Month: August 2022

Here’s a remarkable presentation at the NYU Orphan Film Symposium on Counter-Archives, recorded June 16, 2022, at Concordia University. It centers on a rediscovered and restored nonfiction film (a sponsored film, a travelogue, a newsreel production, an ethnographic film), fraught with colonialist rhetoric and ideological  baggage — yet redeemed, or at least re-contextualized and informed, by a First Nation perspective. “Making it right.” The film Totem Land (1927) runs 10 minutes; the session 51. Aiding in the contextualization is a sound newsfilm fragment recorded a year later, in which famed anthropologist Franz Boas speaks plainly against “scientific” racism.  Kester Dyer (Carleton

[Read on. . . . ] Watch: Ethnographic Films of George Hunt

“At last the day has came.” So says Frau Leuchtag to her fellow refugee Carl, headwaiter at Rick’s Café Américain in the film classic Casablanca (1942). The day they celebrate is a departure to America. Today’s celebration is the long-anticipated Kino Lorber release of the four-disc box set Cinema’s First Nasty Women — or at least the New York Times publication of “Rewriting Women Back Into Film History” by film critic Manohla Dargis. Her assessment? “A mind-expanding endeavor, the set features 99 mostly comic rarities produced from 1898 to 1926, gleaned from archives and libraries across the globe. It is

[Read on. . . . ] Watch: Nasty Women teaser

“A Call to Emancipation: Liberating Discourses in Mexican and Spanish Student Films of the 1950s.” Recorded at Concordia University, June 17, 2022. These were the first two of three presentations for an Orphan Film Symposium session called Cine útil (a nod to the 2011 anthology Useful Cinema, edited by our hosts Charles Acland and Haidee Wasson, and which contains essays by 5 scholars also participating in the symposium this year:  Zoë Druick, Gregory Waller, Joseph Clark, Charles Tepperman, and Michael Zryd ).  David M.J. Wood introduces a ten-minute film produced in Mexico and performs live English translation of the recorded Spanish-language

[Read on. . . . ] Watch: A Call to Emancipation

Here’s the NYU Orphan Film Symposium session entitled “. . .  and its Discontents,” parts 1 and 3 of 3. Recorded June 17, 2022, at Concordia University.  37 minutes.   DeeDee Halleck (UC San Diego emerita) and Henning Engelke (Philipps U Marburg), Incarcerated Youth: The Otisville Film Club, 1969-1972, with screening of           • A Madman’s World (Kenneth Brown & Charles Smith, 1971)           • The Bloody Crime Crusher (John Vann & James Spann, 1971) Liz Miller (Concordia U) moderator  Click to enlarge or watch at vimeo.com/739282562 Video of the Q&A session is

[Read on. . . . ] Watch: Incarcerated Youth and the Otisville Film Club, 1969-1972