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Orphans Online , Session 9 of 10  104 minutes.  The sessions begins with two rediscovered short films, each with a new video essay introducing it and a live discussion afterward. Both are in mixed-genre categories not easily defined. ¡Mujer, tú eres la belleza!, produced anonymously in Argentina in 1928 is a compilation film as well as an exploitation film that aggressively sells nudity as Art. Hands Across the Border (1963) is described by Jesse Lerner as a “naive industrial.”  A previous post of Juneteenth details the importance of the featured finale film of the evening, a bold new work by the

[Read on. . . . ] Watch: Migration Thursday screenings (Orphans Online 9 of 10)

Streaming now: an HD recording of the first of two Wednesday morning sessions, May 27, 2020, Orphans Online. 66 min. This includes both the archival films and the slide presentations and discussion by the four originators of the session: Nicholas Baer, Katerina Korola, Katharina Loew, and Philipp Stiasny, who zoomed in from New York, Chicago, Munich, and Berlin, respectively.  Click to enlarge, or visit vimeo.com/430242631. Naturschutz: Tieraufnahmen, Germany 1915–1920, dir.: Hermann Hähnle. 4 films from Haus des Dokumentarfilms, Stuttgart. 9 min. Die Aran-Inseln (fragment), Germany 1928, dir.: Heinrich Hauser, Print: Bundesarchiv. 15 min.  Here is their original abstract, submitted in 2019.  The

[Read on. . . . ] Watch: Early German Images of the Anthropocene (Orphans Online 4a of 10)

Streaming now: an HD recording of the second session. 87 min.  In choosing to devote the symposium to Water, Climate, and Migration, we sought presentations addressing the current moment of climate crisis as well as historical media that allow us to think about how the planet got to this point. And about how archives and media makers face the need to be greener and cleaner. This panel does these things.  Click to enlarge or go to vimeo.com/429875386. Linda Tadic, “The Environmental Impact of Digital Archives.” In 2017, she founded Digital Bedrock, a provider of digital preservation services, of which she

[Read on. . . . ] Watch: Environmental Impact (Orphans Online 2 of 10)

In this May 17 post, Bradley E. Reeves (Appalachian Media Archives) shared his new 23-minute video compilation, made to stand-in for the live presentation he would have given at the Orphans / Eye International Conference in Amsterdam. The Tennessee Valley Authority: Built for and Owned by The People  (2020) will remain up for future viewings and research.  Finding he didn’t have time enough to include a recent archival cache in the first mix, Reeves cut another stand-alone video. For post-symposium posting. It began with a connection to the symposium’s water theme, but morphed into a biography of someone who left behind media

[Read on. . . . ] Jack Weidemann’s Lost Legend of Calinda

The Ways of Water (Encyclopaedia Britannica Educational Corp., 1971) 16mm, color, sound, 13 min. Cinematographer: Les Blank Provided with permission from Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. (c)1971 by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Thanks to Rachael Stoeltje, Director of Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive, the symposium was able to screen a high-quality digital copy of this exceptional work, made from a 16mm print from IU’s large collection of distribution prints of educational films. Film Digitization Specialist Carmel Curtis did the scanning. Further, due to Stoeltje’s work with  Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., the rights holder granted permission to keep The Ways of Water streaming as part of

[Read on. . . . ] More Ways of Water via IULMIA

“Hello, Orphanistas,” Grazia Ingravalle (Brunel U London) greets us as this video made for Orphans Online 2020 begins. It reminded me of her generous report on the 2019 NYU Orphan Film Symposium at the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna, which she entitled “An Orphans International.” There too she invoked the forced bilingual portmaneau that has hung around the event since 2001. I never intended orphanista to last beyond the symposium that featured films of the Mexican Revolution, but after Emily Cohen published “The Orphanista Manifesto” in American Anthropologist (Dec. 2004) it took on a life and a capitalization of its own.  Indeed the

[Read on. . . . ] Polish Settlements in Brazilian Wilderness (1933)

In Chinese with English subtitles.  Title: Puppet Show 1980 – Asian CineVision CCTV broadcast, 26:19 An additional part of Klavier Wong’s presentation on the history and preservation of Chinatown Cable Television of New York, she offers this broadcast of a puppet show.  This video presents glove puppet shows performed by Quanzhou puppet troupe from Fujian Province, China. The troupe visited New York City in September 1980. They held performances at American Museum of Natural History and at Yung Wing School in Chinatown. Footages are originated from the audiovisual archive of CCTV which is part of “Asian CineVision records” (TAM 416)

[Read on. . . . ] More from CCTV: 1980 Puppet Show

As response to “Orphans Online” comes in, we must thank Tereza for this encouraging note. Used with permission.  From: Tereza Bernátková <t…email> Date: Sat, May 30, 2020 at 12:08 PM Subject: Orphans 2020 To: <orphanfilm@nyu.edu> Dear Orphan Film Symposium organizers,  Thank you. Orphans 2020 was truly the best festival I’ve ever been to. Not only were all sessions so inspirational, the organization was so smooth, it also felt so friendly and close as the ideas about avant-garde cinema, archive films, and equality and justice were widely shared. I’m so grateful I could attend the festival for my first time. Bill

[Read on. . . . ] Letter from Olomouc, CZ: “truly the best festival”

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

[Read on. . . . ] Helen Hill at the Harvard Film Archive

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 #

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,

[Read on. . . . ] Never Lost But Found in the Ocean — Replay must end June 1, 11:59 pm

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

[Read on. . . . ] Chilean Exile Cinema: Dos años en Finlandia

Here’s the new link to the Found In The Ocean live-stream: https://vimeo.com/424136070

Enjoy a special live performance of Deliquescence by A Clockface Orange (Genevieve HK & Rachael Guma, liquid projection) with Lea Bertucci (sound) and Bradley Eros (light). Here is the link to watch the show at 8:30pm EST.

Most of the sessions live-streamed for the Orphan Film Symposium, May 26-29, 2020, will be available for reply.  Some replays may be delayed as some content is deleted or edited according to agreements with presenters and rights holders. Here are links to watch the Climate Wednesday sessions. 

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

[Read on. . . . ] Dear Dr. Julien #9 (letter from Andrea Stultiens)

Michael Grant In 2019, the Media Preservation Unit at New York University Libraries digitized a collection of nearly 400 short pieces of film from the George Amberg and Robert Gessner Papers, held by NYU Special Collections.  Shot on black and white 35mm film, they showed a startling array of scenes of life in New York City in the early 1950s.  For years, the films were known in the library and to NYU cinema studies professor (and Orphan Film Symposium boss) Dan Streible, but their origins (to say nothing of their copyright status!) were a mystery.  Scanning the films enabled us

[Read on. . . . ] New York City Street Scenes, 1952: Leacock/Van Dyke Actualities in the NYU Special Collections

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 . . . .

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

[Read on. . . . ] Early German Images of the Anthropocene