Full program of the 10th Orphan Film Symposium: 4 days and nights, 75 presenters

Register for the symposium here: www.nyu.edu/orphanfilm

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 6

3:00pm to 5:00pm Tour the Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation

All sessions in the Packard Theater (except for the Saturday night show).

8:00 pm Movie Tones, Radiotelephones, and Tele-vision

Debut restoration of The Edison Kinetophone (1912)

Robert Anen & Ina Archer (NYU) British Actors and Actresses outtakes (Fox Movietone News, 1928)

Manu Luksch & Martin Reinhart with Dreams Rewired (Luksch, Reinhart, & Thomas Tode, 2015)  an essay film about audio-visual technologies – telephony, cinema, tele-vision --  that changed human consciousness; a montage using nearly 200 silent-era and early-sound films from archives around the world

THURSDAY, APRIL 7

9:30am About Orphans X: Sound

Mike Mashon (LOC), Dan Streible (NYU)

+ Susan Courtney (USC) The Sounds and Silences of Operation A-Bomb (1952)

10:00am Preservation Provocations for the 21st Century

Rick Prelinger (UCSC) Silence, Cacophony, Crosstalk: New Talking Points

Evan Meaney (USC) introduces Big_Sleep™ (Meany & Amy Szczepanski, 2015) a codec tutorial and documentary meditation on digital decay

Jonathan Farbowitz (NYU) moderator

11:30am  Paper and Sounds from The Library

The Film of Her (Bill Morrison, 1996) a cine-poem about paper films

Bill Morrison excerpts his never-released 1992 interviews with Howard Walls and Kemp Niver, curators of the Paper Print Collection preserved by the Library of Congress and Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

Alexis Ainsworth & Ken Weissman (LOC) premiering new 3k scans of LOC Paper Print films

Jerry Fabris (Edison National Historical Park) & George Willeman (LOC) Marrying Edison Kinetophone Cylinders and Films: Premieres of The Deaf Mute, Jack’s Joke, The Musical Blacksmiths, et al. (1913)  

Caroline Frick (UT Austin) moderator

LUNCH catered at LOC

1:30pm  Sound and Color

• Joshua Yumibe (Michigan State U) Color Film and the Coming of Sound

• Ulrich Ruedel (U of Applied Sciences, Berlin) Film Sound and Color since 1929

• Heather Heckman (U of South Carolina) Continuous Monochrome: The Problem of the Soundtrack in Chromogenic Color Printing, with test clips from 35mm prints of Carson City (1952), The Iron Mistress (1952), and The Moonlighter (1953)

3:00pm  Raw Sounds of WWII

Jeff Martin (independent) Recorded Voice of Edward W. Stewart, JZJ, 9.535MC, 11:00 - 11:38 AM CWT, Tokyo-Japan (R. P. Read, 1943): Amateur Recordings of Short-Wave Broadcasts from Japanese POW Camps

Matt Barton (LOC) U.S. Marine Corps Combat Recordings, 1943-1945

Melissa Dollman  (UNC) Fifteen Dozen Rosies: Field Research Audiotapes in the Records of The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter Project, 1974-1980

4:30pm Greg Wilsbacher (USC MIRC) Beaten by Your Own Scoop: Early Synch-Sound Newsreel, Admiral Byrd, and the Orteig Prize

            New York to Paris Flyers – outtakes (Fox News, 1927)

            Crew of the ‘America’ Speaks – outtakes (Fox Movietone News, 1927)

DINNER catered downtown

8:00 pm  Robert Gitt & Robert Heiber (Rick Chace Foundation) A Century of Sound

FRIDAY, APRIL 8

9:30am  Classical Music and “Silent-era” Cinema

Walter Damrosch and the N. Y. Symphony Orchestra in France (Fox News outtakes, 1920) USC MIRC

Walter Damrosch Visits Schenectady and Sees Picture of Sound, 1929 (Academy Film Archive)

