Next week watch this space for the official Call for Proposals for the 12th Orphan Film Symposium, May 23-27, 2020, which returns to Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. Orphans 2020 is also the 6th annual Eye International Conference. The co-branded symposium will be dedicated to Water, Climate, and Migration. (More on that in the next post.)
The 2020 event will be in the long-running international biennial format, with four nights and three full days of screenings and presentations showcasing dozens of rediscovered orphan films from throughout the history of cinema. Mark your calendars to join archivists, scholars, curators, artists, preservationists, restorers, collectors, students, and researchers from around the world. Enjoy symposium fare in the landmark museum on Amsterdam’s waterfront.
The April 2018 Orphan Film Symposium at Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, was devoted to the big theme of Love. You can see photos and read about many of the films in blog postings here, or in Liz Czach’s “Love” report in the fall 2018 issue of Film Quarterly. The closing session was notable for several reasons, not the least being the surprise finale with filmmakers Todd Haynes and Cynthia Schneider doing a star turn. Other surprise announcements: Stephanie Sapienza revealed the 2019 Bastard Film Encounter’s Baltimore edition. (A success.) Michael Loebenstein of the Austrian Film Museum announced an “off-year” edition of Orphans in Vienna. Our symposium – Radicals, June 7-8, 2019 – screened short films from 16 countries, with speakers traveling from Chile, Mexico, Estonia, Morocco, Switzerland, Denmark, Spain, Russia, England, the Netherlands, as well Austria and the United States.
In October 2018, a new partnership began with New York’s venerable Film Forum. Repertory programmer Bruce Goldstein invited a semi-annual screening of “Orphans of New York.” Featuring shorts shot in the city, the two-hour show sold out twice. A second slate, “More Orphans of New York,” screened May 18-19, 2019. New MIAP graduate Annie Schweikert joined us in programming works introduced by wunderkind collector Shane Fleming, Smithsonian archivist Ina Archer, NYU Cinema Studies scholar Tanya Goldman, filmmaker Eduardo Darino, and keeper-of-films-and-photos Mary Engel.
Also in 2019, the Museum of Modern Art’s annual To Save and Project Festival of Film Preservation again hosted an Orphan Film program, this time on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Curator Josh Siegel suggested a program apropos the holiday. You can read about the screening we called “Beloved Community: Rarities of African American and LGBTQ Cinema—and More,” which I assembled and presented with MoMA’s Katie Trainor and students from the NYU MIAP Program.
Presaging 2020, Eye Filmmuseum material was part of the 2019 programs. On King Day at MoMA we got a sneak preview of a special find: documentary footage shot by Leonard Henny of Martin Luther King at Santa Rita [Peace Pickets, fragment] (1968). In Vienna, Eye curators Simona Monizza and Rommy Albers introduced a new project preserving the collection of Cineclub Vrijheidsfilm. Such rich material is of course bountiful in Eye Collections, another reason we look forward to the May 2020 Orphans in Amsterdam. On May 27, attendees of the International Conference can spend the day exploring the Eye Collection Centre.
Our announcement about Water, Climate, and Migration is expanded in the next post. While we’re here, this short sample from Eye Collections suggests why curator Giovanna Fossati said water would be our theme: “Because Amsterdam.”
Filmed in 1899 by Emile Lauste for Nederlandsche Biograaf-en Mutoscope. Across the IJ harbor from the Filmmuseum today lie these famous canals. The boat sails Prinsengracht from the Bloemgracht “under the bridge on the Leliegracht. . . In the distance, near the Haarlemmerdijk and the railway bridge of the Amsterdam-Haarlem line, we can see the sluices.”
Prinsengracht (1899)
P.S.
I thought I’d seen nearly all of the boxing films of early cinema, but the Eye YouTube channel reveals this 17 seconds of mutoscopy from Victorian England.
Has He Hit Me?
(British Mutoscope and Biograph, 1898)