Streaming now: an HD recording of the opening livestream. 97 min.
May 26: the first day of the Orphan Film Symposium on Water, Climate, and Migration was devoted to the water theme. Here’s Session 1. Editor Walter Forsberg removed some extraneous bits and abbreviated the screening of Wildlife Conservation Society’s Department of Tropical Research underwater footage of 1927-34.
The symposium called this session The Silent World, featuring films from cinema’s “silent” era of the 1910s and 20s, but with original music, both traditional and experimental. The title also references Jacques Cousteau’s landmark documentary Le Monde du silence (1956, directed with Louis Malle).
The panel is in three sections:
• The silent newsreel footage cataloged at USC MIRC as If the Antarctic Ice Cap Should Melt? — outtakes (Fox, 1929), with a debut new score, composed and performed by Stephen Horne; introduced by Greg Wilsbacher; a video report on this newsfilm by NYU researchers Shiyang Jiang, Zoe Yang, and Zhen Lai; and the first screening of Wilsbacher’s reconstruction of what the Antarctic ice cap story released by Fox News in February 1929 might have looked like.
• Ned Thanhouser‘s introduction to In de Tropische Zee (Carl L. Gregory, Thanhouser Co., Submarine Film Corp., 1914), the only surviving version of longer films shot in the waters around the Bahamas using the Williamson Photosphere. Preserved by Eye Filmmuseum; music by Ben Model. Monique Toppin (University of the Bahamas) and Erica Carter (King’s College London) contextualize this with their historical research project, An Underwater Sense of Place: Bahamas Marine Locations in Cinema Memory.
• Curator of science and film Sonia Shechet Epstein (Museum of the Moving Image) introduces underwater films from the Department of Tropical Research: William Beebe’s Bathysphere in Haiti and Bermuda, 1927-1934. Footage from the Wildlife Conservation Society; with a new soundtrack by the artist known as High Water.
Click to enlarge, or watch at vimeo.com/429504288.