the Orphan Film Symposium

Orphans 2022: Counter-Archives

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 13 Jun 2022 07:31:00 +0000

Gentle colleagues: June 2022 greetings.

It's been two years since this blog was updated, but only because the whole Orphan Film Symposium (and blogging) enterprise moved to an NYU site in the Before Times: wp.nyu.edu/orphanfilm. You can also get there using the simple URL that doesn't look like one: orphan.film.

Just to make sure the news reaches into previous channels, here's word of the 2022 biennial NYU Orphan Film Symposium. Our theme: Counter-Archives. The location: Concordia University in Montreal, a place we will refer to as Tiohtià:ke, using the indigenous name from the real Before Times. Our modus operandi remains as it was upon its launch at the University of South Carolina in 1999: four nights and three full days of screening neglected films and presentations by archivists, scholars, and artists.

Read the full line-up at wp.nyu.edu/orphanfilm/program2022.

Select portions of the 2022 Orphan Film Symposium on Counter-Archives can be watched live on the NYU Cinema Studies Vimeo site.

Here's how to see it.

1. Register your name, affiliation (or independence), and email address using the NYU Orphan Film Symposium registration portal. Type in $0 in payment (or a pay-what-you-will donation). If you make no payment, you will not get an automatic email confirmation. However, we will email a PASSWORD to all registrants on Tuesday, June 14. And again June 15. Use this password to log-in to the Live Event (as Vimeo calls it). If you previously registered, no need to do that again.

2. The password will work during all sessions, June 15-18, 2022. Go to the NYU Cinema Studies Vimeo home, https://vimeo.com/user5490513. Click on the Live Event for Orphans 2022, enter the password.

The symposium is designed as an in-person, live, in-the-theater experience. The webcast will not be integrated into flow of the program. However, most spoken presentations and individual films/files will be streamed live.

Given the sensitive and difficult nature of many counter-archival documents, we will restrict items from streaming when appropriate and at the presenters' discretion. Since this is not a festival program oriented to an interactive general audience, Vimeo viewers will see only a "not available for streaming" announcement when portions are blocked.

The full schedule of what is live-streaming and what is blocked will be published on the OFS blog.

For now, we can say that the Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday 8:00pm screenings will be streaming (with a couple of short exceptions).

Wednesday, June 15, by 8:30pm, the Making Counter-Archives screening (8 films, 57 minutes) will play, followed by a 45-minute roundtable featuring Artists in Residence with the Archive/Counter-Archive Project.

Debbie Ebanks Schlums and Janine Marchessault (York U) introduce

Federica Foglia, Innesti Neri e Bianchi [White and Black Grafts] (2022)
Jean-Pierre Marchant, A Life on the Borderlands (2021)
Sharon Isaac & Kelsey Diamond, Thunder Rolling Home (2019)
Pamila Matharu, stuck between an archive and an aesthetic (2019)
Jennifer Dysart, Caribou in the Archive (2019) and Revisiting Keewatin Missions (ca. 1952)
Chris Chong, Propaganda (2021-22)
Nada El-Omari, Yaffa (2019)
Nadine Valcin, Origines (2021)

+ Roundtable with Jennifer Dysart, Jean-Pierre Marchand, Pamila Matharu, Nadine Valcin, moderated by Janine Marchessault.

Thursday, June 16, 8pm, Screening.

Reanimating Histories, includes Helen Hill Award recipient Kelly Gallagher. Bill Morrison (Hypnotic Pictures) introduces his piece Buried News (2021, 12 min), using newsreels documenting US racial divide (1917-1920), from the Dawson City Collection. Phil Hoffman introduces Your New Pig Is Down the Road (Helen Hill, 1999) a hand-processed 16mm print, which Helen made at Phil's "Film Farm."

Filmmaker Kelly Gallagher presents a program of her short works including More Dangerous Than a Thousand Rioters: The Revolutionary Life of Lucy Parsons (2016), A Herstory of Women Filmmakers (2009), Ceallaigh at Kilmainham (2013), From Ally to Accomplice (2015), and three from 2021: Pine and Genesee, We Had Each Other, and In the Future.

Saturday, June 18, the 8:00 pm screening of silent films in a program we call Two Sons & Sales Femmes. Louis Pelletier (U of Montreal / Cinémathèque québécoise ) introduces Les deux fils de monsieur Dubois (Gordon Sparling, Canadian Forestry Association, 1928), a premiere of the new restoration by the Canadian Educational, Sponsored & Industrial Film Project, with live musical accompaniment by Andrei Castañon. 25 min.

Laura Horak (Carleton U) & Maggie Hennefeld (U of Minnesota) introduce Screening Cinema’s First Nasty Women: • Pranks (US, 1909). Library of Congress. Music by Gerson Lazo-Quiroga. • Laughing Gas (US, 1907, with Bertha Regustus). Library of Congress. Music by Matt Hayes and Gerson Lazo-Quiroga. • La Pile électrique de Léontine / Betty’s Electric Battery (France, 1910). Gaumont-Pathé Archives. Music by Gonca Feride Varol. • Fatty and Minnie He-Haw (US, 1914, with Minnie Deveraux). Library of Congress. Music by Eliot Britton. Introduced by Kickapoo artist Arigon Starr. • The Red Girl and the Child (US, 1910, with Red Wing). Museum of Modern Art. Music by Don Ross. Introduced by Cherokee scholar Liza Black.

+ a final world:
Brian Meacham (Yale Film Archive) introduces outtakes from James Baldwin: From Another Place (Sedat Pakay, 1973) filmed in Istanbul, 1970.

NB. This Blogger site for the symposium remains up to keep access to its 14 years of publication. But it is seldom updated. New material originates at the NYU site.

Orphans Online 2020

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 09 May 2020 05:19:00 +0000

Gentle colleagues! Orphanistas of the World! Sisters and Brothers!

May 2020 greetings.

Regrettable as coronal cancellations are, the 2020 Orphan Film Symposium on Water, Climate, and Migration is migrating to an online experience. May 26-28 live sessions with speakers and presentations will be webcast on the NYU Cinema Studies Vimeo site.

The schedule, extensive postings, and streaming orphans will be found at the Orphan Film Symposium's NYU website: wp.nyu.edu/orphanfilm. Streaming video will be added in the days before the live symposium and remain online after. Recordings of the live sessions will also stream for those who missed them.

Note that this Blogger site for the symposium remains up to keep access to its 12 years of publication. But it is no longer updated. New material always originates at the NYU site.

Orphans 2020: See 68mm films at 8K

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 01 Mar 2020 19:01:00 +0000

The May 23-26, 2020, Orphan Film Symposium / Eye Academic Conference, features 68mm Mutoscope & Biograph restorations (in 8K), presented by Frank Roumen and Giovanna Fossati (Eye), Katie Trainor(Museum of Modern Art NYC), and Simon Lund (Cineric). The curated selection of films relate to the symposium's themes of Water, Climate, and Migration. Also a newly scanned 68mm paper print (rarest of animals) from the Library of Congress, thanks to Cineric and LOC generosity to the NYU Orphan Film Symposium. Dedicated to the late film historian and archivist Paul Spehr.

Read the rich program of films and speakers -- and register to join us in Amsterdam.

Also, read my new blog post about 68mm Mutosope & Biograph films, particularly the original phantom ride film, The Haverstraw Tunnel (American Mutoscope Co., 1897). Although it caused a popular sensation, was often imitated, and inspired film historians and theorists from 1983 onward, the short film (less than 2 minutes) remains rarely seen. Why?

The post, "68mm 8K Phantoms," was sparked by this rare reference to the Haverstraw film in later trade press. "This writer has been viewing film since the Lumiere babies, the Haverstraw Tunnel and the Empire State Express were the screen stars. . . ." Epes W. Sargent, Moving Picture World, Oct. 16, 1920.

The closest thing we see of The Haverstraw Tunnel on the web at the moment are frames from the Biograph catalog, as reprinted in Charles Musser's essential history The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907, published in 1990.

Dan Streible (New York University) @Orphan_Films
Blog of the NYU Orphan Film Symposium (c) 2020.
The symposium is a biennial production of NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Department of Cinema Studies

Program preview. Orphans at Eye, May 23-27, 2020

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 02 Feb 2020 18:00:00 +0000

Registration open to all.

Here's a preview of programming for the 6th Eye International Conference / 12th NYU Orphan Film Symposium, Water, Climate, and Migration, May 23-26, 2020, at Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. Please note the listings are not complete (more to come) and the scheduled arrangement of sessions is not listed. However, this gives an indication of the rich diversity of films, presenters, subjects, and forms offered throughout "Orphans 12."

Saturday, May 23: Eye “Meet the Archive” screenings 12:00 to 16:00

18:00 6th Eye International Conference / 12th Orphan Film Symposium Opening reception and registration.

20:30 Eye Filmmuseum – Cinema 1.
Opening Attractions: Recent Preservation from the Eye Collection.

May 24, 25, and 26: Sessions begin at 10:00, 13:30, 16:00, and 17:30.Lunch 12:30; Dinner 19:00; Screenings 20:30 pm

Sunday, May 24 : WATER

10:00 am Giovanna Fossati et al. (Eye), Floris Paalman (U of Amsterdam, Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image) & Dan Streible (NYU) Opening remarks

Frontispiece: If the Antarctic Ice Cap Should Melt? -- outtakes (Fox Movietone News, US, 1929) new scan from U of South Carolina Moving Image Research Collections; Introduced by Shiyang Jiang (NYU MIAP)

THE SILENT WORLD

Sonia Shechet Epstein (Museum of the Moving Image NYC) Underwater Films from the Department of Tropical Research: Floyd Crosby and William Beebe’s Bathysphere in Haiti and Bermuda, 1927-1934

Monique Toppin (U of the Bahamas) & Erica Carter (King’s College London) An Underwater Sense of Place: Bahamas Marine Locations in Cinema Memory
+ In de Tropische Zee (Thirty Leagues under the Sea) (Carl L. Gregory, Thanhouser, Submarine Film Corp., Bahamas/US, 1914)

RIVERS, DAMS, FLOODS

Stephanie Sapienza (U of Maryland) Unlocking the Airwaves: The National Association of Educational Broadcasters Radio Collection (1952-1973)
Joni Hayward Marcum (U of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) Nature and Energy, Control and Excess: American Infrastructural Cinema in the 1930s
Bradley E. Reeves (Appalachian Media Archives) The Tennessee Valley Authority: “Built for and Owned by the People”

Gregory A. Waller (Indiana U) and Andy Uhrich (Washington U) Irrigating and Reshaping America: Educational Films on the Power of Water, 1927-1948
Sonia García López (U Carlos III de Madrid) & David M. J. Wood (U Nacional Autónoma de México) Water, Catastrophe, and the Authoritarian-Humanitarian State: Las inundaciones en Barcelona (NO-DO, Spain, 1962) and Inundación (ICB, Bolivia, 1966)

Amy Herzog (Queens College CUNY) Spindrift’s Wet Dream: Puget Sound and the Pornographic Imaginary. Spindrift (Richard Kornbacher, 1973) and [Kornbacher home movies] (1960s-70s)
Sofia Elizalde (Cineclub Rosario) Immigrant Women in the Early 20th Century and Erotic Exploitation: A Rediscovered “French” Film from Argentina ¡Mujer, tú eres la belleza! o La Mujer y el Arte [Woman, You Are Beauty! or Women and Art] (Camilo Zaccaría Soprani, AR, 1928)
Petra Belc (Zagreb) The Consolations and Horrors of the Sea: Restoring the Amateur Experimental Super 8 Films of Tatjana Ivančić, (Yugoslavia, 1970s)

Anke Mebold (Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum) Unseen Films of the River Lahn by the Inventor of the Leica Camera (Oskar Barnack, DE, 1914-1920); + Rund um Die Welt in 2 Stunden [Around the World in 2 Hours] (IT/FR/DE, ca. 1914)

Kimberly Tarr (NYU Libraries) From the Communist Party USA Collection: Let’s Get Acquainted (Kyiv Popular Science Film Studio, USSR, ca. 1972)
Oliver Gaycken (Medicine on Screen) introduces Countdown to Collision (Arlie Productions, GWU Medical Center, 1970)
Bill Brand (BB Optics/NYU) and French Institute Alliance Francaise, debute the newly preserved Aqua (Samba Félix Ndiaye, Senegal, 1989)
Laura Kissel (U of South Carolina) moderator
+
Endpiece: Deliquescence, live projection and sound performance by A Clockface Orange (Rachael Guma and Genevieve HK) with Gabriel Guma (New York)

Monday, May 25 : CLIMATE

10:00 DARKENING DAYS OF PROGRESS
Jennifer L. Peterson (Woodbury U) Wheels of Progress: National Park Roads in US Government Films from the 1920s: Wheels of Progress (USDA, 1927); Roads in Our National Parks (USDA, 1927)
Oliver Gaycken (U of Maryland) & Sarah Eilers (US National Library of Medicine) The Darkening Day: US Public Health Service Films on Air Pollution, 1960-1969.
Angela Saward (Wellcome Collection) It Takes Your Breath Away (Dr. M. Catterall, UK, 1964) medical community response to air pollution death

NATURFILME
Nicholas Baer (U of Groningen), Katerina Korola (U of Chicago), Katharina Loew (U Mass Boston), and Philipp Stiasny (Film U Babelsberg Konrad Wolf) The Natural World Viewed: Early German Images of the Anthropocene.
Naturschutz: Tieraufnahmen [Nature Reserve: Animal Photography] (Hermann Hähnle, 1915–1920); Bilder aus Grönland [Pictures of Greenland] (UFA, 1929); Die Aran-Inseln [The Aran Islands] (Heinrich Hauser, 1928)

ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
Julianna Villarosa (U of Iowa) Beyond the Frame: Neglected Films, Unnamed Filmmakers, and Unseen Islanders of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Atmospheric Nuclear Tests Archive
Andrés Levinson (Museo del Cine, Buenos Aires) Project for the Preservation of Argentine Antarctic Cinema: Amateur and Semi-professional Footage from Expedición Polar Argentina (1964-65)
Alice Plutino & Alessandro Rizzi (U of Milan) Raising Environmental Awareness in Italy: An Untitled Documentary about Paper Recycling in Brescia (198?) and How This Super 8 Film Was Restored
Carolina Cappa (Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, San Sebastian, Spain) Project Nitrato Argentino (Museo del Cine Pablo Ducros Hicken, 2019)
Alexander Markov (Ukulele Films, Russia) Constructing Hydroelectric Power Stations in the USSR and Egypt: documentary rushes and amateur films (1951-1964)
Eiren Caffall (climate-change journalist) with her film Becoming Ocean (Scott K. Foley, US, 2018)