Premier nocturne en fa # majeur de Chopin, Interprété par Victor Gille (Gaumont-Petersen-Poulsen, 1928), new restoration by Cinémathèque française  

Anke Mebold (Deutsches Filminstitut) Tonbilder from the Neumayer Collection, 1908-09: Synchronizing Discs and Films from Deutsche Bioscop and Alfred Duskes   

Stephen Bottomore (independent) The Selsior System Dance Films: [Ernest Belcher/Dorothy Edwards dancing] (Boris Sagal, 1913-14)   

Hilde D'haeyere (University College Ghent, Belgium) "Cannibals of the Deep”: Mack Sennett's The Trail of the Swordfish (1931)   

11:30am  Listening to New Histories of American Radio 

Dan Einstein & Mark Quigley (UCLA Film & Television Archive) Preserving Rediscovered Transcription Disks of The Goldbergs: Episode #1297 [Sammy Goes Into The Army] (CBS, 1942)

Rachel Curtis & Alan Gevinson (LOC) The American Archive of Public Broadcasting: Nat Hentoff's The Evolution of Jazz (NERN, 1953)

Josh Shepperd (Catholic U) The Radio Preservation Task Force as National Research Project

Wendy Shay (Smithsonian NMAH) Hills Bros. Tune of the Day (1934)

Joseph Gallucci (Pacifica Radio Archives) American Women Making History and Culture, 1963-1982

Stephanie Sapienza (U of Maryland MITH) National Association of Educational Broadcasters, 1952-1970

Shawn VanCour (NYU) moderator 

LUNCH catered

2:15pm Scoring Documentaries

Julie Brown (U of London) The Original Atmospheric Presentations of The Epic of Everest (1924): Orchestral Score and Tibetan Music   

Blake McDowell (Smithsonian NMAAHC) Paul Bowles Film Scores: Bride of Samoa (Harry Dunham, 1934) and Venus and Adonis (Harry Dunham & J. V. D. Bucher, 1935)  

NYU Libraries Audio in the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar Archive, 1958-2011

Haden Guest (Harvard Film Archive) The Rediscovery Robert Flaherty’s Oidhche Sheanchais (A Night of Storytelling) (1935): The First Talkie in the Irish Language

Julie Hubbert (USC) moderator 

4:30pm Missing Sounds, Found Fragments

Margaret A. Compton (U of Georgia) A Mute Talkie Meets the Digital Humanities: The Rediscovery of Wedding on the Volga (Mark Schweid’s directorial debut, 1929)  35’

Arber Jashari (National Library of Kosova) Film Found, Sound Sought: The Dance of the Rufais  (Kosovo, ca. 1976-80)

Viviana García Besné, Paulina Suárez-Hesketh, & Michael Ramos Araizaga (Permanencia Voluntaria Archivo Cinematográfico) Morelos Mezcla: Rescued Fragments of Mexican Cinema (1930s-70s): La Zandunga (location footage, 1938), La Rebelión de los Adolescentes trailer (1959), fragments of Bellas de Noche (1975)

+

Josephine McRobbie (NCSU), Andy Uhrich (Indiana U) et al. New Sounds for Old Films about Sound, musical performance and video remix from the Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive

DINNER (on your own)

8:00pm Helen Hill Award Screening: Sasha Waters Freyer

Haden Guest (Harvard Film Archive), Jimmy Kinder (filmmaker) and Susan Courtney (USC) present the award and Kodak film prize.

Sasha Waters Freyer presents her work:

All Things Are Photographable (trailer) Garry Winogrand documentary

You Can See the Sun in Late December  (2010)  6’ 

Our Summer Made Her Light Escape (2012) 4’

Chekhov for Children (2010) 72’ Documenting a1979 Broadway staging of Uncle Vanya by 5th and 6th graders, directed by Phillip Lopate, using never-before-screened student videos and Super 8mm films.

