NYU Cinema Studies & Tisch School of the Arts present
Orphans Online, May 26-29, 2020
(All times are NYC, Eastern Daylight Time; GMT -4)
#Orphans2020
The 12th Orphan Film Symposium on Water, Climate, and Migration originally to be held at Eye Filmmuseum Amsterdam in May 2020 became impossible to convene (due to the you-know-what). Most of the 60 scheduled presenters agreed to experiment with an online edition, mixing live talks and live-stream screenings with extensive texts and videos posted on this NYU website. Some of these extraordinary and polished video presentations are already posted.
The world has changed. Thanks to all who persevered. Thanks to all who watch and read here — and keep this community going year-round.
Listed below are the live-streaming portions of the symposium. Other videos are streaming on our Vimeo page, with links and introductions to those works listed in blog posts. New posts and orphan films will be published daily for the rest of May and into June. Most will remain online.
All live-stream events will be viewable on the NYU Cinema Studies Vimeo site <https://vimeo.com/user5490513>. Vimeo’s chat feature allows questions and comments to be submitted in select sessions. We decided to limit the hours of live programming, understanding most everyone interested in watching Orphans sessions is already working overtime in front of computer screens (and Zooming, o! so much Zooming).
Orphans Online owes special gratitude to the Ambulante documentary organization of Mexico, its Directora Paulina Suárez, and to Walter Forsberg, Edgar Domínguez, and Manuel Guerrero, who are coordinating technical details for the symposium (and the Ambulante online festival, which is running concurrently). Quite an achievement in the coronal world we inhabit today. So, yes, NYU in the new NYC is able to pull this off thanks to generous partners in Mexico — and some technical support from James Widdiccombe in the Dominican Republic. ¡Saludos!
You will also note that our contributors and contributions come from the Bahamas, Argentina, Chile, the Netherlands, China, Italy, Croatia, Ukraine, Poland, England, Germany, Senegal, Austria, Russia, Australia, Sweden, Spain, Mexico, the United States, and Canada: a G20 for Orphans 2020.
Tuesday May 26 WATER
10:00 am – 12noon The Silent World
Dan Streible (NYU) opening remarks
Greg Wilsbacher (U of South Carolina MIRC) introduces
If the Antarctic Ice Cap Should Melt? (1929) music by Stephen Horne
Shiyang Jiang, Zoe Yang, & Zhen Lai (NYU) That Manhattan-Sinking Feeling: Research on If the Antarctic Ice Cap Should Melt?
Ned Thanhouser introduces
In de Tropische Zee (Thirty Leagues under the Sea) (Carl L. Gregory, Thanhouser Co., Submarine Film Corp., Bahamas/US, 1914) Music by Ben Model
Monique Toppin (U of the Bahamas) & Erica Carter (King’s College London) An Underwater Sense of Place: Bahamas Marine Locations in Cinema Memory
Sonia Shechet Epstein (Museum of the Moving Image NYC) Underwater Films from the Department of Tropical Research: William Beebe’s Bathysphere in Haiti and Bermuda, 1927-1934. (Thanks to Wildlife Conservation Society.) New soundtrack by High Water.
