Orphan Radio: More listening to recovered history.

Two more "friends of the show" (the Orphans show, that is) followed Danielle Ash with interview segments on "The Leonard Lopate Show," WNYC-FM.

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Sam Bryan, longtime orphanista, discusses his father Julien Bryan's film Siege, documenting Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939 and released to U.S. theaters in 1940.

Information about the DVD.  www.polandww2.com/siege/about-the-siege-dvd

The new DVD is published by Aquila Polonica.

Listen to the Bryan interview:





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Anna McCarthy talks about her great new book The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America (The New Press).

Listen to her here:

Friday, July 30, 2010

The Leonard Lopate Show interviews animator Danielle Ash

Listen to the July 30 broadcast-podcast here:

Award-winning filmmaker Danielle Ash talks about her work and discusses her recent films: "Pigeon Dance" and “Pickles for Nickels.” 

• 
  Watch "Pickels for Nickels" and find out more about Danielle Ash's work here.

• www.danielleash.com 

Bits & Pieces,  Nr. 711


While majors projects and forays swim beneath the surface during summer months, there are some odds and ends to report on the orphan film front.

"Film tramp" Bill Daniel (left) has taken up the orphan film banner and is flying it around the U.S. this summer, screening a 16mm collection of music films from the late-mid-twentieth century.  Read about the "Sonic Orphans" tour on his blog.



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Several orphanistas (Walter Forsberg, filmmaker Meg Jamieson, et al.), pointed out July 8's article in Slate magazine: 

The Silence of the Silents:  
A heroic wiki project to identify lost and orphaned films.
http://www.slate.com/id/2257833

https://www.lost-films.eu

A relatively recent venture, this iterative, wikified  method for identifying extant orphaned films and finding lost ones is a great idea. Lost-Films.eu is helmed (as Variety would say) by the Deutsche Kinemathek (Museum für Film und Fernsehen) Berlin. Partners in the Lost Films project include several archives with some of the largest collections in Europe:

• Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, Berlin
• Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung, Wiesbaden
• Centre national de la cinématographie (CNC), Paris
• Filmarchiv Austria, Vienna
• Národní filmový archiv, Prague

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"Rachel Wilson teaches media production and research in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT [Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology] University. She attended Orphans 7 as part of her PhD research to establish an online digital archive for student films produced in Australian Universities."
         So reads her bio/byline in the just published Senses of Cinema, issue 55 (July 2010).
Read her report on the Moving Images Around the World symposium here:  www.SensesofCinema.com/2010/festival-reports

* * * * *
Perennial favorite and orphan film frog/mascot Ro-Revus, star of Ro-Revus Talks about Worms (1971, watch it here), had a major tribute paid to his legacy at the Pocahontas County [West Virginia] Film Preservation Symposium & Moonshine Jamboree, 4th of July weekend.

Mr. Joe Bowie the Voice of Ro-Revus, was Pocfest's Guest of Honor.   The Columbia, South Carolina native and resident brought Ro-Revus memorabilia and told stories about his life with America's greatest frog. Dwight Swanson, Skip Elsheimer, and friends organized a special screening of a Ro-Revus episode of the SC ETV children's program The June Bugg Show (1967) unseen in public for 40 years! (courtesy of ETV and the UGA Peabody Awards Archive).  All unfolded at the Pocahontas Country Opera House, in Marlinton, West Virginia.


See a video clip of the star-struck Skip Elsheimer with Ro-Joe at AVGeeks.com: 

 The Orphan Film Symposium has mailed Mr. Bowie a copy of its DVD Orphans 7: A Collection of Orphan Films. It includes all six minutes of Ro-Revus Talks about Worms, color-corrected by Colorlab. A DVD extra is an interview with Joe Bowie. 






* * * * *
Anyone who attended the 7th Orphan Film Symposium in April 2010, will recognize the face and brassy voice of Jude Kiernan (left), the NYU MIAP student who served as the acrobatic, head-setted stage manager, traffic coordinator, and troubleshooter throughout the three days and four nights.

