Created especially for the final session of Orphans Online, Bill Morrison‘s compilation Sunken Films (June 2020) appears here for the first time, updated after the May 29 panel “Never Lost But Found in the Ocean: On Biographies of Film Copies.”
Film historian Maria Vinogradova conceived of the topic in collaboration with Morrison, whose newest work is inspired by an unlikely recovery of celluloid from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
A recording of the original session will be posted here soon.
Here’s the description of the May 29 session:
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.
Joining the filmmaker were Peter Bagrov, curator at the George Eastman Museum; Joan Neuberger, professor of history, University of Texas at Austin; Maria Vinogradova, Visiting Scholar at NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia; and moderator Marina Hassapopoulou from NYU Cinema Studies faculty.
Sunken Films assembles pieces of 7 films from 6 archives in 5 countries: the US National Archives, USC Moving Image Research Collections, Library and Archives Canada, British Film Institute, Trinity College Dublin, and Danish Radio.
Click to enlarge full screen, or go to vimeo.com/426920474.