'Best of Orphans' at the IFC Center in NYC

(40 days until Orphans 6)

On Tuesday, February 19th, at 8:00 pm, the IFC Center in New York hosts its weekly screening in the "Stranger Than Fiction" documentary series. This week's episode is being billed as "The Best of the Orphan Film Symposium." Series curator and host Thom Powers will preside over the evening, which features Laurie Anderson talking about her work with NASA footage and Dan Streible of NYU showing short films from several orphaned genres.

Filmmaker Jeanne Liotta will tell how she came across the 1961 wedding film of boxing star Jose Torres and his bride Ramona. Excerpts from films found in the Communist Party USA collection will be shown alongside a short made for the U.S. Information Agency during the cold war. And a curiosity from Madison, Maine, made by an unknown amateur in 1934, that one might swear was a Joseph Cornell film. And a home movie from depression-era Kentucky that one might swear was made by Orson Welles -- three years before Citizen Kane.

Happy Valentine's Day.

(41 days 'til...)

Madame Winger Makes a Film (Helen Hill, 2001)




Red hearts were a motif in the films and art of Helen Hill, whose work we will be honoring on opening night.

Drawing in Helen's cookbooklet Recipes for Disaster (2001), which was released with Madame Winger.

Numbers to consider . . .

(42 days 'til Orphans 6)

More than 300 people will be at the symposium; they come from 17 nations.

The films to be screened were filmed in 16 nations, across 102 years of time (1906 to 2008).

Approximately 30 works have been newly preserved and will debut at the event. Some 20 of these have been preserved by Orphan Film Symposium partnership initiatives.

Rediscovered PASSAIC TEXTILE STRIKE footage

(43 days 'til Orphans 6)

When the NYU Tamiment Library acquired the Communist Party USA collection in 2006, a few hundred reels of films came with it. The librarians' initial inventory led to a significant find: a nitrate print of The Passaic Textile Strike (1926), a storied film sponsored by International Workers Aid to convey labor's perspective on the strike by mill workers in New Jersey. However, only an incomplete version was known to exist, with 2 reels lost. Those reels were found.

The deteriorating nitrate went to the Library of Congress, which had previously preserved the other 5 reels. George Willeman is working to salvage as much of the rediscovered footage as possible. George will tell us more at Orphans 6. Meanwhile, you are here among the first to see these samples of PASSAIC footage he has been able to rescue. (Courtesy of LOC and Tamiment Library.)

Helen Hill Award recipients

(44 days 'til Orphans 6)

Naomi Uman contributed this self-portrait to Helen Hill's Recipes for Disaster: A handcrafted film cookbooklet (2001). Her little dog will be at the symposium too.

A frame from Jimmy Kinder's cameraless film, Grandfather (2008).

Helen Hill Awards announced

(45 days 'til Orphans 6)

Naomi Uman
(Mexico City / L.A.)
&
Jimmy Kinder
(New York City)

The Orphan Film Symposium at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts and its partner, the University of South Carolina Film Studies Program, have named media artists Naomi Uman and Jimmy Kinder recipients of the 2008 Helen Hill Award. The filmmakers will screen and introduce their latest productions at the symposium, March 26-29.

The new award honors independent filmmakers whose work embodies the spirit and creativity of the late animator Helen Hill (1970-2007). Jurors intended to give only one prize, but they were impressed by two outstanding artists – and donors proved generous enough to fund them both. Uman and Kinder each receive funding to participate in the 6th Orphan Film Symposium, an international gathering of artists, archivists, curators, and scholars devoted to neglected films. The award also includes $1,000 worth of Kodak film stock.

Naomi Uman, an innovative filmmaker (Leche, 1998; Removed, 1999) who divides her time between Mexico and California, has been living on a farm in the Ukraine while making her latest work, Kalendar. Unbeknownst to the jurors who selected her for the award, Uman knew Helen Hill. Both artists earned an MFA from the CalArts program in Experimental Animation. Both made the hand-processing of celluloid negatives and tabletop animation their signature techniques. “Naomi Uman is the person who inspired me to understand that film is tough and can withstand a lot of play in the darkroom,” says Melinda Stone, who collaborated with her on the short Developing Memory (2002). “Naomi is a fearless filmmaker and she loves teaching others to experiment.”

Jimmy Kinder, while a student at The New School in 2007, purchased a WWII-era Castle Film on eBay. The 1944 newsreel depicted the U.S. bombing of Truk atoll, the Pacific island that had been his grandparents’ home. In Grandfather, his first 16mm production, Kinder intercuts the found footage with his own hand-drawn direct animation. One of the award jurors, filmmaker Laura Kissel, notes that the moving piece “scavenges archival footage of war and juxtaposes it against handwritten notes that remember his grandfather. This cameraless film insists upon the personal in an age of violence and war.”

Rediscovered Spanish cinema

(46 days 'til Orphans 6)

Thanks to the Filmoteca Española in Madrid, the doyen of Spanish film historians, Román Gubern (Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona) will be attending the symposium. Gubern joins Paula Félix-Didier (director, Museo del Cine, Buenos Aires) in introducing the debut screening of the newly-preserved 35mm film Noticiario de Laya Films No. 3 (1937).
The ten-minute reel, long-thought lost, turned up in an inventory at the NYU Tamiment Library, as did three reels of associated footage. All have been preserved by Cinetech for Orphans 6. Our screening will feature a new score for the silent outtakes, plus a response by Steven Marsh, author of Popular Spanish Cinema under Franco (2005).