Linda Mai Green (NYU IFA)

SATURDAY, APRIL 9

9:30am   A Praise Song for Audiovisual Preservation Exchanges

Judith Opoku-Boateng (Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana) & Mona Jimenez (NYU APEX) Seprewa Discoveries: Access in Action (Seth Paris and Fidelia Serwaa Ametewee, 2015)

10:00am Computing Frontiers

David Gibson (LOC) Alone in the Dark: The Question of Abandonware and Video Games

Robin Edgerton (independent) Computing For Fun at Bell Labs: Computing For Fun (1963) with John Robinson Pierce

Gregory Zinman (Georgia Tech) The Archival Silences of Nam June Paik’s Etude, with Electronic Opera #1 (1969) and HTML recreation of Etude 1 (1967-68)

Andrea Callard (independent) Located for Listening: Early Computer Music by Reese Williams

11:45am Experimental Sound in Small-Gauge Film

Genevieve Havemeyer-King (Wildlife Conservation Society) & Pamela Vizner Oyarce (Second Run Media Preservation) Audio Reconstruction for Some Food May Be Found in the Desert (Andrea Callard, 1977)

Bill Brand (BB Optics) on Reflections (Madeline Tourtelot, 1955)

Matt Soar (Concordia U) Sound and the Standardized Film Leader: Three
Handwritten Films

EYE, Newsprint (Guy Sherwin, 1972) 5’

LUNCH catered at LOC

1:45pm Achtung Argentina!

Nico de Klerk, Joachim Schätz, & Katalin Teller (Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for History and Society, Vienna) Colin Ross “mit ohne Sound”: Travel Lecture Films, including Achtung Australien! Achtung Asien! Das Doppelkontinent Des Ostens [The Twin Continents of the East] (Germany, 1930)

Paula Félix-Didier, Andrés Levinson, & Leandro Listorti (Museo del Cine)  

            * Muñequitas Porteñas (1931)  reel 1 of the first Argentina talkie

            * Variedades sonoras Ariel N 1: "Mosaico Criollo" (Eleuterio Iribarren, 1929)

            * La reina de las ondas (Irena y Karel Dodal, 1948-49) animation

            * Cómo se hace una película Argentina (Arturo Mom, 1948)

4:00pm  Indie Rediscovery and African American History

Heather Sabin (Academy Film Archive) The Sound Man (1950) and The Foley Artist (ca. 1991)

Sandra Schulberg (IndieCollect) Vault Rescues

            * Witch Doctor (1951) Murray Lerner, Lloyd Ritter, & Robert Young

            * excerpt from Anemone Me (1990) Suzan-Lori Parks & Bruce Hainlie

            * Thanksgiving Prayer (1991) Gus Van Sant, with William Boroughs   

Charles Musser (Yale) & Walter Forsberg (Smithsonian NMAAHC) Folk Music, the Henry Wallace Campaign of ’48, and the Rediscovered Count Us In (Union Films, 1948)

Rhea L. Combs (Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture) Building a Collection: Films of Mahalia Jackson, Alice Coltrane, and Whitney Houston

DINNER catered (Culpeper Center, 127 S. Main St.)

8:00 pm Celebrating Sounds from Everywhere: A Medley  at the State Theatre of Culpeper

Adam O’Callaghan (Montreal)  Theremin prelude  

Caroline Martel, excerpt from Mystères des ondes (1946) 

Tommy Aschenbach (Video and Film Solutions) Jiffy Test Films    

Walter Forsberg, Elmo Magnetic Sound Super 8 Projection Test Film blowup

Bill Morrison Little Orphant Annie (Selig, 1918) and Litte Orphant Annie (Victor Talking Machine, 1912), with the voice of Kelli Hix (2016)

Dennis Doros & Amy Heller (Milestone) Transmagnifican Dambamuality (Ronald K. Gray, 1976) 

Skip Elsheimer (AV Geeks) Let’s Make a Sandwich (Miriam Bucher, 1950)

Devin Orgeron (NCSU) Uncle Smiley Goes to _______ (1970s environmental educational) 

Rachael Stoeltje (Indiana U) and Dan Streible The Inner World of Aphasia (Edward and Naomi Feil, 1968), added to the National Film Registry 2015.

