DVD Sampler of Orphan Films

Three students graduating from the NYU Moving Image Archiving and Preservation master's program in six weeks -- Stefan Elnabli, Walter Forsberg, and Jonah Volk -- have produced a DVD.  It's a fully outfitted production, with liner notes, nice graphic design, finest film-to-video transfer, preservation notes, original scores, and commentary tracks.

This Orphan Film Sampler will be given to attendees at the rapidly upcoming 7th Orphan Film Symposium, which commences April 7th. It's not a collection of items from this year's symposium, but an assortment of films shown at past symposiums, alongside orphaned works not showcased before.


Here's the list of 11 entries:


 • The Passaic Textile Strike, reel 5 (International Workers Aid, 1926)
  • Jenkins Orphanage Band (Fox Movietone News, 1928)
  • World's Youngest Acrobat (Hearst Metrotone/Fox Movietone, 1929)
  • Tales from Tamiment (Louis W. Kellman, for the Rand School of Social Science's Camp Tamiment, ca. 1932)
  • Berlin Olympics home movies (unknown, 1936)
  • With the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain (Henri Cartier-Bresson with Herbert Klein, 1938)
  • NYU Surveillance Film of 3/6/68 Dow Chemical Demonstration (NYU Campus Security, 1968)

 • Ro-Revus Talks About Worms (South Carolina ETV, 1971)

 • [New Year's Eve at CBGB's] (Amos Poe, ca. 1978) 
 • let's just kiss + say goodbye (Robert Blanchon, 1995)
 • Homage to H. Lee Waters (Bill Brand and Julia Nicoll, 2004)

 The DVD will not be sold.  In fact, no money changed hands in the compilation and production of these orphan films -- thanks to the generosity of Colorlab, Broadway Video, NYU Libraries (University Archives, Fales Library, Tamiment Library, and the Preservation & Conservation Department), South Carolina ETV, the University of South Carolina Moving Image Research Collections, Library of Congress, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, CPUSA, Amos Poe, NYU Steinhardt Music Program in Film Scoring, and the Tisch School of the Arts/Cinema Studies.

Old and New Media after Katrina after Orphans 7

The 2010 Orphan Film Symposium is now but 22 days away. The program went to the printer yesterday. The full program is online, with annotations galore. 

Meanwhile, as Orphans 7 gets set to host Helen Hill Award winners Jodie Mack and Danielle Ash, a new book with a chapter on Helen Hill and her film work has been announced by Palgrave-usa.com

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Art21.org on orphan films

re: Art21 blog:

Nick Ravich has a swell review of the March 9th "Best of the Orphan Film Symposium" screening at the IFC Center.

http://blog.art21.org/2010/03/12/frederick-wiseman-orphan-films-fifa-montreal-other-documentary-screenings

Bringing Silent Decay to Life: Bill Morrison at Orphans

Experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison is a regular at the Orphan Film Symposium, where he has generated ideas for his distinct approach to creating new works out of damaged film materials. Although Morrison is best known for his feature-length 2002 meditation on the degradation of silent film imagery, Decasia, he has produced over two dozen works since the early 1990s.
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Morrison has partnered with preservation expert George Willeman at the Library of Congress's National Audio-Visual Conservation Center to curate fragments resonant with his unique cinematic vision. They come from prints of five silent feature films: Cromwell the Wicked (1926) an obscure quasi-documentary about Cromwell, Oklahoma; The Climbers (1919), a drama by prolific but little-known director Tom Terriss; Pathé's stencil-colored The Life of Christ (1908); and two independent productions, With Buffalo Bill on the U.P. Trail (1926); and a jungle drama called Life's Crossroads (1928).

All of these nitrate-base prints suffered from emulsion deterioration, a phenomenon caused when off-gassing from the decaying nitrate cellulose base softens the silvery, gelatinous image layered upon it. Although this renders the original materials unprojectable, Morrison reframes the aleatory reconfiguration of the images for aesthetic possibilities.

Morrison and Willeman worked with a large collection donated to the Library of Congress by John Maddox of Duck Run, Tennessee, a private collector who used to project films for neighbors in his own outdoor cinema. However, according to Willeman, the silent films in Maddox's collection came to him from another collector. (This physical movement of the prints -- from collector one to Maddox to LOC to Morrison to the symposium screening -- neatly plays into the the Orphans 7 theme, "Moving Pictures Around the World.")

"Many of them were in amazingly good condition for the lack of proper storage, as Bill will attest," says Willeman. He adds, however, "Even the bad ones had some value."  

    -- Eric Kohn

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frame from Buffalo Bill on the U.P. Trail

Orphans 7, AMIA@20

Here's a reciprocal archival shout-out to Orphan Film Symposium partner, the Association of Moving Image Archivists. Thanks to new (as of this month even) AMIA President Wendy Shay the first new-style AMIA Press Release (2/15/2010) prominently announces the 7th Orphan Film Symposium coming up in April.

Here's a clipping from page one. If you are new to uh-ME-uh doings, theirs is a website worth visiting: AMIAnet.org.

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Edgar Ulmer's Orphan Films

In 1934, at the age of merely thirty, Austrian director Edgar Ulmer saw the release of his second feature film, The Black Cat. Starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, the film was a tremendous commercial success for Universal and won much critical acclaim for Ulmer. At this point, with his career seemingly on the rise, it would have seemed unlikely that the word "orphan" would have ever accompanied any of Ulmer's films.

