Michael Grant
In 2019, the Media Preservation Unit at New York University Libraries digitized a collection of nearly 400 short pieces of film from the George Amberg and Robert Gessner Papers, held by NYU Special Collections. Shot on black and white 35mm film, they showed a startling array of scenes of life in New York City in the early 1950s. For years, the films were known in the library and to NYU cinema studies professor (and Orphan Film Symposium boss) Dan Streible, but their origins (to say nothing of their copyright status!) were a mystery. Scanning the films enabled us to view them, share them, and research their identity with a flexibility and speed that was not previously possible.
New York University (1952) directed by Willard Van Dyke with cinematographer Richard Leacock. Preserved at the US National Archives and Records Administration.
You can read more about that process (and see more of the films!) in this blog post that we published last month for Preservation Week, but here I will cut to what we discovered: the films were shot by Richard Leacock for an NYU promotional film directed by Willard Van Dyke. One reel of the film was, amazingly, shown at the Orphan Film Symposium in 2012 and at last year’s “More Orphans of New York” presentation at Film Forum.