The 2024 NYU Orphan Film Symposium convenes April 10-13, 2024, at Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, NYC. Presenters will be selected from proposals to this open call. Submit by October 16, 2023.
Theme: Work & Play
We invite proposals for presentations that respond to the theme(s) of work and/or play, broadly considered. How have orphan films (neglected audiovisual media) recorded, represented, influenced, and imagined these subjects throughout the history of moving images?
Conceptions of work might include: labor, industry, class, jobs, occupations, production, productivity (and failure), automation, technologies, performance; people, animals, machines, and films that work; as well as the “behind the scene” processes of creating, archiving, and preserving images and sounds.
We welcome similarly expansive ideas of play: leisure, recreation, games, gaming, toys, entertainment, amusement, comedy, fantasy, diversion, sports, and pastimes; the arts; joy, pleasure, passion, sex, love, laughter; as well as social relations that rely on freedom of movement (“play”), as expressed in terms such as community building, children’s right to play, code switching, elective affinities, and personal transformation.
Proposals need not be constrained by terms or categories. We understand things are seldom simple binaries like work & play. As the symposium program comes together, we expect boundaries will blur and spark new thoughts.
We encourage presentations that include the screening of seldom-seen moving images, rediscovered archival material, or recently preserved works. Most daytime presentations will be allotted 20 to 30 minutes, but more time can be given when appropriate (for longer films, multiple presenters, etc.). Evening screenings are generally films that require less spoken introduction and/or have longer run times.
Proposals (300 to 500 words + filmography)
Summarize the rationale for your presentation: What is the significance of the material? How does your proposal address the theme? How will you present it? How many minutes are you requesting? (Indicate your flexibility.) If it’s not obvious in your description, in what way is this orphaned?
At top, put your name, affiliation, email, and a working title. (Don’t feel obliged to use the word orphan, or even work or play in your title.) Include a bio (100 words).
Identify AV materials to be projected. Include video links when possible. Format like this, please.
• Boas on Human Capabilities (1928) MOV, sound, 2 min. (USC MIRC)
• Blue Moon (1988) 16mm print, sound, 3 min. (Anthology Film Archives)
• [Miners, Miners] (ca. 1931) DCP, silent, 5 min. (NYU Libraries)
• Love in Dimension 150 (2018) 70mm print, silent; 8 min. (Danielle Ash)
Email a single text file to orphanfilm@nyu.edu. (No PDFs, thank you.)
Name the attached file: proposal_Orphans2024_SURNAME.docx.
Use the subject line: PROPOSAL for 2024 Orphan Film Symposium.
Proposals received by October 16, 2023 will be given first consideration.
Whether you speak or not, plan to attend. Registration is open to all.
Play & Work, from the earliest cinema.
Newark Athlete (1891) & Blacksmithing Scene* (1893)
* Thanks to scholar Claudy Op den Kamp (an Orphans veteran, by the way), we finally know which motion picture W. K. L. Dickson deposited for copyright when the U.S. Copyright Office and the Library of Congress certified his claim for a copyright under the title Edison Kinetoscopic Records. Dr. Op den Kamp followed a long, long paper trail to find a Dickson letter to the Librarian of Congress. In the envelope she found a paper strip of 18 images, recognizable as The Blacksmith Shop or Blacksmithing Scene (among other informal titles). The video above is that film. Dickson first showed it in public in May 1893 and shot it no earlier than April. [See Charles Musser, Edison Motion Pictures, 1890-1900: An Annotated Filmography (1997).]
Read more of the story in the LOC blog post by George Thuronyi, “Scholar Identifies First Motion Picture Copyright Registration,” Copyright: Creativity at Work, Oct. 13, 2022, blogs.loc.gov/copyright/2022/10/13.
The copyright date for Edison Kinetoscopic Records is written as October 6, 1893. Dickson’s handwritten letter to the Librarian he dates as November 14, 1893 (stamped as received November 16). For some reason, Howard Lamarr Walls’s catalog Motion Pictures, 1894–1912 Identified from the Records of the United States Copyright Office, published in 1953, dates the copyright registration (number 10776) for Edison Kinetoscopic Records as April 9, 1894.
April 19, 2023. The Claudy Op den Kamp YouTube channel published her beautiful video essay The Shadow Line, a 53-minute adaptation of “Paper Print,” a chapter in A History of Intellectual Property in 50 Objects, edited by Claudy Op den Kamp and Dan Hunter (2019). Written as a letter to Librarian of Congress Ainsworth Rand Spofford, her narration has added the story of finding the revelatory 1893 letter from Dickson. Watch that chapter, “The Find.”