May 9, 2020

Orphans Online 2020

Gentle colleagues! Orphanistas of the World!  Sisters and Brothers!

May 2020 greetings.

Regrettable as coronal cancellations are, the 2020 Orphan Film Symposium on Water, Climate, and Migration is migrating to an online experience. May 26-28 live sessions with speakers and presentations will be webcast on the NYU Cinema Studies Vimeo site. 

The schedule, extensive postings, and streaming orphans will be found at the Orphan Film Symposium's NYU website: wp.nyu.edu/orphanfilm. Streaming video will be added in the days before the live symposium and remain online after. Recordings of the live sessions will also stream for those who missed them.



Note that this Blogger site for the symposium remains up to keep access to its 12 years of publication. But it is no longer updated. New material always originates at the NYU site.

Mar 1, 2020

Orphans 2020: See 68mm films at 8K

The May 23-26, 2020, Orphan Film Symposium / Eye Academic Conference, features 68mm Mutoscope & Biograph restorations (in 8K), presented by Frank Roumen and Giovanna Fossati (Eye), Katie Trainor(Museum of Modern Art NYC), and Simon Lund (Cineric). The curated selection of films relate to the symposium's themes of Water, Climate, and Migration. Also a newly scanned 68mm paper print (rarest of animals) from the Library of Congress, thanks to Cineric and LOC generosity to the NYU Orphan Film Symposium. Dedicated to the late film historian and archivist Paul Spehr.

Read the rich program of films and speakers --  and register to join us in Amsterdam.

Also, read my new blog post about 68mm Mutosope & Biograph films, particularly the original phantom ride film, The Haverstraw Tunnel (American Mutoscope Co., 1897). Although it caused a popular sensation, was often imitated, and inspired film historians and theorists from 1983 onward, the short film (less than 2 minutes) remains rarely seen. Why?

The post, "68mm 8K Phantoms," was sparked by this rare reference to the Haverstraw film in later trade press. "This writer has been viewing film since the Lumiere babies, the Haverstraw Tunnel and the Empire State Express were the screen stars. . . ." Epes W. Sargent, Moving Picture World, Oct. 16, 1920.

The closest thing we see of The Haverstraw Tunnel on the web at the moment are frames from the Biograph catalog, as reprinted in Charles Musser's essential history The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907, published in 1990.









































































Dan Streible (New York University)  @Orphan_Films
Blog of the NYU Orphan Film Symposium (c) 2020.
The symposium is a biennial production of NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Department of Cinema Studies

Feb 2, 2020

Program preview. Orphans at Eye, May 23-27, 2020

Registration open to all.

Here's a preview of programming for the 6th Eye International Conference / 12th NYU Orphan Film Symposium, Water, Climate, and Migration, May 23-26, 2020, at Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam.  Please note the listings are not complete (more to come) and the scheduled arrangement of sessions is not listed.  However, this gives an indication of the rich diversity of films, presenters, subjects, and forms offered throughout "Orphans 12."

Saturday, May 23: Eye “Meet the Archive” screenings 12:00 to 16:00

18:00  6th Eye International Conference / 12th Orphan Film Symposium Opening reception and registration.

20:30  Eye Filmmuseum – Cinema 1.
Opening Attractions:  Recent Preservation from the Eye Collection.

May 24, 25, and 26: Sessions begin at 10:00, 13:30, 16:00, and 17:30.Lunch 12:30; Dinner 19:00; Screenings 20:30 pm

Sunday, May 24  :  WATER

10:00 am Giovanna Fossati et al. (Eye), Floris Paalman (U of Amsterdam, Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image) & Dan Streible (NYU) Opening remarks

Frontispiece:  If the Antarctic Ice Cap Should Melt? -- outtakes (Fox Movietone News, US, 1929) new scan from U of South Carolina Moving Image Research Collections; Introduced by Shiyang Jiang (NYU MIAP)

THE SILENT WORLD

Sonia Shechet Epstein (Museum of the Moving Image NYC) Underwater Films from the Department of Tropical Research: Floyd Crosby and William Beebe’s Bathysphere in Haiti and Bermuda, 1927-1934

Monique Toppin (U of the Bahamas) & Erica Carter (King’s College London) An Underwater Sense of Place: Bahamas Marine Locations in Cinema Memory
+ In de Tropische Zee (Thirty Leagues under the Sea) (Carl L. Gregory, Thanhouser, Submarine Film Corp., Bahamas/US, 1914)

