Watch this full-length screening (142 minutes with all the intros).
The internationalism is inspiring, as is the temporal spread (from 1914 to 2019). Films from Germany (pretending to take viewers “around the world”), the Danish Film Institute’s film of the Arctic of Greenland segues to the Museo del Cine’s Argentinean amateur films of Antarctica; two American films documenting and imagining a dying planet; a Ukrainian archive salvaging a Soviet-era amateur film to create a new work for an [unarchiving] project.
Two newly scored silent films. A compilation of unknown provenance. An incomplete work. Nontheatrical nonfiction. Pictures both beautiful and ugly of a planet in distress.
And dogs: perros polar argentinos, a now extinct breed that mixed Siberian Husky, Alaskan Malamute, Greenland Dog, and Manchurian Spitz. Captured in color 60 years ago.
Click to enlarge, or watch at vimeo.com/431071315 to use the embedded time cues.
6:13 Anke Mebold (DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum) introduces
17:20 Rund um Die Welt in 2 Stunden [Around the World in 2 Hours] (IT/FR/DE, ca. 1914) music composed and performed by Stephen Horne
28:50 Donald Sosin introduces his new musical accompaniment for
30:52 Optagelser fra Vestgrønland [Western Greenland] (1935), from the Danish Film Institute
45:10 Andrés Levinson & Pablo Fontana (Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken, Buenos Aires) introduce and narrate 50:25 Antarctic home movies 1957-58
1:14:50 Oliver Gaycken (U of Maryland) introduces
1:21:10 Countdown to Collision (Airlie Productions, 1972)
1:50:55 Mark Quigley (UCLA Film and Television Archive) on Rolf Forsberg’s “Ecological Shocker” Ark (1970)
2:03:43 Oleksandr Makhanets & Bohdan Shumylovych (Urban Media Archive, Center for Urban History, Lviv, Ukraine) The [Unarchiving] Program: A Decayed 1970s Amateur Film Becomes “Derevo”
Not seen in the replay video:
Derevo /The Tree
(Oleg Chorny and Gennadiy Khmaruk, UKR, 2019) 6 min.
The new work takes a decaying found film and audiocassette originally made by amateur filmmaker Victor Kyzyma, from Blahovishchenske, Ukraine, where an amateur film studio operated at at a collective farm. Found in 2017, the 16mm film was all but destroyed by lime. Restored by the Urban Media Archive (Lviv). The directors created a new narrative and structure. New music by composer Oleksiy Miryukov and sound director Andriy Ryzhov.