2:00 pm to 4:00 pm Environmental Impact
Linda Tadic (Digital Bedrock; UCLA) The Environmental Impact of Digital Archives
Jennifer L. Peterson (Woodbury U) Wheels of Progress: National Park Roads in US Government Films from the 1920s:
• Wheels of Progress (USDA, 1927)
• Roads in Our National Parks (USDA, 1927) music by Stephen Horne
Alexander Markov (Ukulele Films, Russia) Constructing Hydroelectric Power Stations in the USSR and Egypt: documentary rushes and amateur films (1951-1964) and Hydroelectric Joy (2020)
6:00 pm Water Tuesday screenings
Charles Musser (Yale U) & Walter Forsberg (CDMX) Rediscovering Another Lost Union Films Production: The Case of the Fishermen (1947, Union Films) from NMAAHC Pearl Bowser Collection
Kimberly Tarr with Michael Grant (NYU Libraries) From the Communist Party USA Collection: Let’s Get Acquainted (Kyiv Popular Science Film Studio, USSR, ca. 1972)
Eiren Caffall (climate-change journalist) & director Scott K. Foley, Becoming Ocean (2018)
Bill Brand (BB Optics) & Amélie Garin-Davet (Cultural Services of the French Embassy) introduce a film from Senegal:
Aqua (Samba Félix Ndiaye, 1989) courtesy of Nine Ndiaye
Rachael Stoeltje (Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive) introduces
The Ways of Water (1971, Les Blank, EB Films) provided with permission from Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. (c)1971 by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Wednesday May 27 Climate
10:00 am The Natural World Viewed: Early German Images of the Anthropocene
Nicholas Baer (U of Groningen), Katerina Korola (U of Chicago), Katharina Loew (U Mass Boston), and Philipp Stiasny (Film U Babelsberg Konrad Wolf)
• Naturschutz: Tieraufnahmen [4 films, Nature Reserve: Animal Photography] (Hermann Hähnle, 1915–1920) music by Ben Model
• Die Aran-Inseln [The Aran Islands] (Heinrich Hauser, 1928) music by Stephen Horne
11:00 am Darkening Days
Sarah Eilers (US National Library of Medicine) US Public Health Service Films on Air Pollution, 1960-1969
Oliver Gaycken (U of Maryland)
• Sources of Air Pollution (1962)
Jennifer Peterson (Medicine on Screen)
Angela Saward (Wellcome Collection) introduces and screens It Takes Your Breath Away (1964) Dr. Mary Catterall and her medical community response to air pollution death
2:00 pm The Helen Hill Award (aka Super Super 8s)
Susan Courtney (U of South Carolina Film and Media Studies) the 2020 Helen Hill Award to filmmakers Martha Colburn (Los Angeles) and Jaap Pieters (Amsterdam)
Bill Brand with newly preserved Super 8 home movies of New Orleans and South Carolina
Amy Sloper (Harvard Film Archive) introduces the restored Rain Dance (Helen Hill, 1990)
Simona Monizza (Eye) and Marius Hrdy (Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival) interview Martha Colburn & Jaap Pieters
+ New assemblage by Mark Paul Meyer (Eye) A Fragmented Encounter with Jaap Pieters on the Occasion of Orphans 2020
Four by Martha Colburn
XXX Amsterdam (2004) restored by Eye
A Little Dutch Thrill (2004) restored by Eye
Triumph of the Wild (2009)
+
Premiere of music video for the group Chasing Rainbows,
I Don’t Wanna (Go to Bed) (Martha Colburn and Pat O’Neill, 2020)
3:30 – 4:00 pm Super Super 8s continued
Petra Belc (Cineclub Zagreb) and Nadja Šičarov (Austrian Film Museum) The Maritime Mini-documentaries : Restoring the Amateur Experimental Super 8 Sound Films of Tatjana Ivančić (Yugoslavia, 1970s)
Ekvinocij [Equinox] (1973) and Varijacije [Variations] (1975)
6:00 pm Climate Wednesday screenings
Anke Mebold (DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum) introduces
Rund um Die Welt in 2 Stunden [Around the World in 2 Hours] (IT/FR/DE, ca. 1914) music by Stephen Horne
From the Danish Film Institute, Optagelser fra Vestgrønland [Western Greenland] (1935) introduction by Donald Sosin for new musical accompaniment
Andrés Levinson (Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken) Antarctic home movies 1957-58
Oliver Gaycken (U of Maryland) introduces Countdown to Collision (Airlie Productions, 1972)
Mark Quigley (UCLA Film and Television Archive) on Rolf Forsberg’s “Ecological Shocker” Ark (1970)
Bohdan Shumylovych and Oleksandr Makhanets (Urban Media Archive, Center for Urban History, Lviv, Ukraine) The [Unarchiving] Program: A Decayed 1970s Amateur Film Becomes The Tree.
