Author: Dan Streible

Helen Hill at the Harvard Film Archive

Helen Hill at the Harvard Film Archive by Amy Sloper The Harvard Film Archive has been the home for Helen Hill’s work since 2007. The story of the material’s arrival to the archive, and the spirit of collaboration and innovation that characterized this process has been well documented, as has her introduction to the archival community through Orphans. The preservation history of Hill’s ten most well-known titles and her home movie reels has also been documented, though we at the HFA hope to gather this information in one place in the coming months to facilitate easier research access to this

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Never Lost But Found in the Ocean — Replay ends June 1, 11:59 pm

A recording of a symposium panel that gets interrupted by technical delays gets 1,700 plays in the first day?   Now the first and second parts are merged into this one smooth viewing of “Never Lost But Found in the Ocean,” with panelists Joan Neuberger (Eisenstein scholar), Peter Bagrov (George Eastman Museum), Maria Vinogradova (NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia), and moderator Marina Hassapopoulou (NYU Cinema Studies) with filmmaker Bill Morrison showing excerpts from his forthcoming film The Village Detective.   https://vimeo.com/424452622 #

Never Lost But Found in the Ocean — Replay must end June 1, 11:59 pm

The live webcast signal was interrupted, but you can watch the replay in two parts. Watch before the stream ends on June 1 (11:59 pm).   Friday May 29  2:00pm   Never Lost But Found in the Ocean: On Biographies of Film Copies Occasionally lost films are found. There are also found films never known to have been lost. Such is the story of four rolls of 35mm film caught in fishermen’s nets near the shores of Iceland in summer 2016. Badly damaged, yet in a remarkably viewable condition, they were identified as parts of a once-popular Soviet comedy, Village Detective (dir. Ivan Lukinsky,

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Chilean Exile Cinema: Dos años en Finlandia

Dos años en Finlandia / Kaski Vuotta Suomessa [Two Years in Finland] (Angelina Vázquez, 1975): Performing Rites and Folklore in Chilean Exile Cinema by José Miguel Palacios (Universidad Alberto Hurtado) & Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto (San Francisco State University) “Chilean exile cinema” refers to a corpus of films and videos made by exiled filmmakers throughout the world, primarily between 1973 and 1990, the period coinciding with the military dictatorship in Chile.[1] For the special event of the Orphan Film Symposium held at the Austrian Film Museum in 2019 we gave a presentation on the radical aesthetics of Chilean exile films (Figs. 1

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Militant Film Circuit of Cineclub Vrijheidsfilms

Luna Hupperetz (University of Amsterdam) The Militant Film Circuit of Cineclub Vrijheidsfilms: Reconstructing a Dutch Multi-sited Cinema History in Light of the Cineclub Film and Paper Collection (IISH) Luna produced this original video in May 2020 as an alternative to being able to (with Floris Paalman) screen 16mm films and talk in person from Cinema 1 at the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. The original abstract of 2019 reads: A cultural ecological approach to archiving: the case of Cineclub Vrijheidsfilms at the International Institute of Social History (IISH)  Activist films from the 1960s and 1970s served the fight against social inequality

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The Helen Hill Award and the Super Super 8s

The Wednesday afternoon program of Orphans Online — the Helen Hill Awards + Super Super 8s.  Climate Wednesday 2:00 pm The Helen Hill Award (aka Super Super 8s) Susan Courtney (U of South Carolina Film and Media Studies) presents the 2020 Helen Hill Award to filmmakers Martha Colburn (Los Angeles) and Jaap Pieters (Amsterdam) [Read the announcement here.] +  a Kodak prize Bill Brand with newly preserved Super 8 home movies of New Orleans and South Carolina   Amy Sloper (Harvard Film Archive) introduces the restored Rain Dance (Helen Hill, 1990)  Interview: Simona Monizza (Eye) and Marius Hrdy (Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival) Martha Colburn & Jaap Pieters Mark Paul

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Harnessing Excess: Water in American Infrastructural Cinema of the 1930s

1 Comment on Harnessing Excess: Water in American Infrastructural Cinema of the 1930s

This research was originally paired with Bradley E. Reeves (Appalachian Media Archives) and his new compilation video, TVA: “Built for and Owned by the People” (2020). Harnessing Excess: Water in American Infrastructural Cinema of the 1930s by Joni Hayward Marcum In 1942 Educational Screen described the government-operated Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) as “harnessing the water and reclaiming the land” of the region. Founded in 1933 as part of the New Deal policies, the TVA was founded as a public corporation. Shortly after the start of the great depression, there was little trust in private companies. Thus, the public utilities run

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Dear Dr. Julien #9 (letter from Andrea Stultiens)

