Register. The (almost) full program.

Register. The (almost) full program.

Save the date, as they say. Click here to register for the fourteenth biennial NYU Orphan Film Symposium.

We convene April 10-13, 2024, at Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, NYC. Our theme: Work & Play. How have orphan works documented and envisioned these subjects throughout the history of moving images? Once again archivists, scholars, artists, curators, and others will convene to screen and discuss a plethora of preserved audiovisual works. 

Registration is open to all. The symposium begins Wednesday evening, April 10, with a 7pm reception and 8pm screening. April 11, 12, and 13, sessions all day, with an 8pm screening each night. Some 26 hours of programming. Plus catering, T-shirts, and more.

The full daily schedule will be published here in February.  Some additional presenters will be added to this list, but here’s the current lineup of 50+ speakers and their stuff. 

  • Jeremy Rourke (2024 Helen Hill Award recipient) animation in performance, including You’re Not Listening, homage to Craig Baldwin
  • Barbara Miller (MoMI) The IATSE Collection
  • Fernando Martín Peña (Filmoteca Buenos Aires) Enrique Bellande’s La vida a oscuras (Life in the Dark, Argentina, 2023)
  • Ann Lyuwenyu Zhang (NYU) & Dino Everett (USC) Projecting 8.75mm Film Prints from China: News Report  (1972) & animation Little Trumpet Player (1973)
  • Eric Faden (Bucknell U) Preserving and Presenting Japanese Paper Films of the 1930s
  • Ashley Dequilla (Filipino American Historical Society ) &  The Estrella Alamar Audiovisual Collection: The Little Farmers of Reynoldsburg, Ohio (Nicholas Viernes, 1936)
  • Karen Falk & Craig Shemin Work IS Play: Rarities from the Jim Henson Legacy & Jim Henson Company Collections, 1957-1987
  • Hayley O’Malley (U of Iowa) & Allyson Field (U of Chicagto) Art on Her Mind: The Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts, 1976 and 2023, with filmmakers Monica Freeman & Louise Fleming
  • Sarah Bashir &  Patrick Vonderau (U Halle / Stockholm U) Abandonware: LSD: Dream Emulator (Osamu Sato, 1998) on original PlayStation 1 console 
  • Ben Solovey (Film Preservation Society) Nintendo Film-Based Arcade Games, 1974-1978:  Wild Gunman (Yokoi Gunpei, 1974), Kasco’s The Driver (1976)
  • Patrick Ellis (U of Tampa) Industrializing Vision: The History of Polaroid (1978)
  • Klavier Wang & Yen Yung-Cheng (National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan) Unveiling the True Face of a Parade: Formosan New Years procession / parade — outtakes (Fox Movietone News, 1930)
  • Sophia Gräfe (Humboldt U, Berlin) & Carolin Pommert (Charité – Universitätsmedizin) Making Children Work: Medical Films from East Germany
  • Charles Acland & Laura Pannekoek (Concordia U) Crawley Films and the Work of Canadian Resource Extraction
  • Courtney Holschuh (Library of Congress) Nitrate Color Tests: Unidentified John Jones No. 122 (1930); Holiday in Mexico (1929) with Pickford & Fairbanks
  • Rosemary Feurer (Northern Illinois U) & Charles Musser (Yale) Carl Marzani and The Sentner Story (1953)
  • Luke Kuplowsky (York U) Where Will The Children Play? Urban Detritus and the Cine-Child; restoration debut of My Own Yard to Play In (Phil Lerner, 1959)
  • Libertad Gills (U della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland; U de las Artes, Ecuador) The Working-class Films of Guayaquil’s Gustavo Valle: Un muñeco llamado Año viejo (1979)  & El subamericano (1976)
  • Howard J. Radzyner with rediscovered Roman Vishniac research films made with surgeon Philip N. Sawyer (1960s)
  • Angela Saward (Wellcome Collection, UK) Medicine at Work and Play: A “Hidden Cinema,” 1931-1969
  • Sonia Epstein (MoMI curator of science and technology)