ARCHIVAL SCIENCES
Linda Tadic (Digital Bedrock / UCLA) The Environmental Impact of Digital Archives
Floris Paalman (U of Amsterdam) & Luna Hupperetz (Vrije U Amsterdam) A Cultural Ecology Approach to Archiving: The Case of Cineclub Vrijheidsfilms (1966-1986) at the International Institute of Social History
Oleksandr Makhanets (Urban Media Archive, Center for Urban History, Lviv, Ukraine) The [Unarchiving] Program: A Decayed Amateur Film Becomes Derevo (The Tree, Oleh Chornyi and Hennadiy Khmaruk, UKR, 2019)

Monday 20:30 HELEN HILL AWARDs: Martha Colburn and Jaap Pieters
Helen Hill home movies and Katrina floods in New Orleans (2005)
+ Rain Dance (Helen Hill, 1990) new scan from Harvard Film Archive

Julie Hubbert (U of South Carolina) confers the Helen Hill Awards:
Recipients Martha Colburn and Jaap Pieters introduce an evening of their films. Simona Monizza (Eye) moderator

Tuesday, May 26 : MIGRATION

MIGRATIONS AMERICAN (African, Asian, European, Latin American)
Ina Archer (Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture) The Great Migration Project: Town of Highland Beach, Maryland Home Movies (1950s-60s)
Jesse Lerner (Claremont Colleges) A Semi-Amateur Documentary on Migrant Labor along the US-Mexican Border: Hands Across the Border (Great Western Sugar Co., US, 1963)
Klavier J. Wang (NYU) Awakening Immigrant Voices: Asia CineVision’s Manhattan Chinatown Community Television, 1977-1983
Juana Suárez (NYU) Seeing and Hearing Migrant Labor and Class Strata in the Equine Industry: Video from an Unmade Documentary (2010)

EXILES, REFUGEES, DIASPORA
Iga Harasimowicz (Polish National Film Institute) & Grazia Ingravalle (Brunel U London) Polish Diaspora through the Prism of Archival Films of the 1930s.
Anna Leippe (Haus des Dokumentarfilms, Stuttgart) The “Daheim in der Fremde” Project: Amateur Films of Refugee Camps, in Southwest Germany, 1946-1969
Kay Hoffmann (U of Offenbach) RhInédits and the Kinemathek of the Upper Rhine Valley: Amateur Films from Alsace, Baden, and Northern Switzerland

BIOMETRICS, INVADERS, MIGRANTS
Nico de Klerk (Utrecht U) & Andrea Stultiens (Hanze U of Applied Sciences) Anthropologist Paul Julien: Dutch “Seasonal Worker” in an African “Contact Zone” -- Between the Nile and the Congo: From Cairo to Ituri Forest and Mount Kilimanjaro (Paul Julien, NL, 1934)
Christian Rossipal (NYU) (Un)documenting the State Archive: The Making of an Information Video for Asylum Seekers.
Medicinsk Åldersbedömning [Age Assessment], (National Board of Forensic Medicine, Sweden, 2017)

CHILEAN IMMIGRANTS AND EXILES
Brenda Ibáñez Toledo (independent / Cineteca Nacional de Chile) Immigrants and Exiles: Home Movies of Two Chilean Families. The Melzers (1940s) and the Tobars (1970s)
Jose Miguel Palacios (U Alberto Hurtado) & Elizabeth Ramirez-Soto (San Francisco State U) Performing Rites and Folklore in Chilean Exile Cinema - - excerpts from Dos años en Finlandia (Angelina Vázquez, Finland, 1975); Pilsner & Piroger (Kjell Jerselius and Claudio Sapiaín, Sweden, 1982); Re-torno (David Benavente, Netherlands, 1983)
+
Feature screening: Gens de toutes parts…Gens de nulle part [People from Everywhere…People from Nowhere] (Valeria Sarmiento, Belgium/France, 1980)
+
Katie Trainor (MoMA New York) American Mutoscope & Biograph 68mm restorations, 1896-1902

Matt Soar (Concordia U Montreal) a special announcement
+ Lost Leaders #21: ASANASA (Matt Soar, 2019)

Note: Wednesday, May 27,Eye invites conference/symposium attendees
to special activities at the Eye Collection Centre.

Helen Hill Awards 2020: Martha Colburn and Jaap Pieters

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 30 Dec 2019 05:24:00 +0000

• Wishing you a good 2020 ahead.

• And sharing this good news about two talented filmmakers.

• Coming soon: news about the rest of the Orphans 2020 program.

For the 12th Orphan Film Symposium, NYU Cinema Studies and the University of South Carolina Film and Media Studies Program present the 2020 Helen Hill Award to Martha Colburn and Jaap Pieters. Each biennial symposium presents the award to independent filmmakers whose work embodies the creative spirit, passion, and activism of the late animator, filmmaker, and educator, a Columbia, South Carolina-born artist and citizen of the world who inspired many.

Colburn and Pieters will each present selections from their own work to an international audience of archivists, scholars, curators, and artists at the NYU Orphan Film Symposium, hosted by Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, May 23-26, 2020. Registration is open.

Eye in fact collaborates with both artists. Eye's curator of experimental film Simona Monizza and curator Marius Hrdy have together with Colburn generated a program of new film prints to debut at the 2020 Ann Arbor Film Festival, including two Filmmuseum restorations. From the Pieters material in its collection, Eye is making 35mm blow-ups of some Super 8 films. Monizza says Colburn and Pieters are “a great match for this award.” Their presence is “both peripheral and global at the same time. Both are uncompromising in their work and lives.”

The prolific Martha Colburn has created more than 60 films, as well as music videos, performances, and installations. After receiving a BFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, she took to filmmaking in 1994, using Super 8 and 16mm film to make short, kinetic animations. In 2002 she received an MFA equivalent degree from the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunst (Dutch National Academy of Fine Arts) and lived in Amsterdam five years before moving to New York and most recently Los Angeles. Recent Anthology Film Archives program notes describe Colburn as “the queen of punk-inflected, high-decibel animation using paper cut-outs, hand-painting, scratching, and sometimes found footage to create deliriously energetic freak-outs.” Among her innovative, hand-made, and often subversive creations she also deploys collage, stop-motion cinematography, puppetry, superimpositions, fragments from abandoned ephemeral films, historical images from art and popular culture, and objects applied to clear leader. (She discusses her technique in the 2011 short Martha Colburn Cuts the Boring Parts Out.)

Colburn’s output also includes several pieces directly relevant to the 2020 symposium’s focus on Water, Climate, and Migration, some of which she posts at marthacolburn.com. Don’t Kill the Weatherman! (2007) reanimates a 15th-century illuminated manuscript’s apocalyptic imagery in response to the contemporary climate change crisis. Anti-Fracking Film (2011) warns of the threat to New York’s water. Stand with Standing Rock (2016) advocates for the Sioux protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline’s threat to ancestral land and water.

Jaap Pieters is called “the eye of Amsterdam.” A long-time resident, he has been documenting daily life in the city built on water for more than 30 years, filming almost exclusively on Super 8 stock. Each roll of exposed film -- silent, running 3 minutes and 20 seconds -- constitutes a whole work, capturing a single subject. Most depict idiosyncratic moments with unidentified people who pass through his neighborhood. Pieters projects his Super 8 reels to audiences, assembling programs as he goes. Eye Filmmuseum houses some of these works, blown up to 35mm for preservation and screening, ten of which are distributed by Light Cone. Meanwhile, thousands of negatives, prints, and unprocessed rolls remain at home in his “amateur archive.” His film-packed apartment has been the site of the documentaries The Universe of Jaap Pieters (2015) and Jaap Pieters Portrait (2005).

In one degree of separation from the origins of the Helen Hill Award, Chris Kennedy’s book 8 Affinities: Jaap Pieters & John Porter (2015) features a dialogue with the Toronto Super 8 specialist who dedicated his Phil’s Film Farm (2002) to his friend Helen Hill.

Unbeknownst to symposium organizers until after these awardees were confirmed, Jaap Pieters appears on-screen in Martha Colburn’s newest work, animations for Richard Ayres' opera The Garden (2018).

- - - - - - - - - -

Established in 2008, the Helen Hill Award recognizes exceptional independent filmmakers whose work befits Hill’s legacy, celebrating creativity, animation, collaboration, and things made by hand. The previous recipients were Naomi Uman and Jimmy Kinder (2008), Jodie Mack and Danielle Ash (2010), Jeanne Liotta and Jo Dery (2012), Werner Nekes (2014), Sasha Waters Freyer (2016), and Nazlı Dinçel (2018).

P.S. Please chip in.
The Helen Hill Award Fund has allowed these 11 deserving awardees to attend the Orphan Film Symposium. Help bring independent media artists to screen their work at this biennial forum. All funds go only to support travel and accommodations for award recipients. Give at this web page for the Helen Hill Award Fund.

- - - - - - - - - -

The 12th Orphan Film Symposium is a co-presentation of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts Department of Cinema Studies, the Eye International Conference, and the University of Amsterdam. Some 50 speakers from across the world will present rare and rediscovered orphan films throughout three days and four nights of screenings and talks. Registration is open to all.

Martha Colburn puts Jaap Pieters in The Garden.

- - - - - - - - - -

Questions? orphanfilm @ nyu.edu

Remembering the first Orphans of the Storm at 20.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 05:38:00 +0000

Thoughts about the 20th anniversary of the Orphan Film Symposium.

Posted here.
https://wp.nyu.edu/orphanfilm/2019/10/01/twenty/

Bonus track:
Some digital image artifacts from 1999 below.

Here's a 1999 flatbed scan of the strip of decaying nitrate film from which the above logo was taken.

For the record, the footage shows a 1928 Eucharistic Congress in Sydney, Australia.

Seed money for the symposium from this NSF grant. Paul Smith was a grantsman and development person for USC Libraries.

A "rather scattered community."

The library's grant made it possible to bring several of the speakers to campus. The reference to George Eastman House was because its senior curator Paolo Cherchi Usai gave a keynote address. A transcription is posted: "What is an Orphan Film? Definition, Rationale and Controversy," University of South Carolina, September 23, 1999.

He began thusly:

I am reminded what happened about two years ago at Eastman House, when one day I opened the side door, and there right in front of me were three piles of films, very carefully stacked. There was a message written on a piece of paper, covered by a stone: "Take good care of these films. I am moving to South Carolina. Hope they are of use to you." No signature. The films were 16mm prints made approximately in the 1920s. They were arranged in alphabetical order. They were not crying. They were in great shape. So we took them in. Took them to the registrar's office and tried to find out what they were. . .

Climate strikes back.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 20 Sep 2019 04:22:00 +0000

With the 2020 Orphan Film Symposium being devoted to Water, Climate, and Migration, the Global Climate Strikes on the Fridays of September 20 & 27, 2019 are of course relevant to how we are now conceiving of audiovisual recordings of these phenomena.

The 1929 Fox Movietone News outtakes catalogued as If the Antarctic Icecaps Should Melt? connect neglect media artifacts to the global moment in a potent and uncanny way. Here's a sample of the 10 minutes.

The University of South Carolina MIRC DVR provides the original Fox librarian's notation: "'Scientists say gigantic frozen sea at South Pole could flood the world.' Cameraman visualizes what would happen if a tidal wave deluged New York. Statue of Liberty gets her toes wet. Even Times Square is submerged."

More on that footage at a later time -- and in 2020 a screening of full piece at the symposium.

For now we simply want to note the student-led Global Climate Strike.

At NYU Cinema Studies yesterday students, staff, and faculty agreed to participate, with the regular school schedule supplanted by time for the noon march from nearby Foley Square to the rally in Battery Park. The city itself has declared public schools will allow students to strike. And of course our NYC neighbors at the United Nations host the March 27 Climate Action Summit during the U.N. General Assembly, while the latest Dutch Klimaatstaking convenes in The Hague. In Amsterdam the September 20 event meets at Dam Square. The University of Amsterdam has endorsed the work of its Students for Climate as well as the 2018 open letter from scientists calling upon universities to do more to combat "human-caused climate change."

Student-led actions on the issue are not new of course. But the now of 2019 feels different, from mass media coverage of teen activist Greta Thunberg's transatlantic voyage to protests in the street to personal daily experiences with our local climates.

In addition to gathering to discuss issues and actions, we now also face dilemmas about how to gather. International conferences and festivals accustomed to assembling people from distant places are having to rethink participation. We have not solved anything, but recognizing the desire by many to reduce long-distance travel the call for proposals to the 2020 Eye International Conference and NYU Orphan Film Symposium welcomes alternative formats of presentation: "We can consider a limited number of (live) video presentations for those who either don’t fly or who want to fly less." Whether with old-fashioned Skype sessions or new interactive media presentation forms (3D holographic projection?), for better or worse, we are learning technological alternatives to bodily gatherings. When we can meet in person, so much the better.

Meanwhile, we continue our work mindfully (pardon the buzz word) and creatively -- and, we hope, with some pleasure.

Toward that end: Here's another example of the richness of orphan films that allow us to consider how the past informs our present.

From the Eye collection, a piece assigned the title Journaal (1926[?]) an unknown Dutch compilation of international newsreel items, including stories about water, climate, and migration: Snowstorm in Manhattan. A costumed Native American posing on a city street (attributed with a Dutch dialogue intertitle with a film historical allusion: "Where did my white brother Karl May go?"). Swimmer Hélène Sude [who?] in an aquarium with a seal. Roald Amundsen after his flight above the North Pole. Opening the Sennar Dam on the Blue Nile in Sudan.

Instagram & Twitter: @Orphan_Films
Facebook.com/groups/orphan.films
+ Orphan.film
.

Call for Proposals: the 2020 Orphan Film Symposium, in Amsterdam

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 13 Sep 2019 03:05:00 +0000

Call for Proposals (due by Nov. 19, 2019)

The 12th Orphan Film Symposium
-- Water, Climate, & Migration --
hosted by
the 6th Eye International Conference
23-27 May 2020

The biennial NYU Orphan Film Symposium returns to Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, 23-27 May 2020, combining forces with the annual Eye International Conference to explore contemporary archival and academic debates. As always, both events assemble film heritage professionals, scholars, archivists, media artists, curators, collectors, filmmakers, and restorers, and others devoted to saving, studying, and screening neglected audiovisual media. Presenters selected from this open call for proposals will offer three full days and nights of talks and special screenings of rare and restored films.

This edition focuses on the urgent but perennial subjects of water, climate, and migration, by examining how neglected works have recorded, represented, and imagined these phenomena throughout the history of moving images.

We invite proposals to present talks and screenings that address one or more of these intertwined concepts. The symposium seeks a range of historical and theoretical perspectives. Proposals might address questions such as these:

Water. Why water? Because Amsterdam! Because everywhere. Water is essential to life itself but also has destructive, even traumatic power, through its flooding forces -- or its scarcity. Societies are shaped by their interrelationships with water -- the Netherlands being a most conspicuous and visible example. For filmmakers, media artists, and documentarians, H₂0 has always been a subject with aesthetic attraction as well. What neglected films illustrate the significance of water in its many forms?