Today, July 13, 2010, Jude and family welcome daughter Billie into the world. Not an orphan.


* * * * *
Forthcoming updates on several Orphan Film Project events, including:

• Films preserved through the Orphan Film Symposium screening at the Museum of Modern Art's "To Save and Project" showcase, this coming fall;

• "Orphans West II," a second mini-symposium on orphan films, sponsored by Los Angeles Filmforum (May 2011), TBA;

 • Audio and video documentation of the 7th Orphan Film Symposium going on-line soon;

• Announcement of dates, location, and theme of Orphans 8 in Spring 2012.

* * * * *

And. . . the Wikipedia entry for "orphan film" now has outtake video of Rick Prelinger and Howard Besser (NYU) answering the questions "What is an orphan film?" and "What is the Orphan Film Symposium?"

Video shot by Erin Curtis (now at SC ETV, with Ro-Revus!) and Lauren Heath (now an NYC-SC commuter-mediamaker) at the 2006 symposium at the University of South Carolina.

the passing of Callie Angell

Callie Angell and Jonas Mekas (April 9, 2010)

Very sad news. 

Word came this past weekend that Callie Angell has died.

Less than a month ago we heard from this brilliant scholar and curator at the screening of the newly preserved Warhol film Uptight #3 -- David Susskind. It was a thrill to work with her on the Danny Williams/Andy Warhol film presentations, which Sarah Resnick, Esther Robinson, and Katie Trainor revved up for Orphans 7.

Callie said yes right away when, in 1999, I asked her to speak at the first Orphan Film Symposium, at the University of South Carolina. And she said yes right away ten years later, when invited to speak at the 2010 symposium. She was eager to attend all four days. She was delighted to see, for the first time, the funny 1967 local TV news piece in which Andy goofs on a square reporter curious about the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (film shot in Rhode Island, brought to us courtesy of Stephen Parr).

So it's especially shocking to learn of Callie Angell's death, less than a month later. 

Callie knew so much. As compiler of Warhol's  film catalog raisonné, she no doubt saw more of his voluminous work than anyone. As Jim Hoberman writes in his Village Voice piece (see below), it was she who pointed out that in the supposedly uneventful eight-hour Empire, one can see reflections of Jonas Mekas and Andy standing behind the camera. When I was hungry for any scrap of information about Warhol's unreleased 1965 film Drunk, Callie generously shared her notes on it. She was, after all, the only person to see the film since '65.

Sarah, Katie, Callie, Esther, Todd (April 9, 2010)

Below are links to some tributes to and memories of Callie, which her curatorial assistant Claire Henry put together and asked be circulated. (Thanks to Bill Morrison for passing this along.)

from Callie’s family in the NYT:  www.legacy.com/

New York Times obituary by Niko Koppel  NYTimes.com/2010/05/11

from the Whitney Museum in the NYT:  www.legacy.com/obituaries

J. Hoberman, the Village Voice: blogs.villagevoice.com/runningscared

        J. J. Murphy:  jjmurphyfilm.com/blog/2010/05/15/for-callie-angell-1948-2010/

Gary Comenas:  warholstars.org /callie_angell_obituary

David Schwartz (Museum of the Moving Image): www.movingimagesource.us 

Douglas Crimp, Artforum:  www.artforum.com/news 

Take care of one another.

dan

the most famous film archivist in the world for the past two years

The May 5 New York Times has a good write-up of the archival details behind Fernando Peña and Paula Félix-Didier's rediscovery of the complete Metropolis. The former, sadly, was unable to join us at the recent Orphan Film Symposium. But the latter, happily, was. In fact, Paula has already come to New York again. This time "the most famous film archivist in the world for the past two years" is in NYC for the premiere of the restored Metropolis at Film Forum.

Saludos, orphanistas.