RIVERS, DAMS, FLOODS

Stephanie Sapienza (U of Maryland) Unlocking the Airwaves: The National Association of Educational Broadcasters Radio Collection (1952-1973)
Joni Hayward Marcum (U of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) Nature and Energy, Control and Excess: American Infrastructural Cinema in the 1930s
Bradley E. Reeves (Appalachian Media Archives) The Tennessee Valley Authority: “Built for and Owned by the People”   

Gregory A. Waller (Indiana U) and Andy Uhrich (Washington U) Irrigating and Reshaping America: Educational Films on the Power of Water, 1927-1948
Sonia García López (U Carlos III de Madrid) & David M. J. Wood (U Nacional Autónoma de México) Water, Catastrophe, and the Authoritarian-Humanitarian State: Las inundaciones en Barcelona (NO-DO, Spain, 1962) and Inundación (ICB, Bolivia, 1966)

Amy Herzog (Queens College CUNY) Spindrift’s Wet Dream: Puget Sound and the Pornographic Imaginary. Spindrift (Richard Kornbacher, 1973) and [Kornbacher home movies] (1960s-70s)
Sofia Elizalde (Cineclub Rosario) Immigrant Women in the Early 20th Century and Erotic Exploitation: A Rediscovered “French” Film from Argentina ¡Mujer, tú eres la belleza! o La Mujer y el Arte [Woman, You Are Beauty! or Women and Art] (Camilo Zaccaría Soprani, AR, 1928)
Petra Belc (Zagreb) The Consolations and Horrors of the Sea: Restoring the Amateur Experimental Super 8 Films of Tatjana Ivančić, (Yugoslavia, 1970s)

Anke Mebold  (Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum) Unseen Films of the River Lahn by the Inventor of the Leica Camera (Oskar Barnack, DE, 1914-1920);  +  Rund um Die Welt in 2 Stunden [Around the World in 2 Hours] (IT/FR/DE, ca. 1914)

Kimberly Tarr (NYU Libraries) From the Communist Party USA Collection: Let’s Get Acquainted (Kyiv Popular Science Film Studio, USSR, ca. 1972)
Oliver Gaycken (Medicine on Screen) introduces Countdown to Collision (Arlie Productions, GWU Medical Center, 1970)
Bill Brand (BB Optics/NYU) and French Institute Alliance Francaise, debute the newly preserved Aqua (Samba Félix Ndiaye, Senegal, 1989)
Laura Kissel (U of South Carolina) moderator
+
Endpiece: Deliquescence, live projection and sound performance by A Clockface Orange (Rachael Guma and Genevieve HK) with Gabriel Guma (New York)



Monday, May 25 : CLIMATE

10:00  DARKENING DAYS OF PROGRESS
Jennifer L. Peterson (Woodbury U) Wheels of Progress: National Park Roads in US Government Films from the 1920s: Wheels of Progress (USDA, 1927); Roads in Our National Parks (USDA, 1927)
Oliver Gaycken (U of Maryland) & Sarah Eilers (US National Library of Medicine) The Darkening Day: US Public Health Service Films on Air Pollution, 1960-1969.
Angela Saward (Wellcome Collection) It Takes Your Breath Away (Dr. M. Catterall, UK, 1964) medical community response to air pollution death 

NATURFILME
Nicholas Baer (U of Groningen), Katerina Korola (U of Chicago), Katharina Loew (U Mass Boston), and Philipp Stiasny (Film U Babelsberg Konrad Wolf) The Natural World Viewed: Early German Images of the Anthropocene.
Naturschutz: Tieraufnahmen [Nature Reserve: Animal Photography] (Hermann Hähnle, 1915–1920); Bilder aus Grönland [Pictures of Greenland] (UFA, 1929); Die Aran-Inseln [The Aran Islands] (Heinrich Hauser, 1928)

ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
Julianna Villarosa (U of Iowa) Beyond the Frame: Neglected Films, Unnamed Filmmakers, and Unseen Islanders of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Atmospheric Nuclear Tests Archive
Andrés Levinson (Museo del Cine, Buenos Aires) Project for the Preservation of Argentine Antarctic Cinema: Amateur and Semi-professional Footage from Expedición Polar Argentina (1964-65)
Alice Plutino & Alessandro Rizzi (U of Milan) Raising Environmental Awareness in Italy: An Untitled Documentary about Paper Recycling in Brescia (198?) and How This Super 8 Film Was Restored
Carolina Cappa (Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, San Sebastian, Spain) Project Nitrato Argentino (Museo del Cine Pablo Ducros Hicken, 2019)
Alexander Markov (Ukulele Films, Russia) Constructing Hydroelectric Power Stations in the USSR and Egypt: documentary rushes and amateur films (1951-1964)
Eiren Caffall (climate-change journalist) with her film Becoming Ocean (Scott K. Foley, US, 2018)