Climate. How can the study of moving images inform our understanding of earth’s climate over time? of perceptions and collective imagination of climate? What films have tackled this subject directly? indirectly? How might media be used as evidence of historical climate change? Moreover, how are the practices and conceptions of preservation itself being reexamined in a time of climate change? What of the environmental impact on and of archives? And how does a growing awareness of living in an Anthropocene epoch alter our experience of watching historical audiovisual recordings of planet Earth, its atmosphere, landscapes, oceans, shores, cities, farms, flora, and fauna?

Migration – human, animal, other – remains a topic of news, policy making, political debate, scientific study, social analysis, and historical research. Humanitarian crises of migration are prevalent in current discourse but have been so throughout the history of mass media. What previously overlooked films and media recordings help us understand issues of migration and our engagement with them?

We of course also welcome proposals that address perspectives not mentioned here.

Presentations
We also invite a variety of presentation formats: traditional illustrated conference papers; introductions to single films; performances, demonstrations, and interventions; and recent media productions using archival or found footage. We can consider a limited number of (live) video presentations for those who either don’t fly or who want to fly less.

Presenters selected from this open call will discuss and screen rediscovered or recently preserved films from collections and archives around the world. The event showcases a diverse array of rare orphan films – silent, experimental, nontheatrical, sponsored, independent, scientific, documentary, educational, newsreel, fragmentary, amateur, industrial, personal, incomplete, and other moving images from outside of mainstream cinema.

Presentations of 10 to 30 minutes will constitute most of the programming. We can also accept proposals for longer time slots if the running time of a compelling screening or the nature of a collaborative presentation warrant more than half an hour. Evening screenings (with short introductions) may allow for longer films, including features. We also may discuss with presenters appropriate alteration of a format or duration when this makes curatorial sense for the program as a whole.

How to apply
Proposals (500 words or less) for presentations should summarize the argument or rationale and identify AV materials by title, format, and duration. Include a short bio (50 words). E-mail a .docx attachment to conference@eyefilm.nl. Subject header: PROPOSAL for Orphans 2020.

Proposals received by 19 November 2019 will receive full consideration.

Travel Grant Program
Eye has established a travel grant program for speakers of the Eye International Conference. The grants, up to 500 euro each, can be used to partially offset registration and travel costs. To apply, please submit a brief essay (no more than 500 words) addressing the financial need for the award, as well as how attendance at the conference will contribute to your professional development. Email your application by 19 November to conference@eyefilm.nl using the term “Travel Grant” in the subject header. The travel grant program is only open to speakers of the Eye International Conference 2020.

Schedule
The Orphan Film Symposium begins with an evening screening on Saturday, May 23 (preceded by “Meet the Archive,” an afternoon public program highlighting recent projects from the Eye Collection). Three full days and evenings of symposium presentations and screenings, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. “Orphans 12” attendees are also invited to special activities at the Eye Collection Centre on Wednesday 27 May.

This event is organized by Eye in collaboration with the Orphan Film Symposium, a project of NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Department of Cinema Studies, and its Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program. + University of Amsterdam (UvA) and the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA).

For more information: www.eyefilm.nl/conference & wp.nyu.edu/orphanfilm

OFS email list for news and updates

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 12 Sep 2019 13:54:00 +0000

Testing a link.

To receive email updates about the Orphan Film Symposium, add your address at this link:

https://groups.google.com/a/nyu.edu/forum/#!forum/orphan-film-symposium/join

Or write to Orphan-Film-Symposium@nyu.edu.

Thanks!

Dan Streible

wp.nyu.edu/orphanfilm

Around the World with H. T. C.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 01 Sep 2019 05:27:00 +0000

In response to my post of August 9, "Underground," archivist-historian and Orphans veteran Paul Spehr commented about early advocacy for underground storage for film preservation. He began working in the Library of Congress Motion Picture Section in 1958, retiring as assistant chief in 1993.

"In the early 1960s the LoC was presented with a collection of 35mm negatives of films shot by Herford Cowling for Burton Holmes for showing at the 1933 Chicago World Fair. Cowling had been a very early consultant on standards for storage of motion picture film --- going back to the 1920s and contributing to the establishment of the National Archives film archive in 1934-36. He was a very early advocate of stable cold temperature and RH.
One of his very early recommendations was use of caves when proper vault space wasn't available. He had access to a cave near Luray Caverns, Virginia and had kept his films there -- and they were in the best condition I ever experienced."
-- Paul Spehr, Orphan Film Symposium Facebook group, Aug. 10, 2019.

As it happens, Luray Caverns is only 40 miles from the bunkers that now house the Library of Congress National Audio Visual Conservation Center's film vaults in Culpeper, Virginia.

I was ignorant of Cowling's work, but an initial search of databases for his eminently searchable name reveals a remarkable career, both as a filmmaker who traveled the world and a preservation advocate who made a genuine contribution to film archiving. He shot hundreds of thousands of feet of film in the first four decades of his career. Some of it is archived, due to his work for government agencies. Much of it is scattered in private collections and archives. Some is identifiable (but not credited) in compilation films by others. Much of it does not appear to survive.

Herford Tynes Cowling (1890-1980) was born in (and died in) Virginia, traveling the world as a photographer, cinematographer, film director, producer -- and freemason! The book 10,000 Freemasons (Denslow, 1957) offers this bio: “Was chief photographer for U.S. Reclamation Service in 1906-1916 traveling extensively in U.S., Canada and Mexico. Headed cinematographic expedition to Formosa, Philippines, Indo-China, Siam, Tasmania, and South Sea islands, producing semi-educational [sic] movies in 1917. Was chief cinematographer for Paramount (Burton Holmes Travel Films). He has also been technical advisor for Eastman Kodak, official photographer of Century of Progress in Chicago, technical director for U.S. National Archives, Washington, chief of photographic services, Dept. of Labor. In 1922 was on expedition to East Africa, Uganda, Congo and The Sudan. Made movies in Tibet and was China war correspondent in 1924.”

---- Cowling at the camera, with Holmes in Japan, 1917.
© Burton Holmes Historical Collection.

---- Image from Singapore Film Locations Archive, sgfilmlocations.com

At the 2001 Orphan Film Symposium, Buckey Grimm's talk "Early Preservation Initiatives" included these additional details. In 1932, the Society of Motion Picture Engineers' first Committee on the Preservation of Film included Cowling, Carl Louis Gregory, and Terry Ramsaye. In 1934, the new Motion Picture Division of the U.S. National Archives hired Cowling. "Cowling’s expertise was well documented," Grimm reported. "His career began in 1910 as chief photographer for the Interior Department. In 1916, he made a series of travelogues called See America First for Metro Pictures, then was Technical Director for Eastman Teaching Films. He was a recognized expert in storage and handling of nitrate film." [Later published as “A History of Early Nitrate Testing and Storage, 1910-1945,” The Moving Image 1.2 (2001).]

After World War II, Colonel Cowling remained in the U.S. Army Air Force, working at the film lab, as "chief of the Division of Photography, Technical Intelligence of Air Material Command at Wright Field, Ohio," no less. (Motion Picture Herald, Nov. 9, 1946.) Twenty years after he gave Spehr the films stored in his Virginia cave, the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, became the very location used as the Library of Congress Motion Picture Conservation Center.

The veteran film expert joined the Society of American Archivists in 1948. He was also a source for Hermine Baumhofer's essay "Motion Pictures Become Federal Records," in The American Archivist (January 1952). She recounts his work with the Interior Department. "Between 1912 and 1915 all areas set aside as national parks were photographed, the filming and editing being done by Mr. Cowling." His See America First series, he told her, consisted of 52 one-reelers released by Metro and Gaumont, "the first Government film to be distributed in this manner" (20). Expect to read much more about such work as film historian Jennifer Peterson publishes her latest research about films from the National Park Service.

What of the materials Cowling gave to the Library of Congress? Its online catalog has entries for books, films, and photographs credited to Cowling. Only four items are listed as part of a "Cowling (Herford Tynes) Collection." As Paul Spehr correctly recalls, these are gifts from Cowling dated ca. 1962, and associated with the 1933-34 Chicago fair, aka the Century of Progress International Exposition.

1934: The World's Fair Black Forest / Burton Holmes Films (Kaufmann & Fabry Co., 1934) 16mm, 144 feet, ca. 4 mins.
1934--Villages of the World's Fair, 16mm, 140 feet
A Century of Progress Exposition -- Indian village (Burton Holmes Films in assoc. with Herford T. Cowling, 1933) 16mm, 114 feet; 2 positive prints + duplicate negative.

The fourth item stands apart: East Indian Island (Eastman Teaching Films, Inc., 1930?); Encyclopædia Britannica Films no. 1077 [ca. 1945]) 16mm, ca. 396 feet, silent b/w; + 35mm, ca. 990 feet, 2 reels, tinted, the latter an exchange copy from the George Eastman House. Stock footage licenser Periscope Film has An East Indian

However there are a couple dozen other films of 1933 the LoC catalog says Cowling made and/or donated. Most are from the Century of Progress Expo, such as The World a Million Years Ago, The Fair at Night, Sally Rand [fan dancer], Faith Bacon the Fan Dancer of Hollywood, The Fair from the Air, and Around the Fair with Burton Holmes no. 1 and no. 2. Copies of some of the Holmes Century of Progress films that Cowling shot are online. (His name is never on screen.) The Fair at Night (1933) is on travelfilmarchive's YouTube channel. Three versions of Wings of a Century are posted from Prelinger Archives, including this 39-minute cut.

Here's the first Around the Fair film (1933). 8 min.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjOBS8Nw7Wk&t=

A minute of Sally Rand's nude fan dance is part of Streets of Paris (1933).
https://youtu.be/9nxUt9M2rVw?t=157

The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress (Jan. 1964) mentioned only that Cowling donated a "small collection of films made in Africa, India, and Southeast Asia in the 1920's" (62).

Other pieces are incompletely catalogued portions of Cowling's nonfiction travelogue work. Several are described curiously as "book," 16mm, such as
* [Kashmir] [Motion picture] [n.p.] Herford Tynes Cowling, 1923.
* An Indian Durbar [Motion picture] [n.p.] Burton Holmes Lectures, 1926, a silent 1,200 feet lecture version and a later, shorter sound version. "Shows the coronation of 'Maharaja Hari Singh of Kashmir,' March 1926."

A third version of the latter film circulates online, with a rare on-screen credit for Cowling, copyright by Eastman Kodak Co., 1927.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjv8NRgBJDE
As recently as this month, YouTubers continue reposting this footage of the "last maharajah," with comments about the political, religious, and military conflicts over Kashmir. (As I update this post on August 16, news outlets are reporting multiple casualties today in the disputed region following the Indian government's revoking the "special status" of Kashmir.)

Both Cowling's [Kashmir] and An Indian Durbar can be linked to fragments that survive elsewhere. Like other globetrotting camera operators of the era, Cowling shot footage that commercial newsreel services licensed or purchased. The University of South Carolina Moving Image Research Collections reference catalog lists Cowling as the camera operator for Fox newsreel footage originally described by a footage librarian as [Leopard] (three shots taken in 1923) and Coronation of the Maharajah of Kashmir (1926). Portions of both were used in theatrical newsreel releases that do not survive. In fact, the company hyped the footage in a puff piece by sales manager Fred Quimby: "Fox News Helps Educate the World," Exhibitors Herald, (Sep. 11, 1926). Without naming Cowling, he boasted of the newsreel's international reach, saying "a special emissary just emerged from the Vale of the Cashmere, near the Afghan border, where he succeeded in making pictures showing the almost fabulous and barbaric beauty and wealth of the land of the Maharajah of that distant spot." Other exclusive newsfilm from Cowling included 1924 coverage of warring factions within China.

Thus Cowling's images were widely seen even if he was not as well known as Burton Holmes.

A final note about the Library of Congress catalog's clues to Cowling's films, now orphaned or lost. The entry attributing Cowling as photographer is for 72 photographs on glass lantern slides from 1923. The assigned title is "[Tibet and Asian landscapes and people, includes mountain expeditions, travel on elephants, tiger hunting, Herford Tynes [sic] with dead tiger and posing with his camera]." These are described as unprocessed items in the Prints and Photographs Division, with the note: "Gift to MBRS [Motion Picture, Broadcasting, Recorded Sound] from Col. Cowling. Photographs are probably associated with the filming of Burton Holmes' To the Roof of the World in Tibet. This catalog record contains preliminary data."

The note is curious in that Holmes filmographies do not include this title, nor any about Tibet. The lone reference I have found to this title is from International Photographer, April 1933. A column by Herford Tynes Cowling, "Around the World, No. 1," features a page of his 1923 photos under the heading "To the Roof of the World in Tibet." Are some of these images also on the LoC lantern slides that have yet to be processed? Are these the only remnants of the companion motion picture? Was there a film by that title or was the footage only part of a Holmes travelogue lecture? (The George Eastman Museum houses a rediscovered Holmes collection acquired in 2004, listing 175 items. None mention Tibet or Kashmir.)

"This" 1923 venture "was the first moving picture expedition ever made into Tibet for the purpose of filming the people and customs of the country," Cowling claimed in 1933. He refers to "about one hundred thousand feet of film exposed which, incidentally, kept very well at the high, dry altitude" [in re: our subject of cold storage as film preservation]. "About four thousand still pictures were taken during the trip, all of which were developed en route."

Were these films the first ever shot in Tibet? Possibly. Certainly among the earliest. By the end of 1923, another American returned from Tibet with footage he secured under even more adventurous circumstances. In our next blog post, we will review the somewhat legendary career of scholar William McGovern and his only film, To Lhasa in Disguise, released in 1924, later lost, but refound and restored in 2015.

The online TibetFilmArchive.org, collected in New York by filmmaker and archivist Tenzin Phuntsog, lists only three pieces of extant film from the 1920s, and these are after 1923. In 1928, German scientist Wilhelm Filchner publicly showed some of the footage he shot during his 1925-28 stay in Tibet. His 1929 book, Om Mani Padme Hum [a Buddhist mantra]: Meine China- und Tibet-expedition 1925-8, claimed he shipped 20,000 meters of unprocessed film to Germany. (Was it the new 16mm format?)

Cowling commented in his 1933 account: "The people had never seen a motion picture and could only understand an ordinary photograph with considerable difficulty."

Such a description of a Westerner’s first encounter with non-Westerners’ first encounter with movies resembles similar accounts of the period. Cowling had been doing such work since the 1910s, but this 1923 expedition came only a year after the release of Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North. As Flaherty and Cowling acknowledged, the communities they photographed participated in the labor of chemically processing the films and photos as they were shot. Cowling describes hiring dozens of Tibetans who made possible his four-month trek through the mountains via yak. Thus the contradiction in his account that Tibetans "could only understand an ordinary photograph with considerable difficulty,” even though teams in his employ helped process thousands of photographs.

