Czech prints: "The fall from the bicycle always ends in wheat."

While at the NCSU Prague Institute last summer, Marsha Orgeron and Devin Orgeron asked film historian Jiří Horníček of the National Film Archive of the Czech Republic (Národní Filmový Archiv) to show them some unique films. Their collective favorite was a driver safety film:

            Nevíme dne [We Don’t Know When . . .] (1946)

            35mm, sound; Czech narration;14 minutes

            directed by Bohumil Vošahlík.

Thanks to these three (and NFA director Vladimir Opěla) we'll get to see this print, plus two 16mm amateur films made in Czechoslovakia: The Soldier’s Story (1934) and [The First Hours of the Occupation] (1968), with Jiří Horníček presenting them.

The final challenge of presenting these films at the symposium is somehow getting English translation for the non-Czech speaking audience of viewers.  How to get a transcription of the narration in Czech to begin with? (Jiří! -- who even provided an audio file of the soundtrack to Nevíme dne). 

How to get these words translated in to English? Knowing that a 1946 driver safety film is likely to contain words and constructions that Google Translator can not accurately translate, we had to find an expert. Quickly. 

After all, the Google translation includes phrases such as this one:

Nekázeň cyklistů způsobila už hodně zla a mnoho škod.

Insubordination cyclists have caused a lot of evil and a lot of damage.

Granted, there is also the sheer poetry of this sentence:

Pád z kola nekončí vždycky v pšenici, často pod blatníky. Jezděte po okraji a hezky za sebou. 

The fall from the bicycle 

always ends in wheat, 

often under the wings. 

Drive along the edge 

of a nice behind.  

Nice. 

But probably not real accurate.

Enter Alice Lovejoy, currently a postdoctoral fellow at Colgate University and recently PhD from Yale, who just happens to be writing a book about the "Czechoslovak Army film studio from 1919 to 1970." She even recognized the voice of the narrator, and the army cinematographer! Talk about the right person for the job.  I'm very grateful for her pro bono translation. 

Whether we then turn that into a printed document or live performance or (ideally) projected subtitles remains to be seen.   

54 days to go….

Amateur film shot at the Ginling College for Women in China (1930)

As part of a panel on women amateur filmmakers of the 1930s, Melissa Dollman, archivist at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, will be showing and discussing amateur films shot by an American couple working in China as educators and Christian missionaries.

Below are excerpts from her proposal to present the films at the upcoming Orphan Film Symposium.  

**********************************
Three reels of silent 16mm film were given to the Schlesinger Library by the Thomson family in 1981.

Lengths: 446', approx. 200', and approx. 300'.
Condition: When inspected at the Harvard Film Archive, no work was needed. No vinegar; good splices. No header/leader. No edge code.
Years shot: R1, 1930-31; R2, 1931; and R3, 1937-38.

Margaret Cook married James Claude Thomson, a chemist and nutrition expert in 1917. That year they departed the United States for the University of Nanking, where he taught, and remained there until the communist takeover of China in 1949. During the Japanese war the university was moved to Chengtu on the Tibetan border. Margaret Cook Thomson was a teacher and missionary for the United Presbyterian Church.

James and Margaret Cook Thomson's home movies depict children's birthday parties, snowball fights, and excursions, most of them shot in the households of fellow white, upper middle-class families -- except these activities take place in a suburban Chinese neighborhood.  In between shots of the Thomson kids at play, we also see local Chinese farmers setting out in the mornings with their wheel barrels down country roads, local Chinese children, a market square, and other scenes of daily life.

We also view moments at the children's Quaker kindergarten.  We don't, however, find in these films much intermingling of the cultures, save for the Thomson family's (beloved) Chinese governess.  

There is also footage of writer Pearl Buck, who was a family friend.

The Thomson children's oral history also details how their parents' positions as visiting foreign professors forced them to flee Nanking for a time during the massacre of 1937, a period captured on film as a pleasure trip to the Great Wall and religious sites.

I will focus on the roll of film shot at the Ginling College for Women.  As the intertitles (not done for the other two films) state, the footage contains shots featuring 

   "Ginling students heading out for church," 

   "Scenes from the Outdoor Spring Field Meet," 

   "Winter Indoor Gymnastic Work," 

   "Smith-Ginling meeting at Ginling," 

   "Ginling Faculty," and 

   "Smith Building in the Spring," among others.  

The "Smith-Ginling" intertitle refers to the collaboration between Smith College (Margaret Thomson's alma mater) and Ginling.  These scenes illustrate, among other things, international collaborations between women's colleges, the work of American Christian missionary women, and how the Ginling school at one point made history for horrific reasons during the Nanking massacre.

**************************

More reports on the other panelists and pioneering women filmmakers in this space soon. But there's nothing like seeing the films projected.

--
Dan Streible

Irish Orphan Films II: Lost, Overlooked & Forgotten Cinema

From Sunniva O'Flynn, Curator at the Irish Film Institute, comes this follow-on to yesterday's notes about the "Orphanage" at the Dublin International Film Festival. Two weeks after the DIFF ends, Ireland hosts another event that's an even closer cousin to the Orphan Film Symposium.  

After two years as a silent film festival, this event is expanding to become the Killruddery Film Festival Celebrating, Lost, Overlooked & Forgotten Cinema. Sunniva O'Flynn (I believe that might be an Irish name, eh) says the screenings take place in a beautiful old estate house (or on the beautiful lawn these photo below shows) where Lord and Lady Meath preside (and still reside).  

