The Alice Cinema on the Yale University campus hosted an ideal of an Amateur Movie Day event. Afterward we realized Connecticut is also apt place to celebrate Amateur Movie Day. Its residents have included Amateur Cinema League founder Hiram Percy Maxim (Hartford), ACL members and award recipients Cynthia and S. W. Childs (Norfolk), and the venerated Robbins Barstow (Wethersfield), who made movies from 1936 until his passing in 2010.* Brian Meacham (Yale Film Archive) put it all together, programming eight films from four sources. Although the university was on spring break, an attentive audience filled nearly two thirds of
Author: Dan Streible
Amateur Movie Days
Happy Amateur Movie Day! The 2024 Orphan Film Symposium featured more amateur films than any previous gathering. Filmmaker and researcher Libertad Gills made this trailer for the occasion, introducing us to this exemplar of amateur film in Guayaquil. The symposium showcased amateur films in multiple modes. In addition to quintessential home movies of family life, we also watched movies made to document professional work: archaeology in Mexico and Mauritania; ballet in Europe and the USSR; medical procedures; boat building; computer experiments; textile manufacture. Amateur films used as therapy for at-risk youth in midcentury France, and as labor activism in Uruguay.
Amateur Movie Day is March 13.
It’s true. There’s an Amateur Movie Day. See the AMD website for a list of events and screenings on March 13. In 2003, the first Home Movie Day screenings seeded a growing awareness of the significance of the millions of small-gauge, amateur film recordings. For more than twenty years HMD has continued to grow, led by the Center for Home Movies with an informal worldwide network of the likeminded. In 2025, kindred spirits have announced Amateur Movie Day, March 13. Thanks to Charles Tepperman’s multi-year grant project and his perennial advocacy via the Amateur Movie Database, a team of archivists
Orphans 2026? Ohio!
Save the dates! April 8-11, 2026 at Wexner Center for the Arts The Ohio State University, Columbus, O! The NYU Orphan Film Symposium convenes the next biennial edition at the Wexner Center for the Arts, at Ohio State University in Columbus. We look forward to collaborating with David Filipi (Head of the Film and Video program) as well as archivists Sarah Hartzell (A/V Preservation and Digitization Specialist, OSU Library; and a graduate of NYU’s MIAP Program) and Tim Lanza (Audiovisual Preservation & Digitization Lead, OSU Library), plus Rachael Barbash (projection operator and manager), and others.
24 Snaps of Work & Play
24 Snaps of Work & Play by Julita (Juju) Pratiwi & Sixuan (Momo) Li (NYU MIAP Program) We photographed the symposium using black-and-white negative film (Kodak T-Max 400, 35mm roll). Our gallery is below. (Or download the PDF.) — Juju & Momo —
Vanguard Video
The Vanguard Tapes by Yuye Shi (NYU Cinema Studies) What are movies? They recreate a subjective experience of sight and sound. So, when we are in the theater they are experiences or stories that we share. And then when they are all reeled up and put back into a can, they are physical representations of those experiences and memories. For better or worse, they are the best we have come to a model of a memory. . . . — Bill Morrison (2019) A filmmaker and artist based in New York, Bill Morrison has devoted a
Preserving a Gap
The Preservation of Mellanrum by Jenny Hsu & Momo Li (NYU MIAP) At the 2024 Orphan Film Symposium, we join with NYU professor of cinema studies Zhang Zhen to present a short film she made in 1985 while an undergraduate student in Sweden. She asked us to help digitize the Super 8 work, which she gave the Swedish title Mellanrum, meaning “gap” or a “space in between.” In the 1980s, university students in film production used analog film and magnetic media to shoot course assignments. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to screen these analog media. Today, established filmmakers and
MIRC’s Montgomery Mill Village Films
Threads of Social Change: Walter S. Montgomery’s Mill Village Films by Anthony Gonzalez (NYU MIAP) & Kimberly O’Quinn (UofSC MIRC) The films we screen at the Orphan Film Symposium come from the Walter S. Montgomery Collection at the University of South Carolina’s Moving Image Research Collections. Throughout his life, Montgomery was an avid amateur filmmaker, shooting family and travel films as well as industrial films about the textile industry. These two films depict daily work and life in “Montgomeryville,” a mill village community near Spartanburg, South Carolina. The state’s textiles sector pivoted from agriculture towards industrial processing during the early
Truth Films
A Revival: The Return of the Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts 2023 & the 2024 Orphan Film Symposium by Jacqueline Grimson & Miaya Webster (NYU) The first-ever Black women’s film festival, the Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts, was envisioned and realized in 1976 by a group of Black feminist filmmakers, including Monica Freeman, Michele Wallace, Faith Ringgold, Patricia Jones, and Margo Jefferson. Held in New York at the Women’s Interart Center, the program featured film works as well as poetry, performance, lectures, and panel discussions. Among the other featured filmmakers were Michelle Parkerson, Ayoka Chenzira, and Madeline Anderson.