• Derevo (The Tree, Oleg Chorny and Gennadiy Khmaruk, UKR, 2019)
May 28 MIGRATION Thursday
10am-12noon Great Migrations
Klavier J. Wang (NYU) Awakening Immigrant Voices: Chinese Cable Television in 1970s-1980s New York Chinatown
Iga Harasimowicz, Michał Pieńkowski, Grzegorz Rogowski (Filmoteka Narodowa, National Film Archive – Audiovisual Institute, FINA, Poland) & Grazia Ingravalle (Brunel U London) Polish Diaspora in Films of the 1930s
• Osadnictwo polskie w puszczach Brazylii
[Polish Settlements in Brazilian Wilderness] (1933)
Ina Archer & Candace Ming (National Museum of African American History and Culture) The Great Migration Project:
• Highland Beach, Maryland, Home Movies
• Trip and Ariel (Zora Lathan, 1975)
3:00 pm Euro Migrations
Carolina Cappa (Elias Querejeta Zine Eskola, San Sebastian, Spain) Project Nitrato Argentino (Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken, 2019)
Kay Hoffmann (U of Offenburg) RhInédits: Amateur Film on the Upper Rhine
Anna Leippe (Haus des Dokumentarfilms, Stuttgart)
• Introduction to Landesfilmsammlung Baden-Württemberg:
• “Schwertmühle” (1967-69) by Karl Gutekunst, Fritz Zoll, and Klaus Hummel; amateur films of housing for displaced persons
Brenda Ibáñez Toledo (Mexico City / Cineteca Nacional de Chile) Home Movies from Cineteca Nacional de Chile
• The Melzer Home Movies: German Immigrants in Chile, 1940
Christian Rossipal (NYU) Swedish Information Video for Asylum Seekers: Medicinsk åldersbedömning [Medical Age Assessment] (2017)
6:00 pm Migration Thursday screenings
Sofia Elizalde (Cineclub Rosario) Immigrant Women in the Early 20th Century and Erotic Exploitation: A Rediscovered “French” Film from Argentina
• ¡Mujer, tú eres la belleza! o La Mujer y el Arte [Woman, You Are Beauty! or Women and Art] (Camilo Zaccaría Soprani, 1928)
Jesse Lerner (Claremont Colleges) A Semi-Amateur Documentary on Migrant Labor along the US-Mexican Border
• Hands Across the Border (Great Western Sugar Co., US, 1963) digital preservation by Roundabout
7:00 pm Artist Ja’Tovia Gary discusses and shows her film
• The Giverny Document (single channel) (2019)
Conversation with Terri Francis (Indiana U, Black Film Center/Archive) with open Q&A
Matt Soar (Concordia U Montréal) Crossing Borders 2022
8:30 pm A Clockface Orange (Genevieve HK & Rachael Guma, liquid projection) with Lea Bertucci (sound) and Bradley Eros (light)
live performance of Deliquescence
Friday May 29 2:00pm Never Lost But Found in the Ocean:
On Biographies of Film Copies
With Bill Morrison Discussing His Forthcoming Film The Village Detective
Occasionally lost films are found. There are also found films never known to have been lost. Such is the story of four rolls of 35mm film caught in fishermen’s nets near the shores of Iceland in summer 2016. Badly damaged, yet in a remarkably viewable condition, they were identified as parts of a once-popular Soviet comedy, Village Detective (dir. Ivan Lukinsky, 1969) whose original negative is preserved at Gosfilmofond of Russia. This discovery is the subject of the forthcoming film by Bill Morrison, The Village Detective (2020), a poetic reflection on the ways in which biographies of film prints are interwoven with biographies of human individuals, real and fictional, as well as broader historical events and their mediations through cinema.
In anticipation of the film’s release our virtual roundtable brings together four perspectives on the significance of film copies, found objects, and ocean as an unlikely repository of films.
Participants:
Bill Morrison, filmmaker, Decasia (2002), The Great Flood (2013), Dawson City: Frozen Time (2017)
Peter Bagrov (George Eastman Museum) Curator of the Moving Image Department
Joan Neuberger (U of Texas at Austin) Professor of History
Maria Vinogradova (NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia) film historian, Visiting Scholar
Envoi & Bon Voyage!
Anke Mebold (DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum)
An Atlantic Voyage: Von Hamburg zu den Niagarafällen mit dem Schnelldampfer Kaiser Wilhelm II
[From Hamburg to the Niagara Falls with the Express Steamer Kaiser Wilhelm II]
compilation film (DE[?] 19?? / GB 1903[?] / FR 1906[?])
Production: (?) / Charles Urban Trading Company / Pathé Frères
Digital copy from 35mm nitrate postivie, 300 meters; b/w, tinted, toned; 16’19’’@ 20fp
Music composed and performed by Stephen Horne