Paula Félix-Didier (center) talks with Bill Brand (right) and Kara Van Malssen at the 2006 Orphan Film Symposium in Columbia, South Carolina.

Pictures from the National Film Board of Breadland*

Jodie Mack and Danielle Ash received the Helen Hill Award for the 2010 Orphan Film Symposium. NYU Cinema Studies and the University of South Carolina Film and Media Studies program hosted the event and screening at the SVA Theatre in Manhattan.  April 8, 2010.

Here's a host of photos from their pre-screening presentation and tea party (lower-case) toasting. The screening was entitled "The National Film Board of Breadland."*




Download individual photos here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/streible/Orphans7Thursday#

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*"The National Film Board of Breadland" is the fictional entity that produced training films for the Queen of Breadland, as seen in By Bread Alone (ca. 2003), Haley Lou Haden's New Orleans puppet theater production. Helen Hill made the film for the puppet program. The allusion to the National Film Board of Canada (for which Helen once worked) and its notoriety in animation was also paid tribute to at the 2010 Orphan Film Symposium screening. Preceding Danielle Ash's Pigeon Dance (2007) and Helen Hill's Scratch and Crow (1995), we screened Norman McLaren's Hen Hop (1942/49), from the National Film Board.

a Canadian Orphan Film Symposium

I dunno what's come of it, but a year or so ago four Canadian scholar/ archivist/ filmmakers (three alumni of past Orphan Film Symposiums), established this website, Cinephemera.

http://www.cinephemera.ca/Cinephemera/Home.html

---

Its objective caught my eye.

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Our Objective
      To create awareness of orphan media and to excavate, preserve, and contextualize a variety of alternative, non-theatrical, obscure or obsolete forms of Canada’s audio-visual heritage. Also, we are in the process of creating an orphan film symposium here in Canada.

Canadian Orphan Film Symposium 
      Similar to the orphan film symposium in the U.S. (www.nyu.edu/orphanfilm) we would like to start an orphan film symposium in Canada. This symposium would consider the material conditions of the circulation of these media, the historical exhibition and reception contexts, the concrete issues related to their preservation and accessibility (storage, copying, preservation, copyright, and digitization), and issues surrounding their study, programming and curation. This symposium would be an opportunity for archivists, librarians, scholars and filmmakers working on orphan film in Canada to share their research and create a viable lobby for the preservation of our fragile audio-visual history.
-----------------------------------

Reading this while also brainstorming about a forthcoming Advisory Board for the OFS (the capitalized one) leads me to think that a new level of maturation has come to "Orphans."  One rationale for having a board of advisors is to make the symposium and the Orphan Film Project more sustainable, to set up succession. 

However, the symposium, it seems, has rippled synchronically, regardless of what comes diachronically. If independent groups, particularly in other nations, are establishing parallel (but not affiliated) symposiums and projects, then a central entity becomes unnecessary. No reason for an "ofs" (lower-case, as in the Cinephemera text) in Canada --or the Netherlands or Singapore -- to "compete" with one (or more) in the U.S. (And no reason to trademark or brand the phrase; that wouldn't be orphanistic.) 

That said, all such enterprises, including NYU's, will be modest and marginal, compared to the big media ventures in the world. It's better for our mutually assured survival, and for the strengthening of ideas and actions, to let a hundred flowers bloom (or a thousand, as we non-Maoists say). 

In fact, since Canada is where a South Carolinian's Madame Winger, Recipes for Disaster, and National Film Board of Breadland were conceived, it only seems right to go there. 

Meanwhile, discussions are underway for 2012 to have Orphans 8 at a venue such as the Museum of the Moving Image (Astoria, Queens) or the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center (Silver Spring, Maryland). Or wherever the event can find safe harbor. And maybe Orphans 2014 in Amsterdam.

Other suggested locations?  Need: 250+ seats; archival projection equipment.

-- dan.streible@nyu.edu