Jun 13, 2022

Orphans 2022: Counter-Archives

Gentle colleagues: June 2022 greetings. 

It's been two years since this blog was updated, but only because the whole Orphan Film Symposium (and blogging) enterprise moved to an NYU site in the Before Times: wp.nyu.edu/orphanfilm. You can also get there using the simple URL that doesn't look like one: orphan.film

Just to make sure the news reaches into previous channels, here's word of the 2022 biennial NYU Orphan Film Symposium.  Our theme: Counter-Archives. The location: Concordia University in Montreal, a place we will refer to as Tiohtià:ke, using the indigenous name from the real Before Times. Our modus operandi remains as it was upon its launch at the University of South Carolina in 1999: four nights and three full days of screening neglected films and presentations by archivists, scholars, and artists.  


Read the full line-up at wp.nyu.edu/orphanfilm/program2022.

Select portions of the 2022 Orphan Film Symposium on Counter-Archives can be watched live on the NYU Cinema Studies Vimeo site.

Here's how to see it.  

1. Register your name, affiliation (or independence), and email address using the NYU Orphan Film Symposium registration portal. Type in $0 in payment (or a pay-what-you-will donation). If you make no payment, you will not get an automatic email confirmation.  However, we will email a PASSWORD to all registrants on Tuesday, June 14. And again June 15. Use this password to log-in to the Live Event (as Vimeo calls it). If you previously registered, no need to do that again. 

 2. The password will work during all sessions, June 15-18, 2022.  Go to the NYU Cinema Studies Vimeo home, https://vimeo.com/user5490513. Click on the Live Event for Orphans 2022, enter the password. 

 The symposium is designed as an in-person, live, in-the-theater experience. The webcast will not be integrated into flow of the program. However, most spoken presentations and individual films/files will be streamed live. 

Given the sensitive and difficult nature of many counter-archival documents, we will restrict items from streaming when appropriate and at the presenters' discretion. Since this is not a festival program oriented to an interactive general audience, Vimeo viewers will see only a "not available for streaming" announcement when portions are blocked.  

 The full schedule of what is live-streaming and what is blocked will be published on the OFS blog. 

 
For now, we can say that the Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday 8:00pm screenings will be streaming (with a couple of short exceptions).  

Wednesday, June 15, by 8:30pm, the Making Counter-Archives screening (8 films, 57 minutes) will play, followed by a 45-minute roundtable featuring Artists in Residence with the Archive/Counter-Archive Project. 

Debbie Ebanks Schlums and Janine Marchessault (York U) introduce 
  • Federica FogliaInnesti Neri e Bianchi [White and Black Grafts] (2022) 
  • Jean-Pierre MarchantA Life on the Borderlands (2021)
  • Sharon Isaac & Kelsey DiamondThunder Rolling Home (2019)  
  • Pamila Matharustuck between an archive and an aesthetic (2019)  
  • Jennifer Dysart, Caribou in the Archive (2019) and Revisiting Keewatin Missions (ca. 1952)
  • Chris Chong, Propaganda (2021-22)
  • Nada El-OmariYaffa (2019) 
  • Nadine ValcinOrigines (2021)
+ Roundtable with Jennifer Dysart, Jean-Pierre Marchand, Pamila Matharu, Nadine Valcin, moderated by Janine Marchessault. 


frame from
Thursday, June 16, 8pm, Screening.
Reanimating Histories, includes Helen Hill Award recipient Kelly Gallagher. Bill Morrison (Hypnotic Pictures) introduces his piece Buried News (2021, 12 min), using newsreels documenting US racial divide (1917-1920), from the Dawson City Collection.  Phil Hoffman introduces Your New Pig Is Down the Road (Helen Hill, 1999) a hand-processed 16mm print, which Helen made at Phil's "Film Farm." 

Filmmaker Kelly Gallagher presents a program of her short works including More Dangerous Than a Thousand Rioters: The Revolutionary Life of Lucy Parsons (2016), A Herstory of Women Filmmakers (2009), Ceallaigh at Kilmainham (2013), From Ally to Accomplice (2015), and three from 2021: Pine and Genesee, We Had Each Other, and In the Future. 


frame grab
Saturday, June 18, the 8:00 pm screening of silent films in a program we call Two Sons & Sales Femmes. Louis Pelletier (U of Montreal / Cinémathèque québécoise ) introduces Les deux fils de monsieur Dubois (Gordon Sparling, Canadian Forestry Association, 1928), a premiere of the new restoration by the Canadian Educational, Sponsored & Industrial Film Project, with live musical accompaniment by Andrei Castañon.  25 min.  

Laura Horak (Carleton U) & Maggie Hennefeld (U of Minnesota) introduce Screening Cinema’s First Nasty Women:     • Pranks (US, 1909). Library of Congress. Music by Gerson Lazo-Quiroga. • Laughing Gas (US, 1907, with Bertha Regustus).  Library of Congress. Music by Matt Hayes and Gerson Lazo-Quiroga. • La Pile électrique de Léontine / Betty’s Electric Battery (France, 1910). Gaumont-Pathé Archives. Music by Gonca Feride Varol. • Fatty and Minnie He-Haw (US, 1914, with Minnie Deveraux). Library of Congress. Music by Eliot Britton. Introduced by Kickapoo artist Arigon Starr. • The Red Girl and the Child (US, 1910, with Red Wing). Museum of Modern Art. Music by Don Ross. Introduced by Cherokee scholar Liza Black.   

 + a final world:
Brian Meacham (Yale Film Archive) introduces outtakes from James Baldwin: From Another Place (Sedat Pakay, 1973) filmed in Istanbul, 1970.        
      

NB. This Blogger site for the symposium remains up to keep access to its 14 years of publication. But it is seldom updated. New material originates at the NYU site.

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