ARCHIVAL SCIENCES
Linda Tadic (Digital Bedrock / UCLA) The Environmental Impact of Digital Archives
Floris Paalman (U of Amsterdam) & Luna Hupperetz (Vrije U Amsterdam) A Cultural Ecology Approach to Archiving: The Case of Cineclub Vrijheidsfilms (1966-1986) at the International Institute of Social History
Oleksandr Makhanets (Urban Media Archive, Center for Urban History, Lviv, Ukraine) The [Unarchiving] Program: A Decayed Amateur Film Becomes Derevo (The Tree, Oleh Chornyi and Hennadiy Khmaruk, UKR, 2019)



Monday 20:30  HELEN HILL AWARDs: Martha Colburn and Jaap Pieters
Helen Hill home movies and Katrina floods in New Orleans (2005)
+ Rain Dance (Helen Hill, 1990) new scan from Harvard Film Archive

Julie Hubbert (U of South Carolina) confers the Helen Hill Awards:
Recipients Martha Colburn and Jaap Pieters introduce an evening of their films.  Simona Monizza (Eye) moderator



Tuesday, May 26 : MIGRATION

MIGRATIONS AMERICAN (African, Asian, European, Latin American)
Ina Archer (Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture) The Great Migration Project: Town of Highland Beach, Maryland Home Movies (1950s-60s)
Jesse Lerner (Claremont Colleges) A Semi-Amateur Documentary on Migrant Labor along the US-Mexican Border: Hands Across the Border (Great Western Sugar Co., US, 1963)
Klavier J. Wang (NYU) Awakening Immigrant Voices: Asia CineVision’s Manhattan Chinatown Community Television, 1977-1983
Juana Suárez (NYU) Seeing and Hearing Migrant Labor and Class Strata in the Equine Industry: Video from an Unmade Documentary (2010)

EXILES, REFUGEES, DIASPORA
Iga Harasimowicz (Polish National Film Institute) & Grazia Ingravalle (Brunel U London) Polish Diaspora through the Prism of Archival Films of the 1930s.
Anna Leippe (Haus des Dokumentarfilms, Stuttgart) The “Daheim in der Fremde” Project: Amateur Films of Refugee Camps, in Southwest Germany, 1946-1969
Kay Hoffmann (U of Offenbach) RhInédits and the Kinemathek of the Upper Rhine Valley: Amateur Films from Alsace, Baden, and Northern Switzerland

BIOMETRICS, INVADERS, MIGRANTS
Nico de Klerk (Utrecht U) & Andrea Stultiens (Hanze U of Applied Sciences) Anthropologist Paul Julien: Dutch “Seasonal Worker” in an African “Contact Zone”  -- Between the Nile and the Congo: From Cairo to Ituri Forest and Mount Kilimanjaro (Paul Julien, NL, 1934)
Christian Rossipal (NYU) (Un)documenting the State Archive: The Making of an Information Video for Asylum Seekers.
Medicinsk Åldersbedömning [Age Assessment], (National Board of Forensic Medicine, Sweden, 2017)

CHILEAN IMMIGRANTS AND EXILES
Brenda Ibáñez Toledo (independent / Cineteca Nacional de Chile) Immigrants and Exiles: Home Movies of Two Chilean Families. The Melzers (1940s) and the Tobars (1970s)
Jose Miguel Palacios (U Alberto Hurtado) & Elizabeth Ramirez-Soto (San Francisco State U) Performing Rites and Folklore in Chilean Exile Cinema - - excerpts from Dos años en Finlandia (Angelina Vázquez, Finland, 1975); Pilsner & Piroger (Kjell Jerselius and Claudio Sapiaín, Sweden, 1982); Re-torno (David Benavente, Netherlands, 1983)
+
Feature screening: Gens de toutes parts…Gens de nulle part [People from Everywhere…People from Nowhere] (Valeria Sarmiento, Belgium/France, 1980)
+
Katie Trainor (MoMA New York) American Mutoscope & Biograph 68mm restorations, 1896-1902

Matt Soar (Concordia U Montreal) a special announcement
+ Lost Leaders #21:  ASANASA (Matt Soar, 2019)


Note:  Wednesday, May 27,Eye invites conference/symposium attendees
to special activities 
at the Eye Collection Centre.




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