Life in the Dark
Director Enrique Bellande’s new documentary profile of a film collector opens the 2024 Orphan Film Symposium. Dark Work, Light Play: On Fernando Martín Peña & La Vida a Oscuras by Andrew Reichel (NYU Cinema Studies, MIAP Program) Fernando Martín Peña looms large in cinephilia, even among the people who don’t know his name. He will forever be associated with the discovery of the most complete print of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) in the Museo del Cine collection. After over 80 years of access to incomplete copies, the museum and Deutsche Kinemathek brought one of the silent era’s most beloved films back
Los subterráneos Cuba
Los subterráneos by Yixuan Li This text draws principally upon the research conducted by Archivistas Salvajes, as well as Lucía Malandro’s symposium proposal. I am deeply grateful for their invaluable contributions. For Orphans 2024, Cuban independent collective Archivistas Salvajes present two films, Nace una plaza (1988) and Parrandas de Camajuaní (1988), belonging to the collection of Cuban amateur cinema the group calls “Los Subterráneos.” The term “underground” precisely reveals the continuous status of these films, as they were ignored by mainstream culture when they were born and present-day Cuban state institutions are disinterested in them. As the main collection of
Japanese Paper Films
Bucknell University’s Japanese Paper Film Presentation — with live music by Adrianne Lundy (NYU Cinema Studies, MIAP Program) The theme Work & Play takes a rare and delightful form in Eric Faden and Jackson Rubiano‘s presentation of three Japanese paper films (also known as “kami firumu”). Just as it sounds, these works were originally printed on paper instead of celluloid throughout the 1930s. They were produced and sold by Japanese companies (the most prominent were called RECFY and Katei Toki), which also sold the means to view the films in the form of small hand-cranked projectors. The films could be
Screening 8.75mm
As part of the Orphan Film Symposium session Moving Image Technologies at Work, in Asia, NYU scholar Ann Lyuwenyu Zhang and Dino Everett, archivist at the University of Southern California, present “Thinking Out of Sync: A Demonstration of the Chinese Obsolete Film Format 8.75mm.” Using a newly refurbished machine, they will project 8.75mm film prints of News Report ’72 No. 45 (新闻简报72年45号) and a 1973 production from the Shanghai Animation Film Studio. Rural Film Projection: China’s 8.75mm Cinema Revolution by Chenghao Wen and Yangyang Xu (NYU Cinema Studies) In the annals of Chinese cinematic exhibition history, there exists a uniquely
Cine amateur danseur
Ballet Star ‘Cosmic Yuri’ at Work & Play by Matthew Yang (NYU MIAP) Ten reels containing the personal home movies of Soviet ballet star Yuri Soloviev (1944-1977) travel to New York from St. Petersburg and publicly screen for the first time, thanks to the efforts of film historian Dr. Maria Vinogradova. Soloviev, a premier danseur of the renowned Kirov ballet, is still regarded as one of the great dancers of his era. His gravity defying leaps captured the imagination of many, so much so that he is still revered as “Cosmic Yuri,” a reference to Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. Unbeknownst
Polaroid Land