McGovern's account of his 1923 trip to Lhasa contradicts Cowling's. His popular book To Lhasa in Disguise reported the Dalai Lama's chief aid made a hobby of "amateur photography," decorating this room with family photos.

The LoC online catalog offers only one photograph.

The title assigned to it is [Lama with headdress and Caucasian man seated in front of nine boys and men, Tibet]. The "Caucasian" man is Cowling himself. Who took the photo? or is that a shutter release cable in his right hand?

More important, what happened to the 20 hours of footage he shot in Kashmir and Tibet? and is there a film called To the Roof of the World in Tibet that might survive under different titles or within later film compilations?

The best photographic evidence comes from the International Photographer piece and his more contemporary account in American Cinematographer (Feb. 1924), "Photographing the Roof of the World," by "Herford Tynes Cowling, A.S.C." The first page of this is missing from the online copy, but the Long Island University Post library digitized its microfilm copy. Here is some of the photo-documentation of H. T. C. at work with his 35mm Akeley movie camera.

"I believe I have secured the only existing films of this nature."

He contributed another short piece, "How the Pandita [Buddhist spiritual leader] Was Photographed," American Cinematographer (April 1925). He describes how Tibetan and Kashmiri workers helped him set up the movie camera and introduced him to the Pandita who gave permission to film people.

Pages harvested from lantern.mediahist.org.

According to the Exhibitors Herald, the 1923 Tibetan expedition was facilitated by Hari Singh, who "later commissioned Cowling to officially photograph his coronation" in Kashmir -- "though it was to rest only in Sir Hari's private archives" ("Fame of A.S.C. Spreads," Sep. 4, 1926). Cowling published his own accounts of the coronation film as an elaborate work for hire. (“A Modern Ruler in the Vale of Kashmir,” New York Times, Feb. 27, 1927; “A Washingtonian Grinds the Camera as India Crowns a New Ruler in a Pageant Costing Millions,” Washington Post, Sep. 16, 1934.)

He'd taken other camera commissions, filming, for example, an elaborate 1924 hunting expedition in Nepal and India for the wealthy "Mr. and Mrs. W. J. Morden of Chicago." The New York Times and many others ran rotogravure spreads of Cowling's stills, including this one of him "photographing the slaughter of the tigers from the back of an elephant."

Rotogravure Picture Section, New York Times, June 29, 1924.

He published his account in "Around the World, No. 2: Filming a Tiger Shoot in India," International Photographer (May 1933). The column ran for six issues, then was reworked for a series in the Washington Post Magazine in 1934.

The question remains: what became of the motion-picture film he recorded on these trips?

His writings do not address the issue.

For most of the 1920s, Cowling traveled the globe, shooting for Holmes for seven years (1917-1923) and then for his own Round-the-World Travel Pictures. American Cinematographer often mentioned the travels of the American Society of Cinematographers member, who upon his return in 1929 served on the journal's advisory board.

When his globetrotting ended, Cowling returned to Virginia and federal employment in D.C. as a technical consultant on motion pictures (and microfilm) for the National Archives, National Parks Service, Bureau of the Census, the military, and other government bodies.

Returning to the relevance to orphan films about climate and migration: Even during his active shooting years he published technical advice about how film needed to be treated in cold and hot climates. See his article "Film Care in the Tropics," for example, in the August 1927 issue of Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers. That so much of his shooting took place in diverse geographies, recording landscapes, mountains, glaciers, rivers, islands, and jungles makes these films prime examples of how we might re-examine newsfilm, travelogues, and their unedited footage for what they captured of these places a century ago.

American and European travel films of that era are often noted now for their "bad" anthropology, xenophobic commentary, and photographic othering of people filmed in non-Western parts of the globe. Without Cowling's theatrical releases to examine, we cannot fairly analyze them. Certainly his brief written comments in trade journals and the press often resort to the word strange (and sometimes worse) to characterize the people and places he encountered in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Pacific islands. He never claims cultural expertise or anthropological mission. He was seeking spectacular scenes for American movie audiences, he says. His writings are often sympathetic to his subjects, expressing admiration for traditional or ancient cultural practices he observes. Cowling writes without judgment about the polyandry (he uses the word) and female-led communities he saw in Tibet.

Without trying to make the case for Cowling as an exceptional filmmaker or sensitive ethnographer, we might conclude by noting his public protest over Hollywood abuse of travelogue footage. He licensed his footage of Tibet and India for use in the RKO release India Speaks (1933), which lists him as one of three photographers in the credits. The movie intercuts genuine location footage shot by Cowling and others with fictional scenes staged in Hollywood, all narrated by travel writer and adventurer Richard Halliburton. The exploitation film presents India as a land of ritualized sin, orgies, crime, and violence. Cowling strongly objected to its misrepresentations. "They have taken scenes made in Burma, Java, Sumatra and other places and put them in Tibet and India with no regard for geographic truth." They took his tiger footage and "faked a fight between a lion and a tiger." He complained to the Federal Trade Commission, the Hays Office, and newspaper reviewers. ("Film Fakers," International Photographer, June 1933.) But the movie enjoyed wide release -- except in England and India, where exhibitors refused to show it. A FilmIndia editorial complaining about misrepresentation of Indians in RKO's new Gunga Din (1939) recalled the rejection of India Speaks on the subcontinent, while "the rest of the world – the white world to be accurate – received the picture with enthusiasm," and "got through the American ‘keyhole’ a cock-eyed peep of India and her 'natives.'"

Can Cowling's footage of Tibet, Kashmir, and India be seen in India Speaks? It has long been listed as a lost film. But . . . just three months ago the Travel Film Archive, a footage licensing company, quietly posted 55 minutes from India Speaks. The 1933 release ran 78 minutes. TFA founder Patrick Montgomery, veteran of archival film collecting and licensing, bought 35mm prints of both Africa Speaks (1931) and India Speaks on eBay. A 1941 RKO reissue version, The Bride of Buddha, 63 minutes, survives as a nitrate print at the UCLA Film and Television Archive.

Indeed many of the shots of Tibetan locations, ceremonies, and lamaseries mirror the stills published as "To the Roof of the World in Tibet" (above). Perhaps Cowling disseminated these in April 1933 precisely because the Hollywood movie that desecrated his handsome footage was released that same month.

Other scenes in India Speaks match Cowling pictures of the 1926 coronation in Kashmir. Compare, for instance, this frame from India Speaks (left) to a Cowling photograph (right) the Washington Post (Sep. 15, 1934) used to promote his article about the coronation.

Finding other Cowling films will take time, but now we know that some of his most widely seen cinematography is no longer lost.

Watching India Speaks confirms why Cowling was so displeased with how his images were appropriated and exploited.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=do059VMWWQA

"The striking posters and exploitation material" boasted of in RKO's trade promotion further reveal how lurid and sexualized the images of India were.
. -- Motion Picture Herald, May 27, 1933.

"'Horrific' Film About India," ran the Times of India headline of April 11, 1948, when the American producer re-applied fifteen years later to London censors to permit exhibition of his self-described "horrific" documentary. (Reference provided by Navnidhi Sharma, who in a fortunate convergence is writing a dissertation on "a history of encounters between Indian cinema and China.")

-- Dan Streible
(updated Aug. 23, 2019, originally published at https://wp.nyu.edu/orphanfilm/2019/08/14/undergroundps).

Notes

• Michael R. Pitts, RKO Radio Pictures Horror, Science Fiction and Fantasy Films, 1929-1956 (McFarland, 2015) well describes the history of India Speaks, but deems it a lost film (as do Wikipedia and IMDb at the moment).

• While in China, Cowling was interviewed about his Tibet shoot and Nepal tiger hunt. (“With the Movie Camera in Farthest Tibet,” North-China Herald and Supreme Court, Oct. 4, 1924.) He also recounted events in his own article, “In Tibet, Strange Land of Beauty and Ignorance, Women Rule 'The Roof of the World,’” Washington Post, Oct. 7, 1934. Upon returning to North America, he told of filming conflicts among Chinese military cliques, particularly those commanded by generals Wu Peifu and Feng Yuxiang in September-October 1924. ("Pictured Actual Fighting Along Chinese Battle Fronts with 8,000 Feet of Camera Film; H. T. Cowling Had Thrilling Experiences While Watching Chinese Factions in Warfare," Victoria [BC] Daily Times, Nov. 18, 1924.)

• The Travel Film Archive offers two other short films about Tibet, which could possibly include Cowling footage. The Unknown World, "an expedition in the 1930's [?] to see the Dalai Lama" in Lhasa, Tibet. The title is another unknown one. The end credit, "A General Film Productions Corp. Picture," identifies this as a post-WWII nontheatrical edition for television. "Adapted by Tom Terriss" refers to the host of a film and radio travel series, Vagabond Adventures (1927-34), who developed postwar television content. I have found no evidence of a title The Unknown World in distribution in the 30s; much of the footage appears to be from the 1920s. Easier to verify is the travelogue Tibet: Land of Isolation (FitzPatrick Pictures, 1934), an MGM theatrical release. Although contemporary with India Speaks, most of the FitzPatrick footage appears distinctive. (Historian Peter H. Hansen assays: "Although it is unclear where the film was shot, the soundtrack is more Chinese than Tibetan in inspiration. . . a visual catalogue of many Western myths about Tibet." Hansen makes this indispensable 2001 essay “Tibetan Horizon: Tibet and the Cinema in the Early Twentieth Century" available for free download.)

• The Travel Film Archive lists 2,851 digital video items in its collection. Only one, An Indian Durbar (1926), is credited to Cowling.

• Where do TFA films come from? The website calls them "a collection of travelogues and educational and industrial films" shot on film between 1900 and 1970. Stock footage entrepreneur Patrick Montgomery began building this and other thematic collections in 2007. Previously he created Archive Films, for a time the largest U.S. stock footage company until acquired by Kodak's The Image Bank in 1997 (which in turn was purchased by Getty Images in 1999).

Cowling's Roof of the World

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 11:57:00 +0000

In response to my previous post, "Underground," archivist-historian and Orphans veteran Paul Spehr sent a Facebook comment about early advocacy for underground storage for film preservation.

"In the early 1960s the LoC was presented with a collection of 35mm negatives of films shot by Herford Cowling for Burton Holmes for showing at the 1933 Chicago World Fair. Cowling had been a very early consultant on standards for storage of motion picture film --- going back to the 1920s and contributing to the establishment of the National Archives film archive in 1934-36. He was a very early advocate of stable cold temperature and RH.
One of his very early recommendations was use of caves when proper vault space wasn't available. He had access to a cave near Luray Caverns, Virginia and had kept his films there -- and they were in the best condition I ever experienced."
-- Paul Spehr, Orphan Film Symposium Facebook group, Aug. 10, 2019.

As it happens, Luray Caverns is 40 miles from the bunkers that now house the LoC National Audio Visual Conservation Center's film vaults in Culpeper, Virginia.

Herford Tynes Cowling (1890-1980) was born (and died) in Virginia but traveled the world as a photographer, cinematographer, film director, producer -- and freemason! The book 10,000 Freemasons (William R. Denslow, 1957) offers this bio: “Was chief photographer for U.S. Reclamation Service in 1906-1916 traveling extensively in U.S., Canada and Mexico. Headed cinematographic expedition to Formosa, Philippines, Indo-China, Siam, Tasmania, and South Sea islands, producing semi-educational [sic] movies in 1917. Was chief cinematographer for Paramount (Burton Holmes Travel Films). He has also been technical advisor for Eastman Kodak, official photographer of Century of Progress in Chicago, technical director for U.S. National Archives, Washington, chief of photographic services, Dept. of Labor. In 1922 was on expedition to East Africa, Uganda, Congo and The Sudan. Made movies in Tibet and was China war correspondent in 1924.”

---- Image from Singapore Film Locations Archive, sgfilmlocations.com

At the 2001 Orphan Film Symposium, Buckey Grimm's talk "Early Preservation Initiatives" included further details. In 1932, the Society of Motion Picture Engineers' first Committee on the Preservation of Film included Cowling, Carl Louis Gregory, and Terry Ramsaye. In 1934, the new Motion Picture Division of the U.S. National Archives hired Cowling. "Cowling’s expertise was well documented," Grimm reported. "His career began in 1910 as chief photographer for the Interior Department. In 1916, he made a series of travelogues called See America First for Metro Pictures, then was Technical Director for Eastman Teaching Films. He was a recognized expert in storage and handling of nitrate film."

After World War II, Colonel Cowling remained in the U.S. Air Force, working at the film lab at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio -- the very location that became the Library of Congress Motion Picture Conservation Center in 1981. The veteran filmmaker joined the Society of American Archivists in 1948. He was also a source for Hermine M. Baumhofer's essay "Motion Pictures Become Federal Records," in The American Archivist (January 1952). She recounts his work with the Interior Department. "Between 1912 and 1915 all areas set aside as national parks were photographed, the filming and editing being done by Mr. Cowling." His See America First series, he told her, were 52 one-reelers released by Metro and Gaumont, "the first Government film to be distributed in this manner" (20). Expect to read much more about this as film historian Jennifer Peterson publishes her latest research about films from the National Park Service.

What of the materials Cowling gave to the Library of Congress? Its online catalog has entries for books, films, and photographs credited to Cowling. Only four items are listed as part of a "Cowling (Herford Tynes) Collection." As Paul Spehr correctly recalls, these are gifts from Cowling dated ca. 1962, and associated with the 1933-34 Chicago fair, aka the Century of Progress International Exposition.

1934: The World's Fair Black Forest / Burton Holmes Films (Kaufmann & Fabry Co., 1934) 16mm, 144 feet, ca. 4 mins.
1934--Villages of the World's Fair, 16mm, 140 feet
A Century of Progress Exposition -- Indian village (Burton Holmes Films in assoc. with Herford T. Cowling, 1933) 16mm, 114 feet; 2 positive prints + duplicate negative.

* [Kashmir] [Motion picture] [n.p.] Herford Tynes Cowling, 1923.

* An Indian Durbar [Motion picture] [n.p.] Burton Holmes Lectures, 1926, a silent 1,200 feet lecture version and a later, shorter sound version. "Shows the coronation of 'Maharaja Hari Singh of Kashmir,' March 1926."

Both of those can be linked to fragments that survive elsewhere. Like other globetrotting camera operators of the era, Cowling shot footage that commercial newsreel services purchased. The University of South Carolina Moving Image Research Collections reference catalog lists Cowling as the camera operator for Fox newsreel footage described originally as [Leopard] (three shots taken in 1923) and Coronation of the Maharajah of Kashmir (June 10, 1926). Portions of both were used in theatrical newsreel releases. In fact, the company hyped the footage in a puff piece by sales manager Fred C. Quimby: "Fox News Helps Educate the World," Exhibitors Herald, (September 11, 1926). Without naming Cowling, he boasted of his newsreel's international reach, saying "a special emissary just emerged from the Vale of the Cashmere, near the Afghan border, where he succeeded in making pictures showing the almost fabulous and barbaric beauty and wealth of the land of the Maharajah of that distant spot." Cowling's images were widely seen even if he was not as well known as Burton Holmes.