NB: Changes to the program order may be made. 

Renewly synchronized films of 1913

Jerry Fabris (museum curator at the Edison National Historical Park) & George Willeman (Library of Congress) have teamed up to do some digital synchronization on a half dozen films made in 1913 using Edison Kinetophone technology.  

For the first time, the Edison cylinders (from the national park) have been digitized and now married to picture elements taken from the 35mm films housed at Library of Congress. 

Hear and see at the 10th Orphan Film Symposium! 

#orphans10

Register online: https://tisch.nyu.edu/cinema-studies/research/orphan-film-symposium/conference_registration.html/

Orphans X: Tours of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, April 6, 2016

See and Hear
the grand workings of the LOC A-V operations. 

On Mount Pony.

Orphan Film Symposium attendees arriving on the afternoon of Wednesday, April 6, are welcome to tour the Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation starting at 3:00 pm. Library staff will guide us through all three preservation labs (audio, video, and film), as well as storage vaults, the data center, and other aspects of the collections. 

The symposium kicks off Wednesday evening with a screening at 8:00 pm.

Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, the symposium runs from 9:30 am through the evening. 

Register now for the discounted rate -- and while seats remain. 

Update: the program for the 10th Orphan Film Symposium (April 6-9, 2016)

Register now! 


NYU and LOC convene 
the 10th Orphan Film Symposium

Orphans X : Sound

April 6-9, 2016 at the Library of Congress

Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation

Culpeper, Virginia

New York University Cinema Studies and its Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program join with the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center for the tenth international gathering of archivists, scholars, preservationists, curators, technical experts, and media artists devoted to orphan films -- an eclectic variety of neglected moving images and sounds. The theme of “Orphans X” is SOUND, broadly conceived.

Full program will be announced soon. 

Among the many presentations:

Robert Gitt & Robert Heiber (Chace Foundation) A Century of Sound: The Histories of Sound in Motion Picutres, an evening of screenings

Matt Soar (Concordia U) Sound the Standardized Film Leader: Lost Leaders #18, Handwritten Universal (PH22.55-1966)

Greg Wilsbacher (U of South Carolina Moving Image Research Collections) The Movietone Project, and a screening of British Actors and Actresses -- outtakes (Fox Movietone News, 1928)

Screenings by the 2016 Helen Hill Award recipient Sasha Waters-Freyer, filmmaker

Bill Morrison Interviewing the LOC Paper Print Collection curators Howard Walls and Kemp Niver as research for The Film of Her (1996)

Sandra Schulberg Rediscoveries from IndieCollect

Dennis Doros & Amy Heller (Milestone) Ronald K. Gray's NYU student film, Transmagnifican Dambamuality (1976)

Julie Brown (U of London) & Julie Hubbert (U of South Carolina) Music Silent Films

Anke Mebold (Deutsches Filminstitut) Tonbilder from the Neumayer Collection, 1908-09: Synchronizing Discs and Films from Deutsche Bioscop and Alfred Duskes

Céline Ruivo (Cinémathèque française) Restoration of Premier nocturne en fa dièse majeur de Chopin (Gaumont-Petersen-Poulsen, 1928) with pianist Victor Gille

Paula Félix-Didier, Andrés Levinson, & Leandro Listorti (Museo del Cine de Buenos Aires) Variedades sonoras Ariel N 1: "Mosaico Criollo" (Eleuterio Iribarren, 1929) et al.

