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 —
Category: Orphans Blog
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.
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
Givanni
“You are an archive”: June Givanni’s ‘Outstanding Contribution to Cinema’ by Alexa Efune (NYU Cinema Studies) On February 18th, the British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA) duly endowed long-time Black film archivist and programmer June Givanni with BAFTA’s “Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema” award. The award marks the first official recognition of Givanni’s critical archival work by an English film institution. Givanni’s labor collecting, preserving, studying, and exhibiting material relating to Black British and Afro-Diasporic cinema dates back over 40 years. In 1981, Givanni assisted in executing the Third Eye World Cinema Film Festival in London. At the end of the
Florencia in Cualác
Florencia Müller in Cualác, Guerrero by José Solé (NYU MIAP) On April 12, the Orphan Film Symposium session called Fieldwork: Excavation and Extraction includes the presentation “Florencia en Cualác” by Tania López Espinal (Cineteca Nacional de México) & Mariana Hernández Blanca (Salvamento Arqueológico Tren Maya). They will screen the newly preserved film Cualác, Cueva Ostocama (1951) and discuss an important figure in archeology whose work is documented in the footage, Florencia Müller (1903-1984). Mexico has 49,347 registered archaeological sites across a wide range of environments, with varied antiquity and diverse cultural origins. These cataloged sites represent only a fraction of
Saturday: Work & Play
And what Work & Play on the final day? and the closing night? Not just work but labor: women on the assembly line, union organizing, a May Day parade, inventors, sex-workers, sound mixers, and hot-metal typesetters. Play abounds in the love of amateurs, shenanigans in a film studio, skateboarding, queer comedy, dancing, painting, children improvising play in the streets of Harlem and woods of Oregon. And music. Lots of music. Worlds recorded across nine decades. SATURDAY, April 13 10am Workers of the World Aurore Spiers (U Chicago) Women Workers in the Media Archive: French Automobile Factory Films, 1914–1925 Jacob Perlin
Friday, April 12: Work & Play at MoMI
The roll-out continues. What’s happening in Astoria? Friday, April 12. Here’s the rundown for the NYU Orphan Film Symposium, Work & Play, at Museum of the Moving Image. Registration is open to all. FRIDAY, April 12 9:30 am Making Children Work; Teens Making Work Sophia Gräfe (Humboldt-University Berlin) & Carolin Pommert (Charité Berlin) Making Children Work: Medical Films from East Germany. Musikerziehung in der Kinderkrippe (1980), Die psychologische Führung des Kindes im Krankenhaus (1976) Katerina Kampoli (Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée) The Centre Familial De Jeunes de Vitry Films, 1966-1983. Et après (And Then, 1969) 11:20 am
The Thursday line-up
The roll-out continues! Here’s the simple-text version of the first full da of the NYU Orphan Film Symposium, Work & Play, April 10 through 13, 2024, at Museum of the Moving Image. We begin Wednesday evening with screenings from Argentina, including the North American premiere of La vida a oscuras (2023), Enrique Bellande‘s profile of film collector Fernando Martin Peña. Registration is now open to all. Day two is filled with diverse screenings by 25 presenters: newly-discovered films by Roman Vishniac; Nintendo arcade games with 16mm film loops; a psychedelic game for PlayStation1; Japanese “paper films”; amateur films from Canada,
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
Orphans 2024: The Program (second part)
The roll-out continues with this second piece of the program for the NYU Orphan Film Symposium, April 10-13, 2024. Our meeting place: Museum of the Moving Image. Our theme: Work & Play. Adding to the 33 presenters announced in part 1, here’s 33 more archivists, scholars, artists, preservationists and curators who will present these rare, neglected, and preserved audiovisual works. (A few more will soon be announced in the third and final part.) But this mix of exciting films and speakers is reason enough to join us. Registration is open to all. Kimberly Tarr (NYU) premieres Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu (David
The 2024 Helen Hill Award goes to Jeremy Rourke
Every other year, the Orphan Film Symposium confers its Helen Hill Award to an exceptional independent filmmaker whose work befits the late artist’s legacy, celebrating creativity, collaboration, animation, and things made by hand. This year we recognize media artist/animator/musician/performer Jeremy Rourke. Preview his work at jeremyrourke.com, his Vimeo page, and Instagram @jeremy.rourke. But his is a live cinema practice. As part of “Orphans 2024: Work & Play,” Rourke will screen his work and perform original music with the projections at Museum of the Moving Image, April 10-13. The NYU Orphan Film Symposium brings together an international audience of archivists, artists,
[Read on. . . . ] The 2024 Helen Hill Award goes to Jeremy Rourke