Orphan Film Symposium

January 7, 2024: Happy 130th Fred Ott Day.  January 7 because W. K. L. Dickson registered the title for copyright as Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze, January 7th, 1894. Below is an abbreviated version of last year’s post (“Fred Ott Sneezes, Twice”), which celebrated the 2023 web debut of the full-length Sneeze movie.  Happy January 7th!  Two thousand twenty-three begins with a film premiere of sorts for Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze, January 7th, 1894. The day is an anniversary for the milestone of cinema commonly known as Fred Ott’s Sneeze. In 1894, Thomas Edison instructed W. K. L. Dickson

[Read on. . . . ] Fred Ott Sneezes, 130th anniversary

The 2024 NYU Orphan Film Symposium convenes April 10-13, 2024, at Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, NYC. Presenters will be selected from proposals to this open call. Submit by October 16, 2023.   Theme: Work & Play We invite proposals for presentations that respond to the theme(s) of work and/or play, broadly considered. How have orphan films (neglected audiovisual media) recorded, represented, influenced, and imagined these  subjects throughout the history of moving images?             Conceptions of work might include: labor, industry, class, jobs, occupations, production, productivity (and failure), automation, technologies, performance; people, animals, machines, and

[Read on. . . . ] Work & Play in 2024 (submit by Oct. 16)

Update: The day before my Curating Moving Images class would see these program notes, Alfred Leslie passed. He was a lion who impacted a lot of things in his long life, including the fledgling Orphan Film Symposium in 2001. His energy and intellect shaped the way I think about the work.  Here’s the screening note that went with the 2001 Orphan Film Symposium session that coupled The House Is Black (1962) and Alfred Leslie’s film Birth of a Nation 1965.  Although the Farrokhzad poetic documentary about lepers is memorable in any context, it resonates differently in this idiosyncratic pairing than in the teary setting of “The

[Read on. . . . ] Rescue Operations and Alfred Leslie

Kol Nidre (nidrei, nidrey, or כל נדרי) is an Aramaic phrase translated as “all vows.” The words are heard and chanted in synagogues on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement in Judaism. In 2022, “Kol Nidre night” falls on October 4. (Hebrew calendar: Tishri 9, 5783). Music associated with the text has been around a thousand years. Recordings of pieces entitled Kol Nidre began well over a century ago.  Musical settings for the traditional chant have taken many forms over centuries. Some twenty-first century artistic uses of the tradition have crossed paths with orphan film work, which

[Read on. . . . ] All Vows again

Here’s a remarkable presentation at the NYU Orphan Film Symposium on Counter-Archives, recorded June 16, 2022, at Concordia University. It centers on a rediscovered and restored nonfiction film (a sponsored film, a travelogue, a newsreel production, an ethnographic film), fraught with colonialist rhetoric and ideological  baggage — yet redeemed, or at least re-contextualized and informed, by a First Nation perspective. “Making it right.” The film Totem Land (1927) runs 10 minutes; the session 51. Aiding in the contextualization is a sound newsfilm fragment recorded a year later, in which famed anthropologist Franz Boas speaks plainly against “scientific” racism.  Kester Dyer (Carleton

[Read on. . . . ] Watch: Ethnographic Films of George Hunt

“At last the day has came.” So says Frau Leuchtag to her fellow refugee Carl, headwaiter at Rick’s Café Américain in the film classic Casablanca (1942). The day they celebrate is a departure to America. Today’s celebration is the long-anticipated Kino Lorber release of the four-disc box set Cinema’s First Nasty Women — or at least the New York Times publication of “Rewriting Women Back Into Film History” by film critic Manohla Dargis. Her assessment? “A mind-expanding endeavor, the set features 99 mostly comic rarities produced from 1898 to 1926, gleaned from archives and libraries across the globe. It is

[Read on. . . . ] Watch: Nasty Women teaser

“A Call to Emancipation: Liberating Discourses in Mexican and Spanish Student Films of the 1950s.” Recorded at Concordia University, June 17, 2022. These were the first two of three presentations for an Orphan Film Symposium session called Cine útil (a nod to the 2011 anthology Useful Cinema, edited by our hosts Charles Acland and Haidee Wasson, and which contains essays by 5 scholars also participating in the symposium this year:  Zoë Druick, Gregory Waller, Joseph Clark, Charles Tepperman, and Michael Zryd ).  David M.J. Wood introduces a ten-minute film produced in Mexico and performs live English translation of the recorded Spanish-language

[Read on. . . . ] Watch: A Call to Emancipation