Heather Sabin (Academy Film Archive): Academy preservation of The Sound Man (1950) and Walter Damrosch Visits Schenectady and Sees Picture of Sound (1929)

Hilde D'haeyere (University College Ghent, Belgium) "Cannibals of the Deep”: Mack Sennett's The Trail of the Swordfish (1931)

Stephen Bottomore (independent researcher) The Selsior System Dance Films: [Ernest Belcher/Dorothy Edwards dancing] (Boris Sagal, 1913-14)

Arber Jashari (National Library of Kosova) Preserving Kosova-film: Lost Sound and The Dance of the Rufais

Margaret A. Compton (U of Georgia) A Mute Talkie Meets the Digital Humanities: Wedding on the Volga (1929) Yiddish theater star Mark Schweid’s directorial debut

Gregory Zinman (Georgia Tech) The Archival Silences of Nam June Paik’s Etude (1967-68), "one of the earliest digital artworks ever created by an artist who was not first trained as a computer engineer." + a screening of Paik's Electronic Opera #1 (1969)

Susan Courtney (U of South Carolina) on the sound of Operation A-Bomb (RKO, 1952)

Viviana García Besné, Paulina Suárez-Hesketh, & Michael Ramos Araizaga, Morelos Mezcla: The collective of Permanencia Voluntaria Archivo Cinematográfico presents fragments of Mexican cinema (1930s-70s)

Sound and Color: Parallels and Intersections, Technology and Aesthetics
• Joshua Yumibe (Michigan State U) Color Film and the Coming of Sound
• Ulrich Ruedel (U of Applied Sciences, Berlin) Film Sound and Color since 1929
• Heather Heckman (U of South Carolina) Continuous Monochrome: The Problem of the Soundtrack in Chromogenic Color Printing

Rick Prelinger (UC Santa Cruz) Silences within Moving Image Archival Practice

Josephine McRobbie (NCSU) with Andy Uhrich (Indiana U) New Sounds for Old Films about Sound, video remix and live performance of educational films about sound

Evan Meaney (U of South Carolina) introduces Big_Sleep™ (2015, with Amy Szczepanski)

The Radio Preservation Task Force: New Histories of Radio
Josh Shepperd (Catholic U), Stephanie Sapienza (Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities), Shawn VanCour (NYU), Jenny Doctor (Syracuse U), Alan Gevinson & Rachel Curtis (American Archive of Public Broadcasting), Brian DeShazor and Joseph Gallucci (Pacifica Radio Archives)

Nico de Klerk, Joachim Schätz, & Katalin Teller (Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for History and Society, Vienna) Travel Lecture Films of Colin Ross ‘mit ohne Sound’. Screenings to include Achtung Australien! Achtung Asien! Das Doppelkontinent des Ostens (Attention Australia! Attention Asia! The Twin Continents of the East, 1930)

Genevieve Havemeyer-King (Wildlife Conservation Society, NDSR) and Pamela Vizner Oyarce (Second Run Media Preservation, Santiago) Audio Reconstruction for Andrea Callard's Super 8 Film Some Food May Be Found in the Desert (1977)

Bill Brand (BB Optics) Preserving Reflections (Madeline Tourtelot, 1955; music by Ed Bland) for the Flaherty Film Seminar, Chicago Film Archives, and NYU MIAP Program

Jeff Martin (New Art Trust) Recorded Voice of Lt. Edward W. Stewart (1943): Amateur Recordings Short-Wave Broadcasts from Japanese POW Camps
&
Matt Barton (LOC) U.S. Marine Corps Combat Recordings, 1943-1945
&
Melissa Dollman (Media Research Archivist) Listening to 175 Rosies: Audio from the Records of The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter Project, 1974-1980

Dan Einstein & Mark Quigley (UCLA Film & Television Archive) Preserving (presumably lost episodes of) The Goldbergs: 600 original vinyl transcription disks

Walter Forsberg (Smithsonian National Museum for African American History and Culture) & Charles Musser (Yale U) Music in the Henry Wallace Campaign of ’48: Count Us In (Union Films, 1948)

