At the 2018 NYU Orphan Film Symposium, filmmaker/programmer Courtney Stephens and programmer/filmmaker KJ Relth debuted their creative archival compilation Mating Games, made from amateur films shot at Muscle Beach in 1963. (The USC Hefner Moving Image Archive supplied the scans of 16mm films shot by Russell Saunders.)
For the 2020 symposium, @courtcolt offered to create a video teaser or two, pointing to the May gathering at Amsterdam’s Eye Filmmuseum and its themes of water, climate, and migration. As we were comparing archival film sources to use the world changed and the Orphan Film Symposium is now migrating to an all-online edition for later May. Amid the stay-inside-and-online moment, she made this beautiful piece, a variation on the one posted here.
She samples three historical elements: If the Antarctic Ice Cap Should Melt? — outtakes (Fox Movietone News, 1929), the symposium’s emblematic film, newly scanned by the University of South Carolina’s Moving Image Research Collections; two shots from a film she located in the Prelinger Archives, Wild Fowl in Slow Motion (Hawley-Lord, Inc., 1947); and “Aetherius,” an air from Music of Ancient Rome, Vol. I – Wind Instruments (Amiata Records, 1996) performed by Synaulia, an ensemble of “paleorganologists” who reconstruct ancient music.
More about these three interesting orphans (of sorts) in the next post.
Meanwhile, we can note that while working on these “Orphans Corona” videos, the filmmaker was simultaneously writing this reflective essay, which is not unconnected to the symposium’s environmental theme. She considers her 2015 film Ida Western Exile alongside other works about “wilderness and female risk,” finding it “felt quit different now that the entire populated world had become a danger zone. . . . Open space is no longer a synonym for distance, which has become a synonym for home.”
Courtney Stephens, “Exposure Cinema,” desistfilm, April 1, 2020.