Working and Playing with Polaroids: The History of Polaroid (1978) by Rob Asher (NYU Cinema Studies) Despite the widely-reported resurgence in analog photography (including Polaroid instant-film) in the 2020s, the Polaroid is still associated with its heyday in the 1970s. Just before its popularity was beginning to wane, the Polaroid Corporation made an in-house motion picture about its camera and company. The History of Polaroid (1978) wasn’t intended for theatrical release or broadcast. Few people outside the company have seen it. But scholar Patrick Ellis has. He saw the only-known copy when researching the corporate records, held at Harvard Business
8.75 in the USC archive
Portrait of an Archivist: Dino Everett by Siyuan Li (NYU Cinema Studies) Dino Everett is a highly respected film preservation and digitization expert whose work focuses not only on the content of film works but also on the formats in which they are created, preserved, restored, and projected. Fifteen years ago, he became the archivist for the HMH Moving Image Archive, part of the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. He has led the preservation of film reels, video tapes, and as well as hardware in its collection. In his view, unusual formats are often overlooked but may
Fox Formosa Film
A Preview of the Unveiling of a Parade in Taiwan, 1930 by Siyi Quan (NYU Cinema Studies) At the 2024 Orphan Film Symposium, Klavier Wang, an assistant professor at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University in Taiwan, presents new research done with graduate student Yung-Cheng Yen. In her talk “Unveiling the True Face of a Parade” she will screen Fox Movietone News footage filmed on the island of Taiwan in 1930 and discuss the complexities of public life in occupied Formosa. The University of South Carolina’s Moving Image Research Collections catalog assigns the unedited newsfilm the title Formosan New
Nintendo Gunman
Benjamin Solovey calls his presentation at the Orphan Film Symposium “Battle Sharks and Wild Gunmen: The Challenges of Film-Based Arcade Games (1974-78).” His modest bio only hints at the multimedia archaeology he does. Benjamin Solovey works for Film Preservation Society, a nonprofit organization based in Los Angeles, which is carrying out the 4K restoration of paper print titles from the Biograph Company [1908-1913]. He received his Dual Master’s degree in Preservation and Preservation of the Moving Image from the University of Amsterdam and has enjoyed over a decade of experience in film post-production and media preservation. Wild Gunman: Showdowns on
Full program #Orphans2024
The whole program for April 10-13, 2024. NYU Orphan Film Symposium All events at Museum of the Moving Image Register here. (Day rates available.) Download the 12-page booklet here. WEDNESDAY, April 10 7:00 pm Opening Reception 8:00 pm Welcome: Eric Hynes (MoMI), Dan Streible (NYU) Fernando Martín Peña (Filmoteca Buenos Aires) introduces Hasta la Vuelta (Antonio Ber Ciani, Argentina, 1936) Sofía Elizalde (independent archivist) Finding Lost Films in Rosario Screening: La vida a oscuras (2023, Argentina) 74′ [trailer] Enrique Bellande’s profile of a film collector Juana Suárez (NYU) moderator THURSDAY, April 11 9:30 am Welcome to the Orphan Film Symposium
restaurants VERY near Museum of the Moving Image
Restaurants VERY near Museum of the Moving Image. In order to have a dinner break that allows you to return to the 8pm museum screenings, consider these options. Tacuba Cantina (across the street!) 35-01 36th St. (at 35th Ave) Sac’s Place 35-11 35th Ave (at 36th St.) Cafe Triskell 33-04 36th Av (at 33rd St.) Napoli Pizza & Pasta 33-02 35th Ave (at 33rd St.) Arepas Cafe 33-07 36th Ave (near 33rd St.) Mar’s 34-21 34th Ave (at 35th St.) Pig Beach BBQ 35-37 36th St (at 36th Ave) Astoria Seafood 3710 33rd St, (at 37th Ave) Susuru Ramen 33-19 36th
[Read on. . . . ] restaurants VERY near Museum of the Moving Image