The Flaherty gives animation award to Helen Hill

The force-for-good now simply called "The Flaherty" (the nonprofit organization that puts on the annual Robert Flaherty Film Seminar), bestows two honors each year, the Leo Award and the Samu Award. The former, named for Leo Dratfield (the influential nontheatrical film distributor who ran Contemporary Films), is given for long-time achievement in independent film and video. The latter is given to an animator whose work conveys “a universal message illuminating our sense of world community.” It’s hard to think of an artist more deserving of this award than Helen Hill.

Charles Samu helped bring attention to independent animators in many places, especially via the World Festival of Animated Film in Zagreb. Although Helen’s filmmaking thrived in many ways, no international spotlight shone on her or her work until her passing. Leo Dratfield and Charles Samu are also obscure figures in the public sphere because they both put their energies into the invisible sector of filmdom – distribution. No work gets to an audience but by distribution. And so it remains quite wondrous and inspiring that the work of Helen Hill has now come to us despite the fact that she never distributed her films, at least not in any conventional sense. She did show at festivals, but more often took prints and projectors to alternative sites of exhibition, including her own home.

Moreover, Helen’s films embody the Samu Award’s aspiration to an art of universality and to work that generates a sense of community. Her films are animated by love of all kinds – romantic, spiritual, filial, maternal, familial. She lived the life of a utopian anarchist, a citizen of the world, residing in the creolized port of New Orleans, the bohemian town of Halifax, the worldly world of Los Angeles, the creative community of Boston, while remaining a creature of Carolina. All of these inflect her enchanted cinematic world, a House of Sweet Magic, but one that also knows about the darknesses of life, and death.

On Monday, November 24, at 7:30 pm, the Flaherty will celebrate its awardees at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theater (at Peter Norton Symphony Space in New York). Helen Hill’s masterpiece, Mouseholes (1998),


Miššje luknje (Slovenija festival)


will screen as part of the Samu Award presentation. Two Leo Awards follow. Fellow orphanista Barbara Hammer is being recognized for excellence in filmmaking throughout her career; Filmakers Library gets the second Leo for its forty years of work in the “invisible sector” of indy film and video distribution.

The force-for-good called simply "The Flaherty" (the nonprofit organization that puts on the annual Robert Flaherty Film Seminar), gives two


http://www.flahertyseminar.org/rffs_leo_2008.asp

For Excellence in Exhibition, Distribution or Programming: Filmakers Library.

For Excellence in Filmmaking: Barbara Hammer.

We will also be presenting the Samu Award to the late animator Helen Hill, whose films convey a universal message illuminating our growing sense of world community.

The 2008 LEO AWARDS will be presented on Monday, November 24, 7:30 pm at the Peter Norton Symphony Space in New York City. The celebration will include presentation of the awards, as well as, clips from the Filmakers Library collection, a short film by Helen Hill, and Barbara Hammers' films, Sanctos and Vital Signs.

Home Movie Boxing Day

Well, the day after the big holiday is called Boxing Day, eh.

At yesterday's Anthology Film Archives screening of home movies, one Super 8 film made an emotional impact that even surpassed the story of boxer Jose Torres' wedding film turning up in 2006. This year, a married couple and their adult daughter brought a single reel of Super 8, which they told us the daughter found in her grandmother's house in Spain. They had been unable to view the footage, so they brought it for us to watch with them.

They told us that the box holding the film indicated that it might be something from grandfather's poultry business back in Spain. Instead, what it turned out to be was a film that none of them had seen -- or even knew existed. Which shock, joy, and tears they realized that what we were watching was film of their own wedding.

The bride and groom had come to the U.S. to study. One day before he entered Duke University law school, the groom was joined by the bride and their immediate family members, who traveled from Spain for the wedding. Seventeen people gathered in a Catholic church in Durham, North Carolina in 1967. After the watching the whole film the family concluded it must have been the brother-in-law who shot it. No one knew what had happened to it all these years.

