Opening frames from Among Poles Living in France (1938) & Polish Settlement in Brazil (1936). Filmoteka Narodowa.
Meanwhile, Prof. Ingravalle has just published her report on “Radicals,” the 2019 Orphan Film Symposium at the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna. Read it on the blog of Domitor, the International Society for the Study of Early Cinema. “As a transnational scholar,” she writes, “orphaned like many of a clear sense of affiliation, it was a pleasure to feel part of this community and take part in what I like to imagine as an Orphans International.”
With her talk “Towards a Decolonization of Film Archiving and Curation” at the 2019 symposium, she touched on issues that also resonate with the 2020 themes. The short film screened with that presentation — Panorama of Calcutta, India, from the River Ganges (1899) preserved at the BFI National Archive — could just as readily be a touchstone for this year’s symposium on Water, Climate, and Migration. As the BFI and she note, this actuality sold by Britain’s Warwick Trading Company in fact shows the city of Varanasi (some 675 kilometers up the Ganges from Kolkata). Although the title is a symptomatic colonialist misidentification, the film itself remains cinematically powerful.
It also evocatively opens the 2018 documentary by Sandhya Suri, distributed in North America by Icarus Films.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcEAEOdw0M4&t=4s
Commissioned for the UK-India Year of Culture in 2017, its footage comes entirely from the BFI National Archive collection.
The BFI’s India on Film project now includes 109 videos derived from the archive.
Registration for the May 23-26, 2020, Eye International Conference / NYU Orphan Film Symposium in Amsterdam is open to all.
Register now to save a seat at the [catered] table and in Eye’s Cinema 1.