Every cineaste's hero, Kevin Brownlow, will select and present some of the silent films. In the other strand of programming, the Killruddery site reports that a "small number of very special guests" will "select and introduce a favourite film" that never reached "the audience it deserved." Also on the programme:  illustrated lectures, a reading room/library, a café, and a bar (imagine!) 

http://killrudderyarts.com/filmfestival/?page_id=189
Watching My Left Foot.  

the risk of broadmindedness [67 days to go]

Thanks to Union Docs for its interest in orphan films and symposing on same. Quixotic?  No doubt.

Here's a thoughtful blog response to last weekend's screening.

Crate Digging: The Orphan Film Symposium

January 29th, 2010 by Colin Beckett

http://www.uniondocs.org/crate-digging-the-orphan-film-symposium/

Orphans at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival

Some call it Jay-Diff....

From the Irish Times, this description of an interesting sidebar at the upcoming Dublin International Film Festival (Feb. 18-28, www.JDIFF.com):

ORPHANAGE  

An orphan film is one that no longer officially belongs to any individual or corporate entity. This intriguing event – Installation? Exhibition? – will put a number of the oddest orphan films before visitors to a specially designed space at Cultivate on Saint Andrews Street. Savour such curious delights as a Turkish Wizard of Oz and a North Korean Godzilla.  Cultivate at The Greenhouse, St Andrews Street, runs throughout festival.

* ** * * * * * * ** * ** * * ** * * ** * * * * 

And then this, from the festival catalog:

       An ‘orphan film’ is any motion picture that has been abandoned by its owner or caretaker. Usually, the term refers to all manner of films outside of the commercial mainstream: public domain materials, home movies, outtakes, alternate endings, undeveloped reels, unreleased material, industrial, medical and educational movies, CCTV footage, just about anything that’s unloved, unwanted or forgotten. To celebrate these parentless films, the festival will be hosting a unique installation at the Greenhouse on Andrews Street. In keeping with the Greenhouse’s green ethic – it is part of the Cultivate community – the setting will be composed entirely of recycled elements. Indeed, the Orphanage could be seen as a celebration of the possibilities of recycling. The furniture, decorations and art works that decorate the space will all be composed from found objects. Most significantly, the films themselves are, in some sense, all needlessly discarded objects. Among the delights on display will be Planet Wars, the famous (perhaps notorious) Brazilian remake of Star Wars, released just five, barely legal months after Lucas’s film hit South America.

Also have a glance at utterly hilarious Turkish takes on ET (Badi) and The Wizard of Oz (Aysecik in the Land of Magic Dwarfs). If you want something semi-respectable then visit when The Old Dark House, James Whale’s follow-up to Frankenstein, is occupying the monitor. If you’d like to witness a legendary folly then check out Pulgasari, a North Korean version of Godzilla. Shin Sang-ok, the film’s South Korean director, was famously kidnapped by Kim Jong-il and forced to do the film-mad dictator’s weird bidding. Odd.

Credits:  Remakes by Evan Doherty.  Space by Alan Kelly. Curated by Tara Brady. Hosted by Cultivate.

 ** * * * * * * ** * * ** * * ** * 

Odd. Fun. Interesting. Something for everyone. And this Orphanage installation certainly shares the funky diversity of the Orphan Film Symposium generally.  

Should the symposium be flattered that the first two sentences are taken verbatim from its own website and longstanding descriptive definition of 'orphan film'?  No doubt. It all derives from National Film Preservation Act language anyway.

In a similar vein, the Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science (lu.com/ODLIS) by Joan M. Reitz alludes to and borrows from SC.edu/orphanfilm/definition.html:

orphan film

     Narrowly defined, a motion picture abandoned by its creator, owner, or caretaker, or lacking the commercial potential to assure preservation. Broadly speaking, a film outside the commercial mainstream, including public domain materials, industrial and educational films, newsreels, independent documentaries, scientific and ethnographic films, experimental films, silent-era productions, amateur works, and films of small or unusual gauge. The National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF), a charitable affiliate of the National Film Preservation Board (NFPB) of the Library of Congress, awards federally funded grants to archives for the preservation of historically, culturally, or aesthetically significant orphan films. Click here to learn more about orphan films.

It's all true.

And click here to register for the 7th Orphan Film Symposium, April 7-10, 2010, in New York. Only 68 days before we kick off on that Wednesday evening with an 8:00 pm screening at the SVA Theatre. 

About 230 people have already signed up for the 267-seat space.

Maybe Jameson is interested . . . . 

the L Magazine (NY) and Gallagher on Barstow

Quick note the start of the two-night orphan film events at Union Docs. In Brooklyn: the L and the CBG.

http://www.thelmagazine.com/TheMeasure/archives/2010/01/22/three-questions-for-cullen-gallagher-about-the-orphan-film-symposium



Good times last January also, when Dr. Robbins Barstow's amateur film Disneyland Dream (1956) made it to the National Film Registry.

http://orphanfilmsymposium.blogspot.com/2009/01/this-is-why-we-do-what-we-do-save.html

filmmaker Edward O. Bland's new blog for THE CRY OF JAZZ

The NYU Orphan Film Symposium is premiering the restoration of THE CRY OF JAZZ (1959), Friday, April 9, at 8:00pm, at the Visual Arts Theater, 333 W. 23rd St. (New York).

This e-mail notice came in today:

I have launched a new blog to celebrate recent attention to my half-century old film THE CRY OF JAZZ.
Apparently the younger generations consider this film a "classic."
Here's the link:  http://ggdaddybland.blogspot.com/

Oh, the blog's name, ggdaddybland, comes from the fact that some people call me the "Great-Grandaddy of Hip Hop" because of the confrontational qualities of both my music and this film.

Best

Ed Bland

The redoubtable Mr. Bland also has this great website:  EdBlandMusic.com