Twenty – Orphan Film Symposium

Orphans at Twenty
Dan Streible

Orphans 2020 is nigh (and its call for proposals now open).

At the moment, however, 20 also reminds me that September 2019 marks the 20th anniversary of the Orphan Film Symposium. The milestone prompts me to recall the experience of the first event now often called simply “Orphans.” Some veterans of the 1999 gathering recently sent thoughts about it.

September 22 through 25, 1999, the University of South Carolina in Columbia hosted a high-spirited group of symposiasts and attendees for a one-time only event we called Orphans of the Storm: Saving ‘Orphan Films’ in the Digital Age. The screenings, talks, music, food, drinks, and unexpected encounters – for alchemical reasons we could not have planned – made for a memorable experience. In the midst of shared fatigue, lots of good feeling emerged. (See “Saving Orphan Films, a South Carolina Symposium,” International Documentary, December 1999.)

logo ^{The original web graphic from 1999.}

Afterward, I was surprised but thrilled to hear from many participants that this combination of festival and conference, with its admixture of scholars, archivists, filmmakers, preservationists, curators, collectors, students, and self-selected independents, was something special. And it needed to be repeated, they wrote.

For some it was their first trip to South Carolina. The novelty of a place away from the usual cultural capitals attracted them. Why was such a gathering being held here? Others knew of the large, nitrate-rich film archive at the university, with its cornerstone Fox Movietone News Collection of 11 million feet of film. For them the location made sense.

That resource led USC Libraries to fund a one-off film preservation conference. The dean, George Terry, hired a professor of communications, Augie Grant, to organize an event to highlight the collections and bring experts in film preservation to campus. When the organizer left the university for Silicon Valley, he asked if I wanted to take it on. I had only been at USC for a year. Professor Ina Rae Hark was building a new Film Studies Program. I’d done research in archives but had no experience in preservation. But I said yes, provided I could take Don Crafton’s advice and attend the 1998 conference of the Association of Moving Image Archivists. At that AMIA gathering (Miami Beach!) nearly everyone I asked to come for a convocation on orphan films said yes.

USC’s veteran Newsfilm Library archivist Andrew Murdoch tutored me on what was in the collection. He said that the term “orphan film” had recently come into archival vernacular to refer collectively to the neglected categories that were not commercial features. In particular, newsreel outtakes, silent films, and early synch-sound recordings were gems of the collection and the (mostly) unpreserved pieces of nitrate one might consider at-risk. (They were not copyright orphans, since the university owns the copyright to most all of these. Nearly unimaginable now that a Hollywood studio would give away a huge portion of its intellectual property, but that’s what Twentieth Century Fox gifted to the university in 1980.)

The air of anticipation about the 1999 symposium was aided by the Library of Congress, which allowed Columbia to be the South Carolina stop on its National Film Preservation Tour. It loaned prints and personnel so we could screen archival prints of works on the National Film Registry at the university, as well as Columbia Museum of Art, the Nickelodeon Theater, and the South Carolina State Museum. Robert Gardner came from Harvard with his 1963 ethnographic classic Dead Birds, which our USC colleague Karl Heider helped shoot. The Queen of the Gullah Geechee Nation, Marquetta Goodwine, narrated the LOC silent footage of Zora Neale Hurston’s Commandment Keeper Church, Beaufort, South Carolina (1940). The National Archives newsfilm specialist Bill Murphy introduced John Huston’s San Pietro and LOC’s Mike Mashon introed Dr. Strangelove. Karen Ishizuka premiered the newly-preserved 8mm amateur films shot inside the Topaz internment camp during WWII. All of this before the symposium itself even began.

To be sure, another factor in making Orphans of the Storm memorable was the difficulty we experienced in film projection at the university’s Russell House (student union) theater. Long story there. Suffice it to say subsequent gatherings were rescued by the generous genius of film projection expert James Bond of Chicago, who brought the equipment and expertise we needed to show a variety of film formats. Let it also be recalled that in the late twentieth century we were also projecting VHS videotapes and QuickTime 1.0 files on the big screen, showing new “state of the art” interactive CD-ROMs and old-school overhead transparencies, and recording the talks on audiocassette tapes. So in 1999 the technical delays were with us throughout. Fortunately, the audience was made up of people who knew what the challenges were and who took the delay times to extend productive conversations and to simply get to know one other. Perhaps because we fed them well throughout, they forgave the technical shortcomings.

More important, the content of what we were seeing held our rapt attention. The eclectic mix of experimental, silent, theatrical, documentary, amateur, civic, local, and other orphan films – plus video and television programs – kept us guessing about what would come next. Rick Prelinger and Joe Lauro presented curated programs of Oklahoma hospital films and 1920s musical rarities. Many of the week’s films I had not seen myself. (Full line-up here.)

Many of the presenters had sent proposals to our open call, but to be sure we were able to attract attendees to Columbia because the USC Thomas Cooper Library used a National Science Foundation grant to fund invited speakers. These included newsreel experts (Raymond Fielding, Bill Murphy); curators from the Museum of Modern Art, UCLA, Whitney Museum of American Art; senior and emerging scholars involved with archives and preservation (Yuri Tsivian, Don Crafton, Eric Schaefer, Jacqueline Stewart, Charles Musser, archivist Jon Gartenberg, and others); and, crucially, filmmakers working with archival and found footage (Alan Berliner, Carolyn Faber, Peter Forgacs, Bill Morrison). Also, the presence of Nico de Klerk representing the Netherlands Filmmuseum added an exciting international dimension.

