Rollout of the April 10-13 program continues: two presenters will add to the symposium’s continuing attention to films from Argentina.
Renowned film collector, historian, educator, programmer, TV host, and raconteur Fernando Martín Peña will join us for the NYU Orphan Film Symposium. On opening night we will screen Enrique Bellande’s La vida a oscuras (Life in the Dark, Argentina, 2023, 74 min.), a profile of Peña. Recorded throughout seven years, we see his daily life in Buenos Aires: in the self-designed home/tower where he stores his library of 8,000 prints; teaching (and projecting) at the national film school; in the public television studio hosting the program Filmoteca, temas de cine; visiting collector-sellers of celluloid prints.
This new documentary appeared simultaneously with Peña’s latest book Diario de la Filmoteca, in which he narrates a year of his life watching and showing the prints in his collection. Today, Peña is in California, to present films at Oakland’s Noir City festival — and to scout celluloid acquisitions. We look more than forward to his return to the U.S. for the symposium at Museum of the Moving Image.
Fernando (if I may) has been a “friend of the show” since we met in Buenos Aires in 2009. The NYU MIAP graduate and director of the city’s Museo del Cine, Paula Félix-Didier, generously hosted a dozen archivist colleagues who volunteered to work for ten days on the museum’s extraordinary collection. We did it again in 2015, part of NYU’s ongoing APEX (Audiovisual Preservation Exchange). And in 2016, Paula and Fernando made sure the Mar del Plata Film Festival included two programs of orphan films.
Paula also led us on extracurricular adventures, including a special event Fernando conducted at MALBA, the Latin American Art Museum of BA. Using a 9.5mm projector, he showed an uncanny recording made outside the Casa Rosada among celebrants of the 1930 military coup! Then, on 16mm, a William S. Hart western, the only surviving copy of the jaw-dropping La Fiera Domada, a 1923 reduction of the otherwise lost film The Aryan (1916). In 2018, Andrés Levinson presented Museo del Cine’s restoration-in-progress at the second Orphans at MoMI. (Read Shahed Dowlatshahi’s notes on that for this blog.)
Another story of rediscovery from Argentina is part of Orphans 2024. The film whisperer of Rosario, Sofia Elizalde, will show parts of La Soldadura Autógena (Fusion Welding, 1939?) and tell of its mysterious provenance. Of unknown origin (Swiss?) are two silent, nitrate prints, one a recut attributed to an amateur filmmaker in Argentina, who put his name on the screen credits. Above all, this technical training film is beautifully shot, a pleasure to watch, and now digitized thanks to Elizalde and Museo del Cine.
At the 2020 Orphan Film Symposium, she presented another peculiar and wonderful film from Rosario. Mujer, tú eres la belleza! (Woman, Thou Art Beauty, 1928) is an eccentric, entertaining compilation film. Watch her introduction (“Immigrant Women in the Early 20th Century and Erotic Exploitation: A Rediscovered ‘French’ Film from Argentina”) and the movie itself as webcast May 28, 2020. Begin five minutes into the video here.
Join us for these and dozens of other orphan films during 4 nights and 3 days in Astoria NYC. Registration is open to all.
The Orphan Film Symposium is a production of NYU Tisch School of the Arts, its Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies, and the department’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation master’s program. We gratefully acknowledge additional support for 2024 from Tisch’s Center for Research and Study.