And yet, for Ulmer, his life and career took something of a detour. During this time, Ulmer stole away the wife of producer Max Alexander, which may not have been that big a problem except Alexander was the nephew of Universal studio head Carl Laemmle. Effectively an outcast in Hollywood, Ulmer would start directing ethnic films, setting himself on a course that would result in one of the most diverse crop of films ever to come from a single director. He helmed a number of Yiddish-language films, some educational films, and during the 1940s released a wildly diverse and impressive series of films for PRC, including his most famous film, Detour (1945).

Not surprisingly, a career with so many different types of films made for so many different types of audiences and studios resulted in a great many orphaned films. During the late 30s and early 40s Ulmer directed a series of at least eight educational films for the National Tuberculosis Association. Long forgotten sponsored films, Devin Orgeron found a tremendous amount of information on these Ulmer TB orphans, presenting his work at the fifth Orphan Film Symposium (and publishing it in the forthcoming book Learning with the Lights Off).

Still, there are a great many other orphaned works in the Ulmer oeuvre, owing to the fact that few of his films were made for big Hollywood studios. Luckily, the director's daughter, Arianne Ulmer Cipes, has done a tremendous amount of work towards saving Ulmer's orphaned films. As she put it in a September 1997 interview in Video Watchdog:

So the materials are coming in, but now comes the point where I have to find a way to invest in the preservation of "orphaned films." The ones that are owned by majors -- The Black Cat (1934), The Man From Planet X (1951), and so on -- are being maintained and utilized on video and laserdisc, and they [presumably] be preserved. But all the other films -- including Detour (1945), Her Sister's Secret (1946) and Bluebeard (1944) -- are orphaned films. To get the material up to first grade quality becomes a very important mission.

To this end, Arianne Ulmer Cipes started the Edgar G. Ulmer Preservation Corp., an organization that has done much to presere Ulmer's more famous films. Still, as Orgeron's research shows, there is a great amount of work yet to be done in regards to preserving the tremendously diverse output of the director. While many of his films fail to transcend their meager budgets and oft-times mediocre stories, just as many manage to rise admirably above their modest origins, owing to the creativity and resourcefulness of their director.

If the totality of Ulmer's career is to be assessed, it can only be done so by measuring all his films, both the famous pictures, and the forgotten ones.


-Ben Strassfeld

A New Trip Down Market Street

In today's media-saturated environment, audiovisual glimpses of daily life are ubiquitous. Flashback to the earliest days of the moving image, and much of what remains feels fragmented by comparison: minute-long mementos recording everyday life (the Lumière films), staged performances (Edison kinetscope loops), or bits and pieces of curiosities. However, as windows into the past, their range is finite. That's precisely why the captivating film known by the assigned title A Trip Down Market Street Before the Fire -- a single, unbroken shot of San Francisco circa 1906 --  holds onto its place as a vital piece of film history. Depending on the projection speed it unfolds  between ten and fifteen minutes.




The Library of Congress on-line version (digitized from a print deposited by the AFI in 1972) is catalogued as 533 feet long. Transferred at 15fps it runs 10:38. The longer running time comes from renowned film collector Rick Prelinger, who found a previously neglected 35mm print, which he has also used for Prelinger Archives's first venture into HD transfer. At the Internet Archive, the trip lasts 13:52.

The camera operator behind this long take is left unidentified. One historian recently posited it was a man called Jack Kuttner, others question that verdict. Another historian suggests that advertisements of 1906 point to the Miles Bros., a nationally prominent, San Francisco-based film company of the time. (See Melinda Stone's essay, "Five Moments on Market Street, 1905-2006," at SF360.org.)

Whoever the cinematographer was, his[?] project succeeds precisely because he manages to stay invisible. As the static camera stares unblinkingly at the street ahead, the cable car on which it rests slowly drifts through downtown San Francisco, aimed at The Ferry Building in the distance.

The silent footage makes a lively affair, as we watch the bustling metropolitan scene grow animated with colorful details. Horse-drawn carriages and buggies compete with automobiles for space on the crowded road, while men and women adorned in formal [everyday?] dress wander through the frame. Occasionally children dart across the street, vanish and reappear. The freedom of movement creates a retroactive sense of suspense, as we realize that nobody adheres to any discernible traffic laws. Pedestrians wander aimlessly through the streets, occasionally pausing to mug for the camera.

Whenever media archaeologist Prelinger has screened the footage using the recently uncovered 35mm print, as he plans to do with a further restored version at the Orphan Film Symposium, viewers discover a wealth of details, including passing advertisements and even license plate numbers. Over time, the footage develops a hypnotic rhythm, turning a naturalistic snapshot into something with far greater meditative value. Noticing this transcendent quality, avant garde filmmaker Ernie Gehr stretch-printed the footage for his 1974 found footage work, Eureka.

Time has validated A Trip Down Market Street more than anything else. The film offers a precise geographical survey -- so precise that in 2005 filmmakers Melinda Stone and Liz Keim mounted their own cameras on the back of a truck and recreated the footage shooting a contemporary Market Street. (Their resulting DVD gathers several other archival films shot on that location as well as new and recent productions.)

The original is more informed by change than familiarity. Much of the urban landscape on display vanished during the April 1906 earthquake and subsequent fire. As a result, Market Street functions as a record of the past forever haunted by the future.


  At the Orphans 7 screening, April 10th, Rick Prelinger will introduce the screening of his new 35mm print. A A new, original musical soundtrack is being composed and recorded by the NYU program in Scoring for Film and Multimedia (thanks to Ron Sadoff).


-- notes by Eric Kohn and Dan Streible