A final note about the Library of Congress catalog's clues to Cowling's films, now orphaned or lost. The entry attributing Cowling as photographer is for 72 photographs on glass lantern slides from 1923. The assigned title is "[Tibet and Asian landscapes and people, includes mountain expeditions, travel on elephants, tiger hunting, Herford Tynes with dead tiger and posing with his camera]." These are described as unprocessed items in the Prints and Photographs Division, with the note: "Gift to MBRS [Motion Picture, Broadcasting, Recorded Sound] from Col. Cowling. Photographs are probably associated with the filming of Burton Holmes' To the Roof of the World in Tibet. This catalog record contains preliminary data."

The note is curious in that Holmes filmographies do not include this title. The lone reference I have found is from International Photographer, April 1933. A column authored by Herford Tynes Cowling, "Around the World," No. 1, features a page of his ten-year-old photos under the heading "To the Roof of the World in Tibet." Are some of these images also on the LoC lantern slides that have yet to be processed? Are these the only remnants of the companion motion picture? Was there a film by that title or was the footage only part of Holmes or Cowling travelogue lecture?

"This was the first moving picture expedition ever made into Tibet for the purpose of filming the people and customs of the country," Cowling claimed in 1933. He refers to "about one hundred thousand feet of film exposed which, incidentally, kept very well at the high, dry altitude" [in re: our subject of cold storage as film preservation]. "About four thousand still pictures were taken during the trip, all of which were developed en route." He adds "The people had never seen a motion picture and could only understand an ordinary photograph with considerable difficulty."

Such a description of a Westerner’s first encounter with non-Westerners’ first encounter with movies resembles similar accounts of the period. Cowling had been doing such work since the 1910s, but this 1923 expedition came only a year after the release of Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North. As Flaherty and Cowling acknowledged, the communities they photographed participated in the labor of processing the films as they were shot. Cowling describes hiring dozens of Tibetans who made possible his four-month trek through the mountains. Thus the contradiction in his account that Tibetans "could only understand an ordinary photograph with considerable difficulty,” even though teams in his employ helped process 100,000 feet of 35mm motion-picture film and 4,000 still photographs.

The LoC online catalog offers only one photograph.

The title assigned to it is [Lama with headdress and Caucasian man seated in front of nine boys and men, Tibet]. The "Caucasian" man appears to be Cowling himself. So who took the photo? or is that a shutter release cable in his right hand?

More important, what happened to the 20 hours of footage he claims to have shot in Kashmir and Tibet? and is there a film called To the Roof of the World in Tibet that might survive under different titles or within later film compilations?
The best photographic evidence comes from both the International Photographer piece and the more contemporary account in American Cinematographer (February 1924), "Photographing the Roof of the World," by "Herford Tynes Cowling, A.S.C." The first page of this is missing from the digitized copy I accessed and the images are of low resolution. But here is some of the photo-documentation of H. T. C. at work.

"I believe I have secured the only existing films of this nature."

Pages harvested from lantern.mediahist.org.

According to the Exhibitors Herald, the Tibetan expedition was made possible by Sir Hari Singh, who "later commissioned Cowling to officially photograph his coronation" in Kashmir -- "though it was to rest only in Sir Hari's private archives." ("Fame of A.S.C. Spreads," Sep. 4, 1926.")

Daguerreotype of Earth's moon (1840)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 25 Jul 2019 13:13:00 +0000

Sharing. In this month during which so much media archiving has helped public memory of the 50th anniversary of earthlings visiting their moon.

"Daguerreotype of Earth's moon" (1840)

attributed to John W. Draper
2.75 x 3.25 inches
University Archives, Bobst Library, NYU

The Orphans in Space DVD (2012) cover image comes from the Draper Family Collection, housed in the New York University Archives. The collection includes celestial photographs taken by John William Draper (1811-1882) and his son Henry Draper (1837-1882). Both were physicians, professors of chemistry, and amateur but innovative photographers.
The photograph derives from a 3.25" x 2.75" daguerreotype of the moon made by the father, probably on March 26, 1840. A newly-appointed professor at what was then named the University of the City of New-York, the elder Draper created the image from the rooftop of the university's main building on Washington Square (less than a block from where the collection now resides, in NYU's Bobst Library). Alongside its observatory, the rooftop featured a glass-enclosed photographic studio, where Draper and fellow faculty member Samuel F. B. Morse made some of the earliest daguerreotype portraits that year.

Rather than the first photograph of the moon taken, this image is the earliest one among those known to survive. As early as 1837, photologist John W. Draper experimented with the effects of light (including moonlight) on salted paper. In 1838-39, after Louis Daguerre invented his method of fixing photographic images on metal plates, French astronomers asked their countryman to record the moon, but his attempts failed to maintain focus as the satellite moved during his long exposure times. When knowledge of daguerreotypy reached New York, Draper used a camera literally made from a cigar box to render at least two images of the moon during the winter of 1839-40. The first, "about one-sixth of an inch in diameter," was overexposed, the silver iodide on the copper plate turning black. The second, "nearly an inch" in diameter, fixed the light of a waning gibbous moon. Draper called it "deficient in sharpness" and "confused," although the "position of the darker spots on the surface of the luminary was distinct" in this "stain."

"I placed a flat gas-burner (bat’s-wing) in a magic lantern, and received the image of one of the grotesque transparencies, on a plate three inches square: in half an hour, a very fair representation was obtained."
("Remarks on the Daguerreotype," American Repertory of Arts, Sciences, and Manufactures, July 1840, 401-4. Reproduced here.)

On March 23, 1840, Draper reported this limited success to the New York Lyceum of Natural History. Three nights later he recorded a last-quarter moon (i.e., a visible half moon), the positive image mirror-reversed by his telescope. This detailed daguerreotype became the source from which many copies derived. So many digital copies of this 1840 image now populate the internet, subject to so many manipulations of photographic variables, that it is difficult to discern that each derives from the same source. Some reverse the image horizontally, vertically, or both. Others switch the positive-negative values. Still others reproduce the later water-damaged daguerreotype plate; others the plate after its 1960s cleaning and restoration. Digital enhancements and alterations abound. Adding to the confusion of images, son Henry Draper became a prolific astrophotographer. After building an observatory at his home in 1860, he took more than a thousand images of the moon, and later the sun, planets, comets, and stars. These were reprinted in both the popular press and scientific literature, as well as on lantern slides, stereographs, and other formats.

The provenance of the 1840 John W. Draper daguerreotype is difficult to trace. From the beginning, the scientist himself re-photographed his own photographs. "There is no difficulty in making copies of Daguerreotype pictures of any size," he wrote. In the winter of 1839-40, "I made many copies of my more fortunate proofs . . . copying views on very minute plates, with a very minute camera." Later, these were enlarged "to any required size, by means of a stationery apparatus." What became of these daguerreotypes of daguerreotypes? In what ways did subsequent reproduction technologies alter the look of the original?

In 1960, some daguerreotypes were rediscovered amid a miscellany of Draper material, stored in the attic of Gould Memorial Library at NYU's University Heights campus in the Bronx. Before an extended loan to the Smithsonian in 1962, the NYU Photo Bureau made a copy photograph, which bears a confusing label: "First known photograph of the moon was taken by John W. Draper ca. 1839-40. The spots in this photo are caused by mold and water damage on the original daguerreotype, which apparently [?] no longer exists." Since 1993, when the moon photographs returned to the University Archives, experts have concluded that the daguerreotype seen here is most likely that taken by John Draper in 1840.

If so, its survival as an object happened against the odds. The senior Dr. Draper saw much of his work destroyed by an 1844 fire. Another devastating fire in 1866 obliterated the University Medical College, of which he was president. In addition to Draper's own papers and apparatus, the invaluable collections of the Lyceum of Natural History, which NYU had taken in, were completely consumed by the flames. After the fire, the New York Evening Post, recognizing the need to protect museums and archives, wrote on May 25: "What we want in New York is a great fire-proof building, sufficiently capacious to afford shelter to all the societies which possess valuable collections.”

__________

Dan Streible, with research contributions from Ashley Sena-Levine, Simon Baatz, Nancy Cricco [university archivist], Howard McManus, Len Walle, Deborah Jean Warner, and Gregory Wick. Special acknowledgement for Walter Forsberg, who willed the Orphans in Space DVD into being and who brought the Draper moon photograph to my attention in the first place. The medium-resolution digital copy of the framed daguerreotype is my amateur snapshot taken with an iPhone 4 when Nancy Cricco showed the original to us in 2011.

Slide show at 2014 Orphan Film Symposium, Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam.

Downloadable. Booklet (40 pages) for the two-DVD set Orphans in Space: Forgotten Films from the Final Frontier (NYU Orphan Film Project, 2012). Produced and edited by Walter Forsberg, Alice Moscoso, Dan Streible, and Jonah Volk. Booklet design by Kramer O'Neill.

Orphans in China -- - “影展与城市” 国际论坛

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 02 Jul 2019 17:48:00 +0000

Orphan films in China?

Many, of course! So at last the Orphan Film Symposium visits China.

Xiamen University invited me to talk about the symposium-as-festival (“Screening Orphan Films: Why and How?”) and to screen a sample of shorts at this week's two-part conference on festivals and archives. Most of the other works presented here also fit within the orphan rubric. We saw a variety of previously neglected, forgotten, obscure, seldom-seen, or undistributed titles: ethnographic films, a found-footage remix, video art appropriation, a propaganda drama about comradeship among Chinese and North Korean soldiers during the Korean War, home movies from Taiwan, indie Malaysian movies, and restorations of feature films from Singapore, Mexico, the Philippines, and Thailand.

How did we get here?

In 2018, professors Li Xiaohong and Ray Jiing first visited NYU Cinema Studies with a group of other faculty and students from Xiamen University in Fujian, China. Our NYU faculty colleague Zhang Zhen was the conduit for dialogue among our Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program, NYU Cinema Studies, and XMU's team, who are creating a media archiving degree similar to NYU MIAP. The university now operates an expanding film archive and study center, guided by Professor Jiing, best known for establishing what is now the Taiwan Film Institute.

Professors Li Xiaohong (Deputy Dean of Humanities) & Ray Jiing, 井迎瑞.

This week the interactions culminated in a large conference, "影展与城市" 国际论坛 -- the International Film Festival Forum -- hosted by Xiamen University's College of Humanities and co-organized with the NYU Asian Film and Media Initiative. Part 1 (June 28-29) brought 16 speakers together for daytime presentations and evening screenings. Zhang Zhen and Sangjoon Lee conceptualized the panels.

Our generous host Prof. Li and her impressive students from the Department of Film and Drama took this commemorative photograph on day one and delivered laminated copies to each of us the next day.

Part 2 (June 30 - July 3) addressed Film Archives and Film Restoration, with a new set of presenters, led by Dr. Jiing, assembling again on the beautiful campus. MIAP Director Juana Suárez and I were the fortunate two who got to present at both, with Dina Iordanova (St. Andrews U), Hee Wai Siam (Nanyang Technological U), and Nitin Govil (University of Southern California) participating in both as well.

Most attendees were Xiamen University faculty and students, working alongside invited artists, archivists, programmers, and researchers from across China and southeast Asia -- Yunnan, Guizhou, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, Thailand, and the Philippines. Others came from North America, Europe, and Australia, including Jan-Christopher Horak (UCLA Film and Television Archive), Howard Besser (NYU), Bono Olgado (U of California, Irvine), Miao Song (Concordia U, Montreal), and Kirsten Stevens (U of Melbourne).

We learned about the histories and practices of film festivals including the Hong Kong IFF (from Roger Garcia), Singapore IFF (Yuni Hadi), Southeast Asian FF (Sangjoon Lee), Canada China IFF (Song Miao), Japanese festivals (Ma Ran), Latin American preservation festivals (Juana Suárez), and Taiwan's Women Make Waves (Huang Yu-Shan) and Golden Harvest Award and Short Film Festival (Ming-Yeh Rawnsley).

The fact that China's Golden Rooster and Hundred Flowers Film Festival has located to Xiamen this year* was a key reason the university organized the forum on this theme. We heard from Professor Li about the founder of the Golden Rooster Awards, and from Zheng Guoqing (Xiamen U) about Taipei's Golden Horse Awards and Festival. Other topics analyzed included the marketing of festivals (Liao Gene-Fon, Taiwan U of Arts), "cities of film" (Zhang Aigong, XMU), film collecting (Zhang Jin, China Film Archive) and Lin Liang-wen (Taiwan U of Arts), and Home Movie Day (Hsieh Yu-en, Film Collectors’ Museum).

Media art and ethnographic filmmaking were given particular attention, with screenings of the Chinese-language works Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings (Wang Bo & Pan Lu, 2017) Kawa People (Tan Leshui, 1958; introduced by the filmmaker’s son), and Tail After Those Old Photos (Chen Xueli, 2015). Yunnan was also well represented by Tan, Chen, media artist Li Xin, and film rescuer Xiong Libo. They were joined by Wei Wei (Guizhou Minzu U) on the Miao series of ethnographic films from the 1970s.

----

Each section of the conference ended with a visit to the XMU Film Archive Studies Center, located on the top floor of the library on the larger Xiang'an campus. Shiyang Jiang led our tour of the archive. A new film scanner sits alongside an acre of projectors and old film cans -- displayed to remind us of the noted cultural heritage site, the Terracotta Army of Xi'an. There's also a lecture room set up with working 35mm projectors on the floor, which were used to good effect.

Shiyang Jiang of the XMU film archive will be entering the NYU MIAP master's program.

Photos and videos by Dan Streible, June 27, 2019.

Ray Jiing's Archivist's Code of Ethics on display in Chinese concludes with a paragraph about the English terms "orphan films" and "public domain." Shiyang translated.

A special treat concluded the visit: projection of a 35mm print from the Military Collection, nothing less than a reel from Wong Kar-wai's Ashes of Time Redux (1994/2008).

The evening screenings on the giant screen of the 700-seat theater were especially memorable. These included

• Chris Horak introduced UCLA restorations of the handsome Enamorada (Emilio Fernandez, Mexico, 1946), shot by Gabriel Figueroa, starring Maria Félix & Pedro Almendáriz; and, from Hollywood, the odd 1929 Best Picture nominee Alibi (sound version)

• Man with a Movie Camera: The Participatory Global Remake (1929/2017), January 19, 2017 edition; introduced by Howard Besser as an example of database cinema and our forum theme of cities.

• Lino Brocka's Maynila, sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag / Manila in the Claws of Light (Philippines, 1975), a 2013 restoration by the World Cinema Foundation, introduced by Benedict Salazar Olgado, former director of the National Film Archives of the Philippines.