As often happens at these home movie affairs, moments of serendipity followed. We learned that the couple had celebrated their 41st wedding anniversity that very week. And that she had become a United States citizen 24 hours before HMD. A good week.

The New York Home Movie Day began this year with a film shot in Nigeria. A man, originally from Gary, Indiana, brought a reel of 16mm film his father took when visiting Nigeria in the 1960s. The moviemaker was a Baptist minister whose church had a mission relationship with a Nigerian church. While we listened to the son narrate what parts of the film he could, he took out his cell phone and called his 86-year-old mother while the film was still running. We had the privilege of hearing their sweet dialog about the trip 40+ years ago and what daddy (who passed away 32 years ago) had done in Nigeria. The footage ended with a kind of portrait of the new church he built in Gary.

I also like very much a 50+ year-old black-and-white birthday party film. Shot in 16mm, it showed "Pinky's 3rd Birthday," which took place in a large family home in Buenos Aires. Young Pinky and her party guests were being entertained by trained dogs and a ventriloquist, as well as the hired cinematographer.

Save that one.

Happy Home Movie Day, Jack Dempsey

Now that Home Movie Day (Internationale) occurs near the date UNESCO recently established as the World Day for Audiovisual Heritage (October 27), the HMD movement is appropriately global in scope. Many of us are attending Home Movie Day events today, October 18, including we New Yorkers heading out to Anthology Film Archives' Maya Deren Theater (just a few dozen blocks down the East Side from the United Nations building).

At HomeMovieDay.com one reads that HMD is now established in sites such as Amsterdam, Buenos Aires, Berlin, London, Columbia [SC], Mexico City, Slovenia [!], Toronto, Milan, eleven locations in Japan, and Gerringong, Australia. The local events always have at least a few revelations, and sometimes major ones -- such as the discovery of Wallace Kelly's films (ca. 1929-50) and his masterpiece OUR DAY (1938). Shot in the town of Lebanon, Kentucky, the entertaining short 16mm film leapt onto the National Film Registry a few months after its appearance at Anthology. (With preservation and 35mm blow-up done by Colorlab.)

By the way, you can see the whole 16 minutes of OUR DAY online now, thanks to Martha Kelly and KET in Louisville. There's also a podcast of a TV segment about Wallace Kelly.

Here's to more amateur film discoveries and rediscoveries around the world this week. Thanks to the Center for Home Movies, with which the Orphan Film Symposium proudly associates.

By the way, did you know that Italy has a national preservation and archiving project that goes by the name Associazione Home Movies? (HomeMovies.it)


Or, did you know that in 1927, one could buy 16mm recordings of the Gene Tunney - Jack Dempsey heavyweight title fight, only 18 hours after the bout ended? It's true.

the 7th [!] Orphan Film Symposium

NYU MIAP & LOC MBRS present
Orphans 7

7th Orphan Film Symposium
April 7-10, 2010
National Audio-Visual Conservation Center Library of Congress, Culpeper, Virginia

The Orphan Film Symposium travels to the Library of Congress for its seventh biennial gathering of archivists, scholars, preservationists, curators, collectors, technology experts, and media artists from around the world in saving, studying, and screening neglected moving images. New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts / Department of Cinema Studies is pleased to accept the Library’s invitation to convene in the NAVCC’s jewel-box Mount Pony Theater on the new Packard Campus, giving the symposium optimal presentation of images and sounds in all film, video, and digital formats.


Call for Presentations
Following on the internationalism evident in 2008 at Orphans 6: The State (where 18 nations were represented), Orphans 7 will focus on global and transnational issues. How have moving images circulated across national and other boundaries? How are neglected archival materials accessed and used across and within borders?

