The Danish Film Institute is conducting a funded project to identify and preserve films of Greenland. Curator / Museumsinspektør Thomas C. Christensen made this video report on DFI’s recent work to date. Silent. Adorable puppet theater.
Category: Uncategorized
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
The Public Procurement of a Biometric Love Story
Christian Rossipal introduces a 2017 Swedish Information Video for Asylum Seekers. In the wake of the “European Refugee Crisis” in 2015, when more than 240,000 people entered Sweden to seek asylum, a controversial age assessment technique was introduced in the country. Since many of the asylum seekers claimed to be under the age of 18 – and thus eligible for certain child privileges protected by law – the increasingly restrictive Swedish government gave The National Board of Forensic Medicine (RMV) the mandate to create a new process for age assessment. As a result, RMV introduced MRI scanning of knee joints
[Read on. . . . ] The Public Procurement of a Biometric Love Story
Download the Color Illustrated Program.pdf
Your guide to all things Orphans Online, May 26-29, 2020. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Dg0T71C8Zp0qiA92iEC1HBakhIpgzDuF/view?usp=sharing Thanks to @ValeriaKriletich, designer. #Orphans2020
Rolf Forsberg’s ARK (1970)
Mark Quigley (UCLA Film and Television Archive) brings our attention to his environmental awareness film of 1970 and tells us about its exceptional but under-appreciated filmmaker, Rolf Forsberg (1924-2017). Then watch the whole film. Rolf Forsberg’s Film Group 1 presents Ark. 20 min.
Home Movies from Highland Beach, Maryland
Screening notes by Candace Ming and Ina Archer The selection of films we will screen at the Orphan Film Symposium on Water, Climate, and Migration comes from the National Museum of African American History & Culture (NMAAHC) collection. Zora Lathan and the Mayor of Highland Beach, William Sanders, brought them to the museum, which scanned them over the course of several Great Migration Home Movie Project (GMHMP) appointments. The movies of the incorporated beach community were shot between the early 1950s and the mid-1960s by the Pinson and Sewell families. Here’s a sample. https://vimeo.com/420099929/7c66bedb22 Highland Beach was established over 125 years
Restored films of Henri Plaat
Here’s a true gift from Eye Filmmuseum, delivered expressly for this online edition of the Orphan Film Symposium. The museum and NYU planned for nearly two years to have the symposium convene in conjunction with the Eye International Conference. Although forces have made all of us re-organize the best laid plans, we are grateful that Eye continues to share its remarkable collections and curatorial talents. Since the first Orphan Film event in 1999, the Filmmuseum has contributed to the symposium. Curator Mark Paul Meyer introduces us to Dutch visual artist Henri Platt and two of the ten short experimental films
Movies at War (U.S. Army Signal Corps, 1944)
For Orphans 2020 Online, NYU PhD candidate Tanya Goldman has created a video introduction to Movies at War (1944) — an episode of the U.S. Army Signal Corps “Film Bulletin” series. She discusses how the film’s depiction of the global transport of film reels allows viewers to make sense of a complex media infrastructure and how the use of portable 16mm projectors gave life to a multi-sited nontheatrical circuit. As the Movies at War narrator proclaims, army effort propelled “entertainment unreeling to span the universe!” Play her introduction (13 min.), with a 9 min. excerpt from Movies at War: https://vimeo.com/418490057 …And there’s
[Read on. . . . ] Movies at War (U.S. Army Signal Corps, 1944)
Trailers
At the 2018 NYU Orphan Film Symposium, filmmaker/programmer Courtney Stephens and programmer/filmmaker KJ Relth debuted their creative archival compilation Mating Games, made from amateur films shot at Muscle Beach in 1963. (The USC Hefner Moving Image Archive supplied the scans of 16mm films shot by Russell Saunders.) For the 2020 symposium, @courtcolt offered to create a video teaser or two, pointing to the May gathering at Amsterdam’s Eye Filmmuseum and its themes of water, climate, and migration. As we were comparing archival film sources to use the world changed and the Orphan Film Symposium is now migrating to an all-online edition for
Orphans Online (corona)
A picturesque reminder: the 2020 Orphan Film Symposium on Water, Climate, & Migration is migrating to an online edition for late May. Details to come. Created by Courtney Stephens.