• The fabulous martial arts flick 血指环 / Ring of Fury (Singapore, 1973), restored by the Asian Film Archive, with Cineric Portual solving the serious mold and color fading problems; introduced by Karen Chan.

The before-and-after demo for Ring of Fury is more striking than most.

• Santi-Vina (Thavi Na Bangchang, Thailand, 1954)

Introduced by Sanchai Chotirosseranee of Film Archive (Public Organization), Thailand; restoration from the BFI National Archive's 35mm nitrate release print. The first Thai color feature film -- and such colors!

My orphan shorts (small films screened on the small screen) included [Elsa and Albert Einstein at Warner Bros.- First National Studio] (US, 1931); the amateur production Na odnoi zemle / On the Same Earth (USSR, 1976); and the particularly well-received 轻骑姑娘 / Light Cavalry Girls (China, 1980) from the University of South Carolina's Chinese Film Collection. This Central Newsreel and Documentary Film Studio production by Shen Jie highlights the Chinese army’s Bayi Women Light Motorcycle Team. The XMU students were particularly intrigued by this anomalous experimental documentary. (My thanks to the researchers who rediscovered these three films: Becca Bender and Maria Vinogradova, as well as Zoe Meng Jiang, Yongli Li, and Lydia Pappas.) I was also able to screen clips from my forthcoming annotated, on-line filmography of 50 terms for newsreel elements, including the item that serves as the frontispiece for the 2020 Orphan Film Symposium -- If the Antarctic Ice Cap Should Melt? -- outtakes (Fox Movietone News, 1929).

Special recognition here for artist-curator Qin Dao and his presentation on the Guangzhou City cinematheque "On Kino." Here's a quintessential icon of orphan films in China, as seen on the Facebook page.

My gratitude to the Xiamen University team for the hospitality all week. They gave us access to the famous local cuisine, a tour of Gulang Island (UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site), and extraordinarily friendly attention to every detail.

Don't be surprised if there is another forum next year.

-- Dan Streible

p.s. Special thanks to XMU student, 华莱士 Young, my translator, problem-solver, and fellow basketball fan.

Also, it must be noted that the XMU student team of Alice, Shiyang, and Young all gave up what should have been their first day off to make sure I got through the emergency room process.

(Total out-of-pocket cost for emergency room visit, doctor's exam, lab tests, and medications: about $50 USD for this non-citizen.)

_______________________________________

* Rebecca Davis, “Xiamen Woos Film Industry, Becomes New Home of Golden Rooster Festival,” Variety, June 16, 2019.

Orphans - Radicals - NOW!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 06 Jun 2019 14:34:00 +0000

Gentle colleagues:

“At last the day has came!”

Official greetings from the OFS, NYU, and our host ÖFM.

If you have registered for the special edition of the NYU Orphan Film Symposium – RADICALS – at the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna, you already what needs be known about our schedule. But attached here is a plain-text version of the program, along with the PDF that Jurij Meden sent us previously.

At the entrance to the Filmmuseum, you and all visitors will find a paper version of the program sitting at the ticket counter. Starting at 3:00 pm today (Thursday, June 6), you can officially register by picking up your name badge (required to get you in to all the events).

Thursday evening consists of the 7:00 pm screening of restored Dutch experimental films from Eye Filmmuseum, followed by an 8:30 Orphans-Radicals reception in the lobby, and concluding at 9:30 pm with a very short screening and convivial introductions.

Friday and Saturday presentations begin at 9:30 am. (Doors open at 8:30 am; with coffee/croissant discount at the museum.) Lunches and coffee breaks catered for us.

Thanks to all of you who have come from far and near to be part of this special Orphans gathering. Looking forward to it all.

Truly,

Dan Streible
NYU Orphan Film Symposium

Jurij Meden,
Kurator, Austrian Film Museum

Michael Loebenstein
Director, Austrian Film Museum

Orphans | RADICALS | The Program

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 13 May 2019 01:54:00 +0000

Here's the official program. Registration is open to all.

Click here to join an international gathering of archivists, curators, scholars, artists, and others dedicated to saving, studying, and screening radically diverse types of neglected works.

RADICALS

a special edition of the NYU Orphan Film Symposium

at the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna, June 6-8, 2019

Thursday, June 6
15:00 to 21:00 Registration at Filmmuseum (Augustinerstraße 1)

19:00 Movements, a program in the film series “There are no rules!” Restored and Revisited Avant-Garde Films from the Netherlands.
Introduced by curator Simona Monizza (EYE Netherlands Film Museum)

20:30 Symposium reception party at Filmmuseum lobby and bar

21:30 Film Program 0
• A Few Drunkards at the Mars Bar (Masha Godovannaya, US, 2001, 1 min) Introduced by Masha Godovannaya as homage to Jonas Mekas.
• tx-reverse (Martin Reinhart & Virgil Widrich, Austria, 2018, 5 min) Introduced by Martin Reinhart and Virgil Widrich.

Friday, June 7
8:30 Registration opens at Filmmuseum (coffee & croissant discount offer)

9:30 Session 0: Welcome and opening remarks
Michael Loebenstein (Austrian Film Museum), Dan Streible (NYU Cinema Studies)
Why Radicals?

10:00 Session 1
Grazia Ingravalle (Brunel University London) British or Indian Colonial Film Heritage? Towards a Decolonization of Film Archiving and Curation
• Panorama of Calcutta, India, from the River Ganges (Warwick Trading Co., UK, 1899, 35mm, 2 min)
Kaveh Askari (Michigan State University) & Hadi Gharabaghi (New York University) MSU and National Iranian Radio and Television’s Iran Film Series: Ancient Iran: Part 2, 3000-800 BC (Margaret Mehring and Mohammad Ali Issari, US/Iran, 1977)

11:15 Coffee break

11:45 Session 2
Brian Meacham (Yale Film Study Center) & Josh Morton (filmmaker) Radical Theater: The Black Panthers, New Haven, and Puppet Show (Josh Morton, US, 1970, 16mm, 9 min)

Kimberly Tarr (NYU Libraries) Angela Davis Report (DDR, 1972, 16mm, 19 min) new preservation from the Communist Party of the United States of America Collection

13:00 Lunch break

14:00 Session 3
Thomas Christensen & Katrine Madsbjerg (Danish Film Institute) Unidentified International Socialists, or: How Uncle Sam Traveled from Vienna to Copenhagen: Onkel Sams Wienerrejse (Uncle Sam's Trip to Vienna, Austria, 1931)
---------------------
Enrique Fibla-Gutierrez (Filmoteca de Catalunya) & Pablo La Parra-Pérez (Elías Querejeta Film School) The Wretched of the Spanish Earth: Fragments from Spanish Radical Film Archives, 1930s-1970s
---------------------
David Landolf & Brigitte Paulowitz (Lichtspiel / Kinemathek Bern) Amateur Filmmaking for a Greater Cause: René Betge’s Propaganda for the Lebensreform Movement “die neue zeit,” 1929-1939

15:45 Coffee break

16:15 Session 4
Tania López Espinal (Cineteca Nacional México) “Viva Cristo Rey!”: Manuel Ramos, 9.5mm Films, and the Cristero War, 1926-1929
---------------------
José Miguel Palacios (Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Santiago) & Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto (San Francisco State University) Redefining Political Cinemas in Exile: Chilean Filmmakers After 1973
• Pinochet: asesino, fascista, traidor, agente del imperialismo (Sergio Castilla, Sweden, 1974, 16mm, 5 min) print courtesy of the Swedish Film Institute
• La femme au foyer (The Housewife; Valeria Sarmiento, France, 1976, 23 min) courtesy of Groupe de Recherches et d’Essais Cinématographiques
---------------------
Léa Morin (L'Atelier de l'Observatoire, Casablanca) An Unknown Moroccan Cinema: Mostafa Derkaoui’s Student Films in Poland, 1969-1971
• Ludzie z piwnicy (People from the Vault, 1969, excerpt)
• Gdzieś, pewnego dnia (A Day Somewhere, 1971, 35mm, 20 min)

18:00 Conference dinner at Al Caminetto da Mario (Krugerstraße 4)

20:00 Film Program 1 (open to public)
• The Black and the Green (St. Clair Bourne, US, 1983, 16mm, 45 min)
Presented by Judith Bourne & Jacob Perlin (Metrograph, NYC)

Saturday, June 8
8:30 Registration opens at Filmmuseum (coffee & croissant discount offer)

9:30 Session 5
Stefanie Zingl (Austrian Film Museum / Ludwig Boltzmann Institute) The Sensation of Color: Mroz short-lived 9.5mm Color Film
Testfilm (Josef Mroz, Austria, 1930, 2 min)
Farbenfilmversuche (Josip Sliškovič, Austria, 1931-32, 5 min)
---------------------
Giorgio Trumpy, Josephine Diecke, David Pfluger, & Barbara Flueckiger (University of Zurich) Reconsidering Rigid Procedures of Color Film Digitization: Case Studies in Toning, Lenticular Processes, Chromogenic Stocks, and Mroz-Farbenfilm
---------------------
Sandra Ladwig (University of Applied Arts Vienna) The Amateur’s Provocation of Perception: René Tajoburg’s Irrsinn rot weiss gelb (Frenzy in Red, White, Yellow; Austria, ca. 1970, 6 min)

10:45 Coffee break

11:15 Session 6
Rommy Albers, Simona Monizza (EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam) & Floris Paalmen (University of Amsterdam) Cineclub Amsterdam Freedom Films at the International Institute of Social History
---------------------
Mara Mattuschka & Hans Werner Poschauko (Maria Lassnig Foundation, Vienna) Maria Lassnig's Films in Progress: An Artist's Approach to Restoring Unfinished Works

13:00 Lunch

14:15 Session 7
Hieyoon Kim (University of Wisconsin-Madison) Toward a New Cinema: The Seoul Film Collective and Film Activism in the 1980s, excerpts from Pannori Arirang (1982) and Surise (South Korea, 1984)
---------------------
Eva Näripea (National Archives of Estonia / Estonian Academy of Arts) & Hardi Volmer (Nukufilm) Päratrust [Butt Trust] Heritage
• Kalkar (Estonia, USSR, 1980, 11 min) a punk satire of Tarkovsky’s Stalker
---------------------
Masha Godovannaya (Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna) Silent Horizon: Evgeny Yufit and Early Necrorealist Cinema
• Lesorub (Woodcutter, USSR, 1985, 35mm, 8 min)
• Vesna (Spring, USSR, 1987, 35mm, 10 min)

15:30 Coffee Break

16:00 Session 8
Joachim Schätz (University of Vienna) Avant-garde Mimicry
• Mit unbekanntem Ziel (Destination Unknown; Austrian Chamber of Commerce & Institute for the Promotion of Trade, Austria, 1963, 35mm, 23 min)
---------------------
Martin Reinhart (University of Applied Arts Vienna) The Data Loam Project: Challenging the Dystopia of the "Information Age"
---------------------
Tara Merenda Nelson (Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY) Radical Collaboration: Robert Frank in Rochester

17:00 Session 9: Open discussion about Radicals

18:00 Dinner break

20:00 Film Program 2 (open to public)
• Tsaar Muhha (Tsar of the Flies; Estonia, USSR, 1981, 3 min) Introduced by Eva Näripea.
---------------------
• Premiere screening of a 1930s nitrate iteration of Hans Richter’s Every Day (UK, 1929, 16 min) Introduced by Caroline Fournier (Cinémathèque Suisse).
---------------------
• About Us (Robert Frank & VSW students, US, 1972, 16mm, 38 min) Introduced by Tara Merenda Nelson.

21:30 Closing party at Filmmuseum lobby and bar

NB: All silent screenings will be accompanied by Filmmuseum’s resident pianist Elaine Loebenstein.

Registration is open to all. Click here for details.

Register for RADICALS: June 6-8, 2019

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 24 Feb 2019 07:07:00 +0000

Register now for RADICALS,
a special edition of the
NYU Orphan Film Symposium
at the Austrian Film Museum
in Vienna,
June 6-8, 2019.

Click here for registration information, with discount for early payment.

Thursday, June 6:
Symposium registration includes free admission to the 7:00 pm screening of Dutch experimental films curated by Simona Monizza (EYE Netherlands Film Museum).
An Örphans opening reception follows in the lobby and al fresco bar area (with drinks & nibbles) at das Österreichische Filmmuseum.

Here’s a first look at some of the presentations and screenings slated for RADICALS throughout Friday, June 7 & Saturday, June 8.

Kimberly Tarr (NYU Libraries) Angela Davis Report (DDR, 1972) Premiere of new 16mm preservation from the Communist Party of the United States of America Records at NYU Tamiment Library

Rommy Albers, Simona Monizza (EYE), & Floris Paalmen (U of Amsterdam) Cineclub Amsterdam Freedom Films at the International Institute for Society History

Mara Mattuschka & Hans Werner Poschauko (Maria Lassnig Foundation) Maria Lassnig's “Films in Progress”: An Artist's Approach to Restoring Unfinished Works

Grazia Ingravalle (Brunel U London) British or Indian Colonial Film Heritage? Towards a Decolonization of Film Archiving and Curation. Panorama of Calcutta, India, from the River Ganges (Warwick Trading Co., 1899) and excerpts from Around India with a Movie Camera (Sandhya Suri, 2018)

Masha Godovannaya (media artist, QFAAG Unwanted Organization) Necrorealism in the USSR: Films and Photos by Yevgeniy Yufit: Werewolf Orderlies (1984), Woodcutter (1985), Spring (1987), and Suicide Monsters (1988)

Caroline Fournier (Cinémathèque Suisse) Debut screening of a 1930s nitrate iteration of Hans Richter’s Every Day (1929)

Joachim Schätz (Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for History and Society) Avant-garde Mimicry: Mit unbekanntem Ziel [Destination Unknown] (Austrian Chamber of Commerce & Institute for the Promotion of Trade, 1963)

Virgil Widrich & Martin Reinhart (U für angewandte Kunst Wien) Time and Space Reversed on Screen: tx-mirror at Twenty (new productions)

Martin Reinhart (U für angewandte Kunst Wien) What Is the Data Loam Project?