Blake McDowell (Smithsonian NMAAHC) Paul Bowles Film Scores; and the amateur film, Venus and Adonis (Harry Dunham and Jules V. D. Bucher, 1935)

David Gibson (LOC) The Question of Abandonware in Video Game Preservation

Mona Jimenez (NYU APEX Ghana) Seprewa Discoveries - Access In Action (2015, Seth Paris and Fidelia Serwaa Ametewee) music from the JH.K. Nketia Archives, U of Ghana

EYE Film Museum, Guy Sherwin, Optical Sound Films (1971-2007)

Laurie O'Brien (Rochester Institute of Technology) Peephole Cinema installation, "Kinetoscopic Records" (2015)

+ the state of and stakes in Orphan Works legislation and copyright reform.

PICTURING LEE DICK: The Hunt Continues

by guest blogger Tanya Goldman  


When I submitted my preliminary piece on the career of nonfiction filmmaker Lee Dick for publication with Feminist Media Histories in December 2014, I called it “Picturing Lee Dick,” a nod as much to the endeavor of envisioning her career as it was to the irony that I had no confirmed photograph of my elusive object of study.

The photo of “Lee Burgess” from 1954 that I opted to include in the original article was an educated guess, for she peters out of the historical record nearly a decade earlier after her divorce from husband Sheldon and the end of production on a cycle of government nurse training films. Given that her maiden name was Burgess, she was a Midwesterner by birth, and that she had led the financial committee for the Association of Documentary Film Producers in New York, it seemed reasonable to infer that “Lee Burgess,” treasurer of the Sooner Chapter of American Women in Radio and Television, could be the filmmaker formerly known as Lee Dick. This remains speculative on my part.

While the contours of her post-1945 career are still waiting to be unearthed, I am happy to report that I recently found two confirmed photographs of Lee from 1933, accompanying engagement announcements published in the Omaha World-Herald and Chicago Tribune in April 1933. (She also, I learned, was better known in Omaha as “Pi.” Who knew?!) When the couple married the following month in New York City, their nuptials received brief mention in the New York Times wedding section. (I happened upon these photoson Thanksgiving while checking Ancestry.com on an unrelated inquiry; on a whim, I returned to Margaret Lee Burgess’ entry and voilà! It appears an anonymous distant relative uploaded these articles this past summer.)

---

I have also found two additional projects that the Dicks worked on during the early forties.

While researching a separate project at the National Archives this summer, I stumbled upon a March 1942 letter sent from filmmaker Joseph Losey to Arch Mercey, Deputy Coordinator of Government Films. In the letter, Losey pitches the production of a series of nonfiction films to be used for national defense. Dial Films Inc. -- the company founded by Lee and Sheldon Dick in 1940 for the production of sponsored film Day After Day -- is referenced as one of Losey’s available filmmaking units. In this letter, Dial Films is said to be working on a film for the Port of New York Authority. No word yet on if this film still exists. 

I also recently discovered that Sheldon directed film The Trimbles of Maple Street (1942) for the Office of Civilian Defense. The film is available online from Indiana University’s Moving Image Archive.

Happy viewing!
http://collections.libraries.indiana.edu/IULMIA/items/show/52

Original article citation: 
Tanya Goldman, “Picturing Lee Dick: A Nonfiction Film Pioneer,” Feminist Media Histories 1.2 (Spring 2015): 125-134. http://fmh.ucpress.edu/content/ucpfmh/1/2/125.full.pdf.


* * * * *

Tanya Goldman is a second-year doctoral student in cinema studies at New York University. In 2015, she introduced a screening of Lee Dick's Men and Dust (1940) for the Orphan Film Symposium's annual screening at the Museum of Modern Art's To Save and Project International Festival of Film Preservation. Her dissertation will focus on the career of independent film distributor Tom Brandon. Contact her: tlg260@nyu.edu.