We seek proposals for presentations on topics including: film repatriation projects, moving image works about international and regional subject matter; regional and transnational cinemas (e.g., the Global South, the West, Bollywood, Nollywood, Middle Eastern, Southeast Asian, etc.); issues of migration, mobility, and global/local dynamics; international co-productions; intellectual property and copyright debates; films altered for foreign markets and multiplelanguage releases; stylistic cross-fertilization; heritage, cultural property, and developing nations; diasporic cinemas; border cultures; World-Wide Web as production-distribution site and de facto ‘archive’; DVD regions; world film festivals and archives; the World Cinema Foundation; the work of international associations in preservation and access; and other neglected historical and archival material that sheds light on globalization and the transnational aspects of film history and archiving. New productions by media artists using archival material are also sought, including nominations for the Helen Hill Award (given to innovative, independent filmmakers).

Contact:
Dan.Streible@nyu.edu
NYU Cinema Studies
721 Broadway, 6th fl.
New York, NY 10003
(212) 992-8225 office
(917) 754-1401 cell
www.nyu.edu/orphanfilm

Zorn/Colbert genius

In re: Genius

Anthology Film archivist Andrew Lampert reports that the musician John Zorn is game to play accompaniment for three obscure silent shorts by the Belgian cineaste Charles Dekeukeleire: Combat de boxe (1927), Impatience (1928), and Histoire de détective (1929).

Until such a time as that collaboration happens, we can satisfy ourselves momentarily with this clip from South Carolina's favorite and native son.


Stephen Colbert on John Zorn's MacArthur "Genius Grant" (2006)

Paul Strand, newsreel stringer

Postscript to the OFS blog's May 31 posting about the film Boxing Form (1924) and the 1923 Dempsey-Firpo fight pictures.

Walking Off the Big Apple (friend of the show) reported (off-line) that one of the cinematographers filming the Dempsey-Firpo fight at the Polo Grounds in New York was acclaimed photographer Paul Strand. (Source: the Aperture monograph Paul Strand: Sixty Years of Photographs, 1976.)

In 1923, when the fight took place, Strand had already made his innovative experimental film Manhatta (1921, with Charles Sheeler). For more than a decade, Strand the still photographer /artist helped pay his bills by shooting newsfilm for several of the major newsreel services. (Manhatta, once the most rented film in the Museum of Modern Art's circulating collection, will presently be restored by MoMANY. Maybe then we'll have a better idea of its running time; I've read scholarly essays and reference books listing its duration variously as 6, 7, 8, 10, and 11 minutes. Don't believe everything you read in the newspaper.)

I've not been able to determine which company promoter Tex Rickard hired to film the Dempsey-Firpo fight. The movie that was released (mostly in violation of federal law) extended the 4-minute bout into nearly 10 minutes by showing preliminary training scenes and slow-motion replays. It also included a brief shot of the movie camera stand.

One of the YouTube versions of the 1923 fight, posted by elgrandecaudillo, contains this shot (as well as newly added Korean subtitles). Tough to spot Paul Strand among the 6 or 7 cameramen seen in this low-low resolution rendition of what was once a 35mm nitrate film. (That's assuming of course that this cutaway shot is from that event and not a stock footage insert -- as they so often are in these things.) There were also other cameras and operators placed closer to the ring during the bout.

I also recently learned that the animator Quirino Cristiani, who made the world's first feature-length animated films, in Argentina, also made an animated version of the famous fight in 1923, simply titled Firpo-Dempsey. Presumably lost, the movie would have been in the mode of an animated newsfilm, a hybrid form rarely discussed. A prior example of this was the lost Der Große Boxkampf Dempsey – Carpentier (Germany, 1921) done by animator Leopold Blonder and released commercially by Arnold Fanck’s Berg- und Sportfilm GmbH.

Come to think of it, the maker of the actual documentary -- The World's Heavyweight Championship Contest Between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier (1921) -- was Fred Quimby. And he went on to a long career as executive producer of MGM cartoons.



(The Academy gave 8 Oscars to a guy whose best work was the "Tom & Jerry" series??)