Nico’s email this week captures the spirit of what happened at Orphans of the Storm. “It was the beginning of a long tradition. . . of postponing my presentation,” he aptly writes. The technical problems of 1999 became nearly comical, but Nico rolled with the punches. An hour by hour delay turned into a whole day of rescheduling his 35mm program. Conditions improved with subsequent USC symposia in 2001, 2002, 2004, and 2006. He presented at each, but somehow we kept having glitches that affected his presentations. “You got it down pat at Orphans 5, just before moving to New York,” Nico says.

Don Crafton, then at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, says of 1999: “I do recall that Columbia was hot and muggy, but a fine welcoming city. Also, there was some problem projecting our ‘restored’ print of The Two Orphans (Selig, 1911), but I think it turned out all right in the end. There were also some strange movies in a hotel room…but it was late.”

And that was Skip Elsheimer, along with dear oddball Stephen Parr, two of the orphan film collectors par excellence. I met young Skip for the first time at the after-party. He introduced himself as a ‘zine maker and 16mm educational film collector from Raleigh, North Carolina. I’d taken a snapshot of this T-shirt wearing person with a bowl haircut sitting with senior film historian and “nitrate won’t wait” advocate Raymond Fielding at the Columbia Museum of Art dinner reception. It struck me as an ideal, bringing together different voices, tastes, practices, and generations with a common zeal for saving orphaned films. I wasn’t present for the spontaneous, late-night, small-gauge screenings that took place in Skip’s Clarion Hotel room during Orphans ’99, but Don helped spread the legend. That renegade spirit and a preference for projecting films over sleeping were other aspects of the event that made future gatherings possible.

After this unlikely but indelible launch it took a village to keep it going. Yes, there were letters of support (and funding) from many to repeat an Orphan Film Symposium. However, the USC colleagues /lifelong friends made it possible. In addition to those mentioned above, three fellow faithfuls have been part of the enterprise from the beginning: co-founders film scholar Susan Courtney, media artist Laura Kissel, and music historian Julie Hubbert, each still involved twenty years on.

Julie writes:
I can’t believe its been 20 years. Because I remember this like it was yesterday: I was a new faculty member, first year, and I happened to mention to a colleague that I was starting to write about film music, and he said “So are you involved in that film thing happening at the Russell House Auditorium this weekend?” And I said, “What film thing?” I immediately walked over to the Russell House, and when I told the young faculty member who greeted me at the door that I was a colleague interested in film music, he smiled, gestured arms wide open and said, “Welcome! We need you!” That was Dan Streible and the “film thing” was Orphans of the Storm. And that’s how I found my film family of Dan, Susan and Laura.
My funniest Orphan-related memory is this: I was at a one of my kids’ swim events just a few years ago, chatting with a mom that I had known for many years, and she tentatively asked if my children were adopted. When I said no and asked why she thought that, she said “well, because you are always wearing these t-shirts that say ‘Orphans’ on them. I thought you worked with orphan children.” Nope. Just orphan film. 🙂
Can’t wait to get a new t-shirt this year!

Susan writes:
My earliest Orphans memories are by now fragmented and uneven, and punctuated by a range of feelings: uncertainty, confusion, the anxiety of threatened chaos and the excitement of possibility and discovery. We knew, and were continually reminded, that we did not know what we were doing. It quickly became obvious, for example, that we were ill-equipped for the complexities of projecting archival film. There wasn’t even a way for us to communicate with the projectionists, so Dan and I took turns running up and down the staircase to the booth, constantly. As a result, I think I missed as much footage in the early days as I saw. And yet I also remember having my eyes and my mind blown wide open. The things we saw and heard changed forever how I understood “film,” and all we might do with it, and my own work as a scholar and teacher.
I also remember “discovering” Dan Streible in those earliest iterations of the symposium. We had both arrived in Columbia in 1997, and were friendly from the start. But while others of us were loud, he was quiet and had been largely floating under the radar. Then at one point during one of the earliest Orphans, as I sat in the audience and watched him at the podium, I remember suddenly seeing him as never before: gregarious, effusive, the most natural, learned, and beloved Master of Ceremonies. It was the Dan Streible all Orphanistas now know and love, but I distinctly remember him emerging for the first time at Orphans. That night I went home and told my husband “You will never believe who Dan Streible is . . . . ”

Last week an incidental Orphans reunion in Columbia reminded us not only of the origin story but also of the ways in which the people involved continue to intersect. The Nickelodeon Theatre and the USC Moving Image Research Collections, now directed by archivist Lydia Pappas, hosted the cine-poet of orphan films, Bill Morrison. They showed his feature-length film The Great Flood (2013). Like his landmark Decasia (2002), this meditation on the 1927 Mississippi River flood sources the majority of its footage from the University of South Carolina archive. Fox Movietone News curator Greg Wilsbacher spoke and former MIRC directors Heather Heckman and Mark Cooper were also in the house. A special night, in the fabulous ‘Nick,’ the Columbia Film Society’s home in a renovated Main Street movie theater.

Orphans at Twenty: “What an empire,” writes Greg Lukow. Though the word gives me pause, it’s true that something sometimes called an “orphan film movement” has grown in ways we never imagined in the twentieth century. Now chief of the LOC Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division, Greg was a keynote speaker from UCLA at Orphans ’99 (see “The Rise and Impact of the ‘Orphan Film’ Metaphor on Contemporary Preservation Practice”) and opened the doors of the Library’s Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation to Orphans X in 2016.

As Don Crafton puts it: “Kudos. Keep the hits coming!”

Indeed we will.

The 2020 symposium is a collaboration of NYU Cinema Studies and Eye Filmmuseum, with the interlaced themes Water, Climate, & Migration. Appropriately, the frontispiece film for this edition comes from the USC Fox Movietone Collection. Its curator Greg Wilsbacher provided this frame from If the Antarctic Ice Cap Should Melt? – outtakes (1929).

Frame from a nitrate print.