Moving Water Montage Power
For our class on Curating Moving Images, undergraduate student and filmmaker Linh Vu created a sixty-second video trailer heralding the 2020 Orphan Film Symposium on Water, Climate, and Migration. As an experimental small-gauge filmmaker, she was inspired by the rhythm of Jane and Stan Brakhage’s noted 1959 birthing film. She has written about Sergei Eisenstein’s conception of montage as “an idea that arises from the collision of independent shots.” (See her essay “Window Water Baby Moving and the Power of Montage,” on her site linhvufilm.com, December 23, 2019.) Here’s Linh Vu’s collage, made from of a dozen pieces — archival
Wasser
Yes, the May 2020 Orphan Film Symposium will be MIGRATING to an online format. (More on that later.) Meanwhile, here’s literally a minute for some audiovisual play with orphan films and our theme of water. Soojin Park and Lan Linh Nguyen Hoai created this video trailer for Orphans 2020 just before the global pandemic forced them away from NYU NYC. [archiveorg Orphans_2020_trailer1 width=640 height=480 frameborder=4 webkitallowfullscreen=true mozallowfullscreen=true] They set about editing from a pool of digitized films after reading an exposé about the global water crisis in Le Monde diplomatique 26 (2019). Linh translated the opening lines of Wasser. Von
Alas!
UPDATE: The 2020 Orphan Film Symposium / Eye International Conference must be canceled. Alas! The program listing will remain posted here, for the record. Such an exciting line up of speakers and screenings it was. What a disappointment to be unable to gather in Amsterdam and convene with beloved allies, partners, and friends from around the world. Thanks to the Eye Filmmuseum and our program committee of Giovanna Fossati, Gerdien Smith, Eef Masson, and Jennifer Peterson for all the work. After we all figure out how life is going to
Haverstraw on Paper
In “68mm 8k Phantoms,” I wrote about how the 1897 American Mutoscope and Biograph film The Haverstraw Tunnel was highly praised upon its release but is now difficult to see. And it’s not on any website. The next day the Library of Congress Moving Image Section responded by sending a ProRes MOV file. So here, online for the first time, is a version of the 1897 motion picture copyrighted in 1903 as Haverstraw Tunnel. The Library scanned its silent, black-and-white, 16mm film at 24 frames per second.. (Downloadable at archive.org/details/haverstrawtunnel). The speed looks about right, although the original 68mm films
68mm 8K Phantoms
This writer has been viewing film since the Lumiere babies, the Haverstraw Tunnel and the Empire State Express were the screen stars. . . . — Epes W. Sargent, Moving Picture World,Oct. 16, 1920 Only now do I fully understand this statement and appreciate its 1920 utterance. I did not see The Empire State Express (American Mutoscope Co., 1896) until perhaps 2020. And I have not seen The Haverstraw Tunnel (1897) at all. Where can we see them? The latter is absent from the web and video releases, but hasn’t disappeared
An “Orphans International”
At the 2020 Orphan Film Symposium in Amsterdam, we’ll see films from the 1930s about Polish diaspora. Archivist Iga Harasimowicz (Polish National Film Archive) will talk about the collection and recent digitization work, joined by scholar Grazia Ingravalle (Brunel U London). Opening frames from Among Poles Living in France (1938) & Polish Settlement in Brazil (1936). Filmoteka Narodowa. Meanwhile, Prof. Ingravalle has just published her report on “Radicals,” the 2019 Orphan Film Symposium at the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna. Read it on the blog of Domitor, the International Society for the Study of Early Cinema. “As a transnational scholar,”
Program preview
Updated April 12, 2020. Here’s the pre-Corona preview of the programming we anticipated for the 12th NYU Orphan Film Symposium — Water, Climate, and Migration. Now we will migrate online later in May 2020. Although we cannot meet at Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, much of the material will be presented in online forms, TBA. The original listings (below) were grouped by theme and topic. However, they give an indication of the rich diversity of films, presenters, subjects, and forms to be offered. OPENING ATTRACTIONS: Recent Preservation from the Eye Collection Water and Movement: 68mm Mutoscope & Biograph restorations (in 8K!),
Helen Hill Awards 2020
For the 12th Orphan Film Symposium, NYU Cinema Studies and the University of South Carolina Film and Media Studies Program present the 2020 Helen Hill Award to Martha Colburn and Jaap Pieters. Each biennial symposium presents the award to independent filmmakers whose work embodies the creative spirit, passion, and activism of the late animator, filmmaker, and educator, a Columbia, South Carolina-born artist and citizen of the world who inspired many. Colburn and Pieters will each present selections from their own work to an international audience of archivists, scholars, curators, and artists at the NYU Orphan Film Symposium, hosted by Eye
Deadline
Orphans 12: Water, Climate, and Migration The first deadline for proposals to present at the May 23-27, 2020 Orphan Film Symposium in Amsterdam was November 19th. The call for proposals remains posted here and at eyefilm.nl/call-for-proposals. (We may consider proposals that arrive after that date, but the program committee has begun reviewing proposals.) Three details to highlight: Orphans 2020 proposals will be reviewed by a program committee: Chief Curator Giovanna Fossati and Gerdien Smit at Eye Filmmuseum; University of Amsterdam assistant professor Eef Masson, coordinator of the MA program in Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image (Media Studies); film