This new video work by Andrea Stultiens made for the online Orphan Film Symposium follows on the May 21 essay by Nico de Klerk, Paul Julien:  A “Seasonal Worker” in the “Contact Zone.”    Dear Dr. Julien #9 – Orphan  Film Symposium by Andrea Stultiens May 24, 2020 https://vimeo.com/421914194 Nico de Klerk (Utrecht University) and Andrea Stultiens (Hanze University of Applied Sciences) Paul Julien:  A “Seasonal Worker” in the “Contact Zone” Notes on our research, screening, and performance that were to have been presented at the Orphan Film Symposium / Eye International Conference in May 2020. Nico de Klerk:   Our

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Saludos @AMBULANTE! webcasting Orphans Online

With gratitude to the Ambulante documentary organization of Mexico, Orphans Online and NYU Cinema Studies / Tisch School of the Arts are happy to share the documentary evidence of what it looks like behind the scenes.  These three are running the live streams for both the Orphan Film Symposium and, concurrently, Ambulante’s 28-day-long online festival.   Manu Guerrero (white shirt), Walter Forsberg (Expos cap), Edgar Dominguez (maroon shirt) @AMBULANTE world broadcast HQ Couldn’tadoneitwithoutyou . . . .

Early German Images of the Anthropocene

The Natural World Viewed: Early German Images of the Anthropocene Over the course of the past century, humans have rediscovered the Earth’s fragility multiple times over. This collaborative presentation focuses on one such moment and site of (re)discovery—early twentieth-century Germany—and the key role that nature films played in efforts to recalibrate humankind’s relationship to a pliable, but still foreboding, world. During this period, the consequences of industrialization and mass migration to urban centers prompted some of the earliest reflections on the destructive effects of modern civilization on humans, other species, and the broader ecology (a term coined by German zoologist

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Links to each live session

Here are the direct links to each live session for easy access: Session 1: Tues. 10:00am The Silent World    Session 2: Tues. 2:00pm Environmental Impact   Session 3:  6:00pm  Water Tuesday screenings  Session 4: Wed. 10:00am The Natural World Viewed Session 5: Wed. 2:00pm The Helen Hill Awards   Session 6: Wed. 6:00pm  Climate Wednesday screenings  Session 7: Thurs. 10:00am Great Migrations  Session 8:  Thurs. 3:00pm Euro Migrations Session 9: Thurs. 6:00pm Migration Thursday screenings  Session 10: Fri. 2:00 pm Never Lost But Found in the Ocean 

How to Chat Questions in Vimeo

[vimeo 422855704 w=640 h=360] How can users chat questions & comments using the Vimeo chat feature?   Step 1: Navigate to the Orphans blog, and click the link for the NYU Cinema Studies “User” page.   Step 2: This will take you to the NYU Cinema Studies Vimeo “User” page. Here, you will see all of this week’s remaining LIVE events.   Step 3: Click on the LIVE event title you wish to virtually attend. This is the hyperlinked title at the top of the event video embed window.   Step 4: This will take you to the LIVE event

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A Town on the Yangtze

Wan-go Weng’s A Town by the Yangtze (1951) by Jonah Volk (Columbia University Libraries) Wan-go H.C. Weng (also known as Weng Wango) is a Chinese-American filmmaker, writer, art historian and collector, poet, and master calligrapher.  Born in 1918 in Shanghai, and still alive at the age of 101, he is the great-great-grandson of Weng Tonghe, a prominent 19th century Confucian scholar.  Moving to the United States in 1938 to study engineering at Purdue University, Weng later studied art at the University of Wisconsin, and had a decades-long career producing educational and sponsored films. Widely respected in the world of Chinese

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The Story of the CCC (193?)

The Story of the C.C.C. (produced no later than 1937), color/bw, sound. A documentary made by the Civilian Conservation Corps documenting life and work in several Massachusetts camps. The intertitle cards tell the story of the CCC from its inception to around 1937. Commentary by Stephen Slappe, Head of the Video & Sound Department at Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, Oregon, for the Orphans 2020 Film Symposium.  sslappe@gmail.com  Here on the eve of the Orphan Film Symposium on Water, Climate, and Migration, artist and film collector Stephen Slappe sends this piece for the occasion. He shares thoughts about and

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Aqua Senegal

An understated but apt opening title card.  Today the happy news arrived confirming that Orphans 2020 has the privilege to offer viewers a first look at a newly preserved film from Senegal. Director Samba Félix Ndiaye‘s short called simply Aqua (1989) is a quiet, elegant work, structured with a subtle “little reveal” at the end. Shot outside of his home town of Dakar, the 12-minute documentary has no dialogue. When Ndiaye died in 2009, he was considered a major figure in African documentary.  On Tuesday, May 26, as part of the 6 to 8 pm Orphans Online screening session, Bill

[Read on. . . . ] Aqua Senegal