José Miguel Palacios (U Alberto Hurtado, Chile) & Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto (San Francisco State U) Chilean Filmmakers in Exile after 1973: La femme au foyer (Valeria Sarmiento, France, 1976), La piedra crece donde cae la gota (Patricio Castilla, Cuba, 1977), Le soulier (Jorge Fajardo, Canada, 1980)

Eva Näripea (National Archives of Estonia) & Hardi Volmer (artist) Päratrust [Butt Trust] Estonian Punk Band films, 1979-1983: Kalkar (satire of Tarkovsky’s Stalker) and Tsar of the Flies

Brian Meacham (Yale Film Study Center) & Josh Morton (filmmaker) Radical Theater: The Black Panthers, New Haven, and Puppet Show (Josh Morton, 1970)

Tania López Espinal (Cineteca Nacional México) Viva Cristo Rey! Manuel Ramos, 9.5mm Films, and the Cristero War, 1926-1929

Thomas Christensen & Katrine Madsbjerg (Danish Film Institute) Unidentified International Socialists, or: How Uncle Sam Traveled from Vienna to Copenhagen. Debut of new preservation: Onkel Sams Wienerrejse (1931)

Léa Morin (L'Atelier de l'Observatoire, Casablanca) An Unknown Moroccan Cinema: Mostafa Derkaoui’s Student Films in Poland, 1969-71

Jacob Perlin (Metrograph NYC) Saint Clair Bourne’s documentary The Black and the Green (1983)

David Landolf & Brigitte Paulowitz (Lichtspiel / Kinemathek Bern) Amateur Filmmaking for a Greater Cause: René Betge’s Propaganda Films for the Lebensreform Movement „die neue zeit,“ 1929-1939

Enrique Fibla-Gutierrez (Filmoteca de Catalunya) & Pablo La Parra-Pérez (Elías Querejeta Film School, San Sebastian) The Wretched of the Spanish Earth: Fragments from Spanish Film Archives, 1930s-1970s

Kaveh Askari (MSU) & Hadi Gharabaghi (NYU) Michigan State University and National Iranian Radio and Television’s Iran Film Series: Ancient Iran: Part 2, 3000-800 BC (Margaret Mehring and Mohammad Ali Issari, 1977). New preservation from the University Archives

Hieyoon Kim (U of Wisconsin) The Seoul Film Collective and Activism in the 1980s (excerpts from 8mm films)

Tara Merenda Nelson (Visual Studies Workshop) Robert Frank at Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York: About Us (VSW, 1972)

Sandra Ladwig (U of Applied Arts Vienna) The Amateur’s Attention to the Inconspicuous: Irrsinn rot weiss gelb [Frenzy in Red, White, Yellow] (René Tajoburg, Super 8mm, ca. 1970)

Giorgio Trumpy, Josephine Diecke, David Pfluger, & Barbara Flueckiger (U of Zurich) Reconsidering Rigid Procedures of Color Film Digitization: Toning, Lenticular Processes, Chromogenic Stock, and Mroz-Farbenfilm

Stefanie Zingl (OFM) The Short Life of Mroz 9.5mm Color Amateur Film: Testfilm (Josef Mroz, 1930) and Farbenfilmversuche (Josip Sliskovic, 1931-32)

and others TBA . . .

Evening screenings curated by Jurij Meden & Michael Loebenstein (Austrian Film Museum) with Dan Streible (NYU Cinema Studies)

Screening Orphans at MoMA, MLK Day 2019

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 18 Jan 2019 23:10:00 +0000

Orphans at MoMA
Monday, Jan. 21, 2019 (MLK Day)
6:30 pm

Museum of Modern Art (11 West 5rd Street, NYC)
To Save and Project: 16th International Festival of Film Preservation

Beloved Community:
Rarities of African American and LGBTQ Cinema—and More

highlights from the Orphan Film Symposium on Love

Piano accompaniment by Ben Model

Three American Beauties (Edison, 1906) 35mm, 1’
MoMA’s restoration of an original hand-colored print; directed by Edwin S. Porter and Wallace McCutcheon.
Museum of Modern Art

Welcome by Josh Siegel (MoMA)
Intro by Dan Streible (NYU Cinema Studies, Orphan Film Symposium)

video greeting from Barbara Hammer
Sarah Keller (U Mass Boston) introduces three of Barbara Hammer's earliest Super 8 films. 3’ each.
Contribution to Light (1968), Aldebaran Sees (1969), and Death of a Marriage (1969)
Electronic Arts Intermix

Something Good—Negro Kiss (Selig Polyscope, 1898) 35mm, 1'
The film rediscovery of the year, from archivist Dino Everett (USC) and scholar Allyson Field (U of Chicago), who identifies this kiss between performers Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown as cinema’s earliest known depiction of black intimacy. The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2018.
University of Southern California Hefner Moving Image Archive

Lan Linh Nguyen Hoai  (NYU MIAP) introduces
Fee (Walther Barth, 1929) 8’
A charming, inventive, and intimate amateur film shot in Zschornewitz, Germany, in which Dr. Barth (an Agfa film engineer) and a companion pose for his 16mm camera amid a field of poppies near the world’s largest brown-coal-fired power station. One of 101 films in the Barth Collection, researched by Louisa Trott (University of Tennessee).
Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound

Juana Suárez (NYU MIAP) introduces
Leopold Godowsky Jr. home movies (1930s-40s) mosaic by Becca Bender, 4’
Becca Bender, while an NYU Moving Image Archiving and Preservation student, uncovered a cache of 150 reels of 16mm film in the Lincoln Center archive. She identified them as those of Leopold Godowsky Jr. (1900-1983), noted musician and co-inventor of the Kodachrome film process. With archivist Bonnie Marie Sauer, she reunited the collection with the estate. This mosaic shows Godowsky’s father (famed concert pianist) and wife Francis Gershwin (sister of George and Ira), as well as family friends Albert Einstein, Leon Trotsky, and Arturo Toscanini.
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts Archive

Bonnie Marie Sauer (Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts)
[Elsa & Albert Einstein at Warner Bros.- First National Studio] (1931) 3’
A lone reel of 35mm nitrate film among the Godowsky material at Lincoln Center, this never-released footage was scanned by the Library of Congress and repatriated to the Einstein Archives. (Thanks also to Cineric lab and to archivist Roni Grosz.)
Albert Einstein Archives, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Brianna Jones (NYU MIAP) Martin Luther King on Voting (WIS-TV, 1966) 35mm, 6’
           On May 9, 1966, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke in Kingstree, South Carolina, urging residents to “march on ballot boxes” in the upcoming election. Newsfilm outtakes from a Columbia television station, the 16mm original was preserved in 35mm by Monaco Film lab with audio restoration by Chace Audio for the Orphan Film Symposium.
University of South Carolina Moving Image Research Collections

Dan Streible introduces
Martin Luther King at Santa Rita [Peace Pickets, Original, fragment] (Leonard Henny, 1968) with Martin Luther King at Santa Rita (KPFA-FM, 1968) audio
For this screening only, a 16mm silent fragment from EYE is accompanied by non-synchronized audio recorded at the same place and time by KPFA radio. On January 14, 1968, Dr. King visited Joan Baez and others arrested for anti-war protests. He spoke to those keeping vigil outside. The film ends with David Harris (Baez's husband) meeting King for the first time; KPFA captured their informal conversation at the same moment.
EYE Netherlands Film Museum & Pacifica Radio Archives

Introduction by John Klacsmann and Ina Archer
A People’s Playhouse (American Negro Theatre, 1944) 16mm, 5’
            Ruby Dee is among those seen in this fundraising promotion for New York’s A.N.T. Jointly preserved by the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) and Anthology Film Archives from an AFA print.
Anthology Film Archives

Claire Fox (NYU MIAP) introduces
Behind Every Good Man . . . (Nikolai Ursin, 1967) 16mm, 9’
This rediscovered independent short is a pioneering portrait of the everyday life of an African-American trans woman. Restored by the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project with a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
UCLA Film & Television Archive

Introduction by Ina Archer (NMAAHC) DCP, 31’
* Elder Lightfoot Solomon Michaux and the Church of God (Willie P. Johnson, 1940s-1950s)
* Cab Calloway home movies (1930s-1950s)
* Ella Fitzgerald on the television show Kreisler Bandstand (ABC, 1951)
Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture

Three American Beauties (Edison, 1906) 1’
This new digital restoration of a complete print includes the surprise ending.
National Library of Norway

The Orphan Film Symposium is a production of the NYU Tisch School of the Arts Department of Cinema Studies. orphan.film

“Orphans of New York” at Film Forum

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 12 Oct 2018 16:20:00 +0000

Ephraim Horowitz in his amateur film, 1979 & What's Happening in Harlem? (CPUSA, 1949)

“Orphans of New York.” That's what Bruce Goldstein, Director of Repertory Programming at New York's influential* nonprofit indie moviehouse Film Forum, entitles our show of 22 entertaining but previously neglected films shot around the city from 1899 to 1979.

Join us on Sunday or Monday.

Tickets are available online at filmforum.org or at the box office.
Film Forum, 209 W. Houston St.
Sunday, Oct. 14, 3:10 pm
repeats Monday, Oct. 15, 7:00 pm

Introductions by Bruce Goldstein (Film Forum) & Dan Streible (NYU Cinema Studies) + special guests
Piano accompaniment for silent films by Steve Sterner

Library of Congress Paper Print Collection, new scans and other early cinema:
* Across Brooklyn Bridge (1899) American Mutoscope Co.
* New Brooklyn to New York Via Brooklyn Bridge no. 1 (1899) Edison Co.
* What Happened on Twenty-third Street, New York City (1901) Edison
* Panorama of Flatiron Building (1903) AM&B
* Opening Ceremonies, New York Subway, Oct. 27, 1904 (1904) Edison
* The Deceived Slumming Party (1908) Biograph
* Actors' Fund Field Day, at the Polo Grounds, New York City, August 19, 1910 (1910) Vitagraph Co. of America, with Bert Williams and Annie Oakley

Dawson City Collection newsreel fragments, Library and Archives Canada, selected by Bill Morrison (maker of the acclaimed Dawson City: Frozen Time.)
* The “Uplift” of the Horse (Universal Animated Weekly, 1917)
* Negroes’ Protest a Silent Parade (Universal Animated Weekly, 1917)
* Anarchists Bomb Wall Street (British Canadian Pathé, 1920)

* [Elsa and Albert Einstein at Warner Bros. – First National Studio 1931] a never-ever-released, charming-as-all-get-out document with the Einsteins enjoying a flying motor trip around the world. Becca Bender found the nitrate reel in a family collection long stored at the archive of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

* a new 35mm print of the storied NYC Street Scenes and Noises outtakes (1929) Fox Movietone News, University of South Carolina Moving Image Research Collections

* Broadway by Day (1932) Magic Carpet of Movietone, 16mm

* New York University (ca. 1952-65?) Willard Van Dyke, for the NYU Alumni Association, reel 3 of 3 of an otherwise lost film.

* The Making of Pelham One Two Three (1974) featurette narrated by NYPD detective-turned-actor Carmine Foresta. 16mm print from the Academy Film Archive.

Young Filmmakers Foundation, 16mm prints
* Black Faces (1970) Studio Museum, Harlem
* Life in New York (1969) Alfonso Pagan & Luis Vale
* Ellis Island (1975) Steve Siegel & Phil Buehler
Sunday intro by Elena Rossi-Snook (New York Public Library for the Performing Arts)

* What’s Happening in Harlem? (1949) Communist Party USA. A hard-hitting political short about the exploitation of and violence against African American and Puerto Rican residents of Harlem.

* Venus and Adonis (1935) Harry Dunham & J. V. D. Bucher's amateur surrealist film. Music by Paul Bowles.

* EPH 4/27/16 (1979) Ephraim Horowitz's masterful amateur film memoir.
Monday intro by Kimberly Tarr (NYU Libraries). (Read about its preservation in time for the centennial of Eph's birth.)

* Three American Beauties (1906) A stencil-colored Edison beauty with the complete original ending recently restored by the National Library of Norway.

SOURCES (It takes a village.)
Academy Film Archive
Albert Einstein Archives, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Craig Baldwin / Other Cinema Archives
estate of Ephraim Horowitz (via Fandor.com)
Library and Archives Canada (via Bill Morrison)
Library of Congress
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
Museum of Modern Art
National Library of Norway
New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
New York University Libraries
Prelinger Archives
Richard Scheckman
University of Iowa Libraries (via Andrew Sherburne, Tommy Haines, Saving Brinton)
University of South Carolina Moving Image Research Collections

Thanks to the film whisperers and NYU alumni of the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program whose research led to some of these discoveries: Becca Bender, Genevieve Havemeyer-King, and Blake McDowell.

* See Sara Aridi, "How Influential Is Film Forum? Christopher Nolan and Others Explain," New York Times, July 31, 2018,

Museo del Cine: Syncing Stephen Horne & "Galería Cinematográfica Infantil" (1927)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 10 May 2018 17:41:00 +0000

This delightful GIF became an emblem of the 2018 Orphan Film Symposium devoted to love.

Courtesy of @MuseoDelCineBA

It then became an Orphans 11 T-shirt.

Archivist Carolina Cappa introduces the film.

A happy marriage resulted from the April 14th screening at the 11th Orphan Film Symposium -- and the Museo del Cine has already debuted it online. Stephen Horne played musical accompaniment (accordion, piano, and glockenspiel) for the museum's restoration of the silent film Galería Cinematográfica Infantil (ca. 1927), introduced by Carolina Cappa. The Buenos Aires team has married that raw live New York recording, complete with audience laughter and applause, to the newly-restored 12-minute portrait of a hundred kids living in the town of General Pico, La Pampa, Argentina, all filmed by Domingo Filippini.

Enjoy it on a big screen!

Love ahead!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 09 Apr 2018 04:39:00 +0000

This just went out to everyone registered to attend the Orphan Film Symposium on Love.

Gentle colleagues:
A first greeting and informational note to everyone registered for the NYU Orphan Film Symposium at Museum of the Moving Image, April 11-14. An exciting week of Love ahead! The dates and times on the Orphans 11 booklet (attached) match what is published at NYU.edu/orphanfilm.

Enter MoMI at 36-01 35 Ave. (at 37 Street) in Astoria, Queens.

All symposium events are in the museum, with the exception of Thursday’s catered dinner (6pm at nearby Zenon Taverna). You will also get a separate email about visiting the new Kodak film lab, a short walk from the museum, on Wednesday before the symposium’s opening reception (7pm at MoMI). You can sign up to schedule your visit individually.

Registration: Pick up name badge & stuff at the Registration table (left of the lobby as you enter). Please wear your Orphans name badge to ease access to the events, including the meals. Register whenever you first arrive, regardless of the day or time.

Wednesday:
7:00 pm MoMI Reception (wine & hors d’oeuvres; thanks, Kodak!)
8:00 pm Opening screening (early Jim Henson, two never-seen films of Einstein, Girl Scouts in 1926, home movies from the inventor of Kodachrome!

Thursday, Friday, & Saturday: 9:30 am start time, with screenings at 8:00pm nightly. Dinner breaks 6pm. We cater dinner Thursday (Zenon) and Saturday (MoMI). Friday is “dinner on your own.” We’ll have a printed list of restaurants within walking distance to assure you have time to get back for the 8pm screening. The museum’s “Where to Eat in Astoria ” is here.
Coffee/tea will be available all day near the registration table, with light nosh before 9:30am. Catered lunches in the museum each day. (For other food and drinks on your own, the museum’s café is open all afternoon.)