  • Todd Wiener (UCLA) One in Seven: True Confessions of a Gay Fleshpouinder (John Canalli, 1988)
  • Stephen Slappe (Dead Media Hour) East Bay Skateboarders, 1965 Home Movies
  • Danielle Ash debuts her stop-motion 16mm film Toying (2024)
  • Annabelle Aventurin Excavation Films of Bernard Nantet: [Tegdaoust Archaeological site, Mauritania] (197?)
  • Aurore Spiers (U Chicago) Women Workers in the Media Archive: Citroën automobile factory films, 1914–1925
  • Isabel Wschebor Pellegrino (U de la República) Cinematographic Archive and Labor in Uruguay: Films by Ferruccio Musitelli, 1970-1973
  • David Sherman (U of Arizona) Painting and Scratching on Celluloid with Wayne Thiebaud: Make a Movie without a Camera (1954)
  • Adina Brădeanu (Bodleian Libraries, U of Oxford) A Bucharest Film Studio Celebrates Its Fifth Anniversary: Noi la cinci ani / Us, Aged Five (Alexandru Sahia Studio, 1955) 
  • Kimberly Tarr (NYU) premieres Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu (David Loeb Weiss, 1980) with Walter Forsberg (Smithsonian); newly preserved with Bill Brand (BB Optics) for NYU Libraries
  • Masha Godovannaya (Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna) From the Archive of Necrorealist Evgeny Yufit 
  • Bill Morrison (Hypnotic Pictures) The Vanguard Tapes (2024) Hi-8 video from the Village Vanguard kitchen in the 1990s
  • Jake Perlin (Film Desk / Cinema Conservancy) The People’s Holiday (United May Day Committee, 194?)
  • Antonia Lant (NYU) The Pyramid Pictures Corporation, 1920-1922.
  • Roger C. Lansing & Caleb Simonds (National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum) A Lost-and-Found Story from Cooperstown: Jimmie Foxx Home Movies, Japan (1934)
  • Tanya Goldman (Hunter College) & Elena Rossi-Snook (NYPL) A Piscatorial Symphony: Fish Market (Michael Eisler & Leroy Stone, 1955)
  • Maria Vinogradova (NYU Jordan Center; Pratt Institute) Ballet dancer Yuri Soloviev’s home movies and travel films (USSR, France, 1960s)
  • Shane Fleming DeVry Cine-Tone: Amateur Talkies, 1928
  • Anthony Gonzalez (NYU/MIRC) Industrial Paternalism in a South Carolina Mill Village: Startex: Men and Women at Work and Play (Walter S. Montgomery, ca.1940)
  • Christina Dovolis & Cléo Sallis-Parchet (York U) Floating Relics (2022) and Jacobs Family Films (1950s-1990s)
  • Natalie Snoyman (Mill Valley Public Library) Inventor Hal Schwartz’s Vibrabath advertising film (ca. 1957)
  • Archivistas Salvajes Collective — Lucía Malandro, Daniel Saucedo, Josué Gomez, & Fabio Quintero — in association with Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, Los Subterráneos Cuba: Nace una plazaParrandas de Camajuaní (Miguel Secades & Miguel García, 1988)
  • Zhang Zhen (NYU) presents the restoration of her Super 8 student sound film, Mellanrum [Gap] (Sweden, 1985), with Momo LiJenny Hsu (MIAP Program)
  • Dana Polan (Martin Scorsese Chair, NYU Cinema Studies)
  • Juana Suárez (NYU MIAP Director)
  • Wanda Strauven (Columbia U)
  • Joseph Clark (Simon Fraser U) 
  • Eric Hynes (MoMI Curator of Film)
  • Aziz Isham (MoMI Exec. Director)
  • Dan Streible (NYU)  

Click here to register and enjoy three days and four nights of transnational camaraderie, sharing food, drink, screenings, music, and conversation with scores of fellow symposiasts. 

Frames from 2 films with circle motifs.
Left: Bernard Nantet’s untitled film of Tegdaoust Archaeological site, Mauritania (197?). Right: My Own Yard to Play In (Phil Lerner, 1959). Submitted by Annabelle Aventurin (archivist) and Luke Kuplowsky (York U). 

The diptych at top marries frames from: (left) La Soldadura Autógena (1939?), Sofia Elizalde, Rosario, Argentina; (right) The paper film Military Parade (193?), Toy Film Museum (Kyoto, Japan) and The Japanese Paper Film Project.