Wanna cut to the chase? Watch the replay edition of the Helen Hill Awards portion of Orphans Online here. 52 minutes.
For each Orphan Film Symposium, beginning in 2008, NYU Cinema Studies and the University of South Carolina Film and Media Studies Program celebrate independent filmmakers with the Helen Hill Awards.
The announcement of Martha Colburn and Jaap Pieters receiving the 2020 award is here. Thanks to Eye Filmmuseum hosting (what was to have been) an Amsterdam symposium, experimental film curator Simona Monizza worked with both artists to select works to showcase, including two films restored by Eye. The live edition of Orphans Online included video not in the replay edition: an hour-long conversation among Colburn (in Los Angeles), Pieters (Vienna), and curators Monizza and Marius Hrdy (Amsterdam), as well as three Colburn films: XXX Amsterdam (2004), A Little Dutch Thrill (2004), and Triumph of the Wild (2009). We also saw the premiere of a music video — I Don’t Wanna (Go to Bed) — she made with Pat O’Neill for the group Chasing Rainbows, published this week.
The rest of the session is now viewable. It includes an original 18-minute compilation by Eye curator Mark Paul Meyer, A Fragmented Encounter with Jaap Pieters on the Occasion of Orphans 2020. Since Pieters, on principle, never digitizes his Super 8 films, these documentary portraits reveal how he makes and shows the hundreds of works he has made.
Click to enlarge, or watch at vimeo.com/430926503 to use the time cues.
Orphans Online, Session 5a of 10
Wednesday, May 27, 2020, The Helen Hill Awards
2:35 Bill Brand (in Queens), Susan Courtney (in Columbia), and Dan Streible with BB Optics’ newly-scanned Super 8 home movies by and of Helen Hill, 15 min.
17:15 Amy Sloper (in Cambridge) on the Helen Hill Collection at the Harvard Film Archive
20:30 Rain Dance, reconstructed (Helen Hill, 1990/2007) 4 min.
25:00 Simona Monizza (Eye Filmmuseum) and Marius Hrdy
26:36 A Fragmented Encounter with Jaap Pieters on the Occasion of Orphans 2020 (Mark Paul Meyer, compilation of 5 interviews, 2006-2018) 18 min.
45:00 – 52:00 Susan Courtney (U of South Carolina in Columbia) confers the Helen Hill Award. Martha Colburn (from Los Angeles) with Pat O’Neill