For our class on Curating Moving Images, undergraduate student and filmmaker Linh Vu created a sixty-second video trailer heralding the 2020 Orphan Film Symposium on Water, Climate, and Migration. As an experimental small-gauge filmmaker, she was inspired by the rhythm of Jane and Stan Brakhage’s noted 1959 birthing film. She has written about Sergei Eisenstein’s conception of montage as “an idea that arises from the collision of independent shots.” (See her essay “Window Water Baby Moving and the Power of Montage,” on her site linhvufilm.com, December 23, 2019.)
Here’s Linh Vu’s collage, made from of a dozen pieces — archival and “found” footage, samplings from experimental cinema, orphan films, and a bit of her own original cameraless animation work — set to a bed of sound effects and Vivaldi’s “Winter.”
Because, of course, the in-person Orphan Film Symposium of May 23-27, 2020, is canceled due to the pandemic you might have heard about, we at NYU are organizing an online version of the Water, Climate, Migration program. For now, we are glad to have this trailer to spark us.
In our sister program at the University of Amsterdam, students studying with Giovanna Fossati have also been making “Orphans trailers” in anticipation of Eye Filmmuseum hosting NYU’s Orphan Film Symposium in late May. Like our UvA colleagues, Linh documented her audiovisual sources.
- Mujer, tú eres la belleza! (C. Z. Soprani, 1928) de Sofia Elizalde
- Window Water Baby Moving (Stan Brakhage, 1959)
- Eaux D’Artifice (Kenneth Anger, 1953) Library of Congress
- [Einstein at Warners] (1931) Library of Congress
- Sources of Air Pollution (1962) National Library of Medicine
- If the Antarctic Ice Cap Should Melt? — outtakes (Fox Movietone News, 1929) USC MIRC
- India on Film: 1899-1947 (trailer, 2017), including Delhi, The Great Capital of India (Pathé, 1909) BFI National Archive
- The Adventures of Junior Rain Drop (1948) Library of Congress
- Lost Jungle (with Clyde Beatty, 1934) archive.org
- Men of the Forest (ca. 1950) USIS
- Movies at War (1943) NARA (thanks Tanya Goldman)
- Hemlock (2020) Linh Vu’s cameraless animation