeff Lambert (National Film Preservation Foundation) & Frank Roumen (EYE Netherlands Filmmuseum) with the newly preserved Cupid in Quarantine (1918)
Sunniva O’Flynn (Irish Film Institute) The New Matchmakers (Radharc Films, 1969) 
Courtney Stephens (filmmaker, Veggie Cloud) introduces the premiere of Mating Games (Courtney Stephens & KJ Relth, 2018) with home movies (1954-1963) by Muscle Beach legend Russell Saunders
Todd Wiener (UCLA) introduces recent restorations including Nikolai Ursin's Behind Every Good Man . . . (ca. 1967) 

a very special surprise final film we can't yet reveal (but not to be missed!)


In between all of the above, throughout Thursday, Friday, and Saturday

Matt Soar (Concordia U) Love Film Leaders (2018), a compilation for the occasion 

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 Story1966)
Tzutzumatzin Soto (Cineteca Nacional México) Love at the (Permanent) Time of Political Repression in Mexico: Hare Krishna (Alfredo Gurrola, 1973)

The Subject Is Sex
Barbara Miller (MoMI) The Variety Photo Plays Theater Collection of Posters for X-rated Movies, 1965-1983
Michael Loebenstein (Austrian Filmmuseum) Risque Super 8s and Amateur Scopophilia

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  

Technophilia
John Froats (collector) Computer Rendering on 16mm at Bell Labs: Patterns (A. Michael Noll, 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) Tito’s Cameraman 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 

Seeing the World 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)

Marie Lascu, Michael Grant, Brendan Allen (XFR Collective) Video Rescues from the Surry (Maine) Arts at the Barn, 1986-88  

Lindsay Zarwell (USHMM) Robert Gessner Films the Rise of Anti-Semitism in Europe and the Middle East, 1934-35 

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


Moderators and respondents include Alia Ayman (Zawya Cinema, Cairo), Charles Musser (Yale), Tami Williams (UW Milwaukee / Domitor), et al. 



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





Stephen Parr at the 2012 Orphan Film Symposium. 




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Mar 2, 2018

Hotel discount for the Orphan Film Symposium.

The 11th Orphan Film Symposium, April 11-14, 2018, is held at Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. 

Which hotel is nearest Museum of the Moving Image? 

The Paper Factory Hotel  
37-06 36th Street, Queens, NYC
0.4 mile from MoMI.
Directions: Walking map.
Phone: 718-392-7200 (No discount code.)
Book online at www.paperfactoryhotel.com.

A few discounted rooms for the Orphan Film Symposium can be reserved at the Paper Factory Hotel using this link: 
https://reservations.travelclick.com/95097?groupID=2122484&hotelID=95097#/guestsandrooms


See the earlier blog posting about accommodation and transportation here

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