Getting to MoMI: The nearest (and most reliable) subway stop is called STEINWAY, with the M & R trains stopping there (Steinway St. & 34th Avenue in Queens). The E train connects to M & R. Less than 5 minutes to walk from STEINWAY to the museum.
Less reliable but near MoMI is the BROADWAY station (Broadway & 31st Street, Queens) on the N & W trains. (The W stops there only on weekdays.) To verify service changes check The Weekender site.
Although car service can be expensive from Manhattan, it is quite affordable from other subway stations, such as Queensboro Plaza. Smart phone apps are generally reliable guides, even with recent subway changes. The MoMI Travel Directions are detailed for all modes and routes.

There is no central symposium hotel, although many of you are staying at The Paper Factory Hotel. Here's the Orphans guide to Hotels near Museum of the Moving Image.

See you soon!

Dan Streible
NYU Orphan Film Symposium director (917) 754-1401

Lichtspiel • Ernst • 17.5

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 04 Apr 2018 05:46:00 +0000

When Brigitte Paulowitz of Lichtspiel / Kinemathek (Bern, Switzerland) films from the Richard Ernst Collection of 17.5mm and 35mm Family Films, 1914-1932, we'll see thirty minutes of sophisticated home movies. And one show-at-home film the grandfather bought, a French travelogue of the Philippines.

She tells us that the English translation of the intertitles in Aux îles Philippines (Pathé, 1914) are:

T1:The ferryman
T2: Banks of the river Pasig
T3: Return from the market
T4: Hemp being the principal industry in the Philippines, the ropemakers are numerous
T5: Laundry
T6: Bathing children

Although we won't get to take advantage of the meticulously produced High Frame Rate DCP the Kinemathek has produced, we'll see some handsome scans of these unique films, re-creating what a home movie program might've looked like in the Ernst home three generations ago.

Honeymoon trip to the Soviet Union in 1932, as well as a purchased reel (ca. 1921) that has a shot of Trotsky!

Leningrad 1932

Honoring Mrs. Alice B. Russell Micheaux, April 11, in Rye, New York

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 04 Apr 2018 04:40:00 +0000

The Orphan Film Symposium begins Wednesday evening, April 11. During that same morning Terri Francis and Lina Accurso have organized this significant event in nearby Rye, New York. They will also talk about the Alice B. Russell Micheaux project on Saturday, April 14, 9:30am, as part of the Orphan Film Symposium at Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, NYC. They will be joined by film historian Charlene Regester of the University of North Carolina.

Terri shares the news below and invites you to this special event.

Honoring Mrs. Alice B. Russell Micheaux
from the website of Indiana University Black Film Center / Archive

Through the efforts of BFC/A director Terri Francis, independent silent film historian Lina Accurso, and a generous community of individual donors, arrangements are in place to set a memorial headstone at the unmarked grave of Mrs. Alice B. Russell Micheaux in 2018.

Mrs. Micheaux was a pioneering film actress and film producer, as well as the second wife of renowned African American filmmaker, Oscar Micheaux. Alice Micheaux performed in The Broken Violin (1927), and in Oscar’s films including Murder in Harlem (1935), God’s Step Children (1938) and The Betrayal (1948). She collaborated with her husband as script supervisor and casting associate on Lying Lips (1939) and miscellaneous crew on Swing! (1938), Murder in Harlem (1935), Ten Minutes to Live (1932) and The Girl from Chicago (1932).

Mrs. Micheaux spent her final years as a ward of the state suffering from dementia, and was buried in 1985 in an unmarked pauper’s grave at the Greenwood Union Cemetery in Rye, New York.

On April 11, 2018, at 11:00 am, we invite you to gather at the site in Greenwood Union Cemetery, Rye, NY, for a meaningful remembrance of Mrs. Micheaux’s life and her vital contributions to early African American cinema as a producer, actress, script supervisor, and spouse to Oscar Micheaux. We plan to honor Mrs. Micheaux with a floral arrangement, music from Jasmine Muhammad, and a blessing from Rev. Martha Cruz, a member of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, local to Rye. Please join us and share the event information linked here.

Due to the long New York winter, we unfortunately will not be able to pour the foundation for the rose quartz marker on this occasion, but it will be in place by the anniversary of Mrs. Micheaux’s birth on June 30.

About BFC/A
The Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana University was established in 1981 as the first archival repository dedicated to collecting, preserving, and making available historically and culturally significant films by and about black people. The BFC/A's primary objectives are to promote scholarship on black film and to serve as an open resource for scholars, researchers, students, and the general public; to encourage creative film activity by independent black filmmakers; and to undertake and support research on the history, impact, theory, and aesthetics of black film traditions.

Symposium info at www.nyu.edu/orphanfilm.

Leaders in the Amateur Cinema League of Nations

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 26 Mar 2018 22:37:00 +0000

Notes by Dan Streible

As we are about to celebrate and screen amateur films from around the world at the Orphan Film Symposium on Love, today Thomas Novotney of Novo Digital Media posted this found compilation of leaders made by the Amateur Cinema League during its run (1926-1954).

And here's a piece I wrote in 2014, inspired by all the ACL leaders appearing on my radar at the time the Museum of Modern Art host an Orphan Film screening we called "An Amateur Cinema League of Nations" A session of the same title appears, with all new content, at the 11th Orphan Film Symposium. A true league of nations with films from Mexico, Estonia, German, and (presented by a Canadian) Czechoslovakia.

Thursday, April 12, 2018
11:20 – 1:15 pm An Amateur League of Nations

Charles Tepperman (U of Calgary) Příběh vojáka (A Soldier’s Story; Čeněk Zahradníček & Vladimír Šmejkal, 1934) and the 1938 International Amateur Movie Show

Alexander Stark (Philipps U, Marburg) “Help us help!”: German Postwar Charity Films by Elisabeth Wilms. Schaffende in Not (Working People in Trouble, 1948)

Eva Näripea (National Archives of Estonia) Forbidden[?] Love Behind the Iron Curtain: Peeter Tooming’s Sentimentaalne novell (A Sentimental Short Story, 1966)

Tzutzumatzin Soto (Cineteca Nacional México) Love at the (Permanent) Time of Political Repression in Mexico: Hare Krishna (Alfredo Gurrola, 1973)

Full symposium schedule and registration information at NYU.edu/OrphanFilm.

Orphans at MoMI, 2012 / 2018

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 25 Mar 2018 20:37:00 +0000

Looking Back: Orphans 8
Made to Persuade (2012)

Notes by Frannie Trempe

In anticipation of the 11th Orphan Film Symposium to be held at Museum of the Moving Image, this post looks back at the last time the biennial event took place at the venue in Queens, New York.

Six years ago, the museum served as home for Orphans 8. As with all iterations of the symposium, Orphans 8 showcased a wide array of rediscovered and once-neglected archival treasures—presented both on celluloid and digital projection. Academics, archivists, students, filmmakers, and other moving image enthusiasts from around the world gathered for four days of screenings, presentations, discussions, and meals—all spent together to foster the unique Orphans ethos regular attendees have come to expect and cherish.

In keeping with the United States presidential election of 2012, the symposium’s theme of “Made to Persuade” set the week’s tone, with a rich four-day program featuring campaign films, propaganda pieces, activism-driven works, and several creative applications of the notion of persuasion. While the election served as an appropriate backdrop for the theme, many Orphans 8 screenings were international in scope. Highlights included Cine Móvil (1976), documentation of an effort to bring films to remote areas throughout Mexico in a fully-equipped RV from Mexico’s Cineteca Nacional, as well as the advertising films of Dutch animator Joop Geesink, presented by Leenke Ripmeester (EYE Filmmuseum) and Julia Noordegraaf (University of Amsterdam).

For the symposium, Colorlab sponsored preservation for the Mexican film, which appeared on the Orphans 8 DVD, and which Cineteca Nacional added to its YouTube channel in 2016.

In another rare screening, five newly-preserved films by groundbreaking computer artist Lillian Schwartz were shown in 16mm at Orphans 8. Schwartz herself attended and spoke in conversation with NYU-MIAP alumnus Walter Forsberg, as part of a program on films made at AT&T/Bell Labs during the 1970s. Forsberg also spoke about computer animation pioneers of the 1960s. (For 2018, collector John Froats continues the conversation about computer-rendered 16mm films from Bell Labs and shares a found fragment of A. Michael Noll’s Patterns from 1964-65).

The Museum of the Moving Image expanded and renovated its space in Astoria only a year prior to Orphans 8, creating an additional layer of excitement for the 2012 event. In the six years since, MoMI has only further cemented its reputation as a powerhouse within the crowded New York City film landscape, both through its exhibitions and year-round curated screenings.

Independent filmmakers Jo Dery and Jeanne Liotta were honored with the Helen Hill Award, honoring the legacy of the New Orleans-based filmmaker and animator. Liotta and Dery each contributed a T-shirt design for the symposium drawn from their work.

Since 2012, Dery has continued to create inventive multimedia installations and comics, including a piece titled Still and Still Moving exhibited by Mono No Aware’s at their gallery space in Brooklyn. Liotta has created experimental shorts on both 35mm and 16mm since 2012, as well as multiple newspaper collages, installations, and one projection project about climate change commissioned for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Science on a Sphere platform. This year’s Helen Hill Award recipient continues the tradition of experimental film at the symposium; Nazlı Dinçel will be honored and a selection of her 16mm works screened.

This year’s symposium will see some presenters returning from 2012, including Jacqueline Stewart, Allyson Nadia Field, and Danielle Ash, as well as panels moderated by former Orphans presenters including Jeanne Liotta, Dwight Swanson, and Charles Musser. Just as “Made to Persuade” did six years ago, Orphans 11 will feature a presentation from Museum of the Moving Image curator Barbara Miller, who will showcase a MoMI collection of vintage posters for X-rated movies.

If the success of Orphans 8 (and the numerous Orphans-branded events since 2012) is any indication, the symposium’s return to Museum of the Moving Image from April 11-14 promises to be unmissable. The 2018 theme of “Love” is a fitting follow-up for the Orphan Film Symposium’s return to New York City --- after all, love and persuasion have more in common than not!

Audio recordings of many of the talks given in 2012 can be downloaded from the Orphans 8 website or the Internet Archive's Orphan Film Symposium Collection.

Full program listing and registration information for the 2018 symposium are here.

To request copies of the Orphans 2012 DVD, Made to Persuade, write to orphanfilmsymposium[@]Gmail.com. The DVD booklet is downloadable here.

Exploratorium • Symposium • Laserium

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 18 Mar 2018 02:00:00 +0000

Notes by Caroline Z. Oliveira

Frame from Laserimage (c) Laser Images, Inc., 1972.

The little-known film experiment Laserimage (Ivan Dryer, 1971-72) is part of the session called Technophilia at the 11th Orphan Film Symposium. On April 13, Kathleen Maguire introduces the premiere screening of a new 16mm print, preserved by Bill Brand (BB Optics) and his students in NYU MIAP’s Film Preservation class. Coordinator of the Cinema Arts Program at The Exploratorium in San Francisco, Maguire (also a MIAP grad, ’08) brought attention to the film’s preservation needs.

Ivan Dryer was the originator of commercial laser light shows in 1973, but he had also been an aspiring filmmaker. In the early 1970s, Dryer partnered with Dr. Elsa Garmire, a California Institute of Technology physicist, to create an hour-long show for the Griffith Observatory Planetarium in Los Angeles. As a pitch, Dryer shot Laserimage, an 11-minute 16mm film that attempted to capture the beauty and fluidity of laser lights. Shooting against a black background, he filmed colorful laser lights and synchronized their movement to instrumental music.

The film’s conception allowed Dryer to develop Laserium (“house of the laser”), the first laser display to be featured in planetariums. The show ended up becoming what the Laserium company’s website describes as “the longest-running theatrical attraction in Los Angeles,” remaining part of the Griffith’s attractions until 2001. Laserium shows traveled to cities internationally and has been referenced in Hollywood movies, television shows, comic books, and music videos. In “LASERIUM In Popular Culture,” Dryer wrote that Laserium made its mark by appearing in:

TV shows from Mork and Mindy to The Simpsons and Two and a Half Men; in movies from Starman to Star Trek and Disclosure; in music videos for Madonna, Herbie Hancock and Def Leppard, among many others; in magazines such as People and National Geographic World. . . . And Laserium is a frequent metaphor for spectacle in reviews of everything from a Kenny Chesney concert to Tron: Legacy. It even shows up in a song by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

In 2017, NYU MIAP student Melanie Miller drafted what became a successful proposal to the National Film Preservation Foundation, leading to a $3,380 NFPF grant to preserve Laserimage as a 16mm film. One print will be archived at the NYU Film Study Center, and another at the Exploratorium, where the preservation elements will also be stored.

Laserimage, the film experiment, had limited circulation, but it helped launch a new art form and the visual-musical spectacle that revolutionized planetarium attractions in the 1970s. •

Fun Fact: In the Marvel comic book The Amazing Spider-Man, issue 165 (1977), Peter Parker and Mary Jane discuss their relationship during a Laserium performance at the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium in New York. “The Laserium is about to begin,” he says. Followed by this panel:

Photograph from Kathleen Maguire.

The 2 rolls of 16mm film -- the master printing negative and a positive optical soundtrack -- that went to BB Optics for preservation. Maguire's Exploratorium colleague Ron Hipschman got them from Pyramid Media, a distributor deaccessioning the elements. For the completist: the NFPF grant to NYU Cinema Studies - MIAP Program was used to create a 16mm interpositive, internegative, negative optical soundtrack, answer print, and release print.

Registration and full program listing for the 11th Orphan Film Symposium.

the Orphan Film Symposium

Orphans 2022: Counter-Archives

Orphans Online 2020

Orphans 2020: See 68mm films at 8K

Program preview. Orphans at Eye, May 23-27, 2020

Note: Wednesday, May 27,Eye invites conference/symposium attendees to special activities at the Eye Collection Centre.

Helen Hill Awards 2020: Martha Colburn and Jaap Pieters

Remembering the first Orphans of the Storm at 20.

Climate strikes back.

Call for Proposals: the 2020 Orphan Film Symposium, in Amsterdam

OFS email list for news and updates

Around the World with H. T. C.

Cowling's Roof of the World

Daguerreotype of Earth's moon (1840)

Orphans in China -- - “影展与城市” 国际论坛

Orphans - Radicals - NOW!

Orphans | RADICALS | The Program

Register for RADICALS: June 6-8, 2019

Screening Orphans at MoMA, MLK Day 2019

“Orphans of New York” at Film Forum

Museo del Cine: Syncing Stephen Horne & "Galería Cinematográfica Infantil" (1927)

Enjoy it on a big screen!

Love ahead!

Lichtspiel • Ernst • 17.5

Honoring Mrs. Alice B. Russell Micheaux, April 11, in Rye, New York

Leaders in the Amateur Cinema League of Nations

Orphans at MoMI, 2012 / 2018

Exploratorium • Symposium • Laserium

Note: Wednesday, May 27,Eye invites conference/symposium attendees
to special activities at the Eye Collection Centre.