Chinese Cable Television (1976-1983) from New York’s Chinatown

Klavier Wang introduces the Asia Cinevision CCTV Collection and her compilation of clips from newly-digitized videotapes.  Located on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Chinatown remains one of the biggest and most vibrant Chinese communities in the United States. Using fuzzy video images found on Chinese Cable Television (CCTV) broadcast tapes, we can now take a look at images, both nostalgic and familiar, recorded there between 1976 and 1983. The historical Asian CineVision Records are now under the custodianship of the Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, part of New York University Special Collections in Bobst Library. A recent archival

[Read on. . . . ] Chinese Cable Television (1976-1983) from New York’s Chinatown

The Tennessee Valley Authority: “Built for and Owned by the People” 

Bradley E. Reeves (Appalachian Media Archives) presents The Tennessee Valley Authority: Built for and Owned by The People  This new 23-minute video, made for the Orphan Film Symposium on Water, Climate, and Migration,  documents the history and controversies surrounding the TVA since the 1930s, compiling 8mm and 16mm home movie footage, 16mm documentary film clips, folk music recordings, excerpts from feature films, and local television newsfilm and videotape.  The Tennessee Valley Authority Act of 1933 chartered the agency to modernize the region. It aimed to educate farmers in ways to improve crops, help replant forests, control forest fires, and improve

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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

[Read on. . . . ] Restored films of Henri Plaat

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

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The Austin Flood (Thanhouser, 1911)

For Orphans 2020 Online, citizen archivist Ned Thanhouser (founder of the nonprofit Thanhouser Company Film Preservation, Inc.)  has created a new introduction to a sobering 10-minute documentary record of a deadly Pennsylvania catastrophe filmed in 1911.  Preserved by the Library of Congress, the 35mm print appears to be a complete copy of the footage the Thanhouser Company released just a week after the disaster. This “graphic picture of the calamity” is presented here with a new piano score by Ben Model, recorded for this Orphan Film Symposium debut.  Play full-screen here, or go to vimeo.com/421600208.  And a lost film. As Ned

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Wild Fowl in Slow Motion

In the previous post about the teaser/trailer that Courtney Stephens created for Orphans 2020, I noted her source materials had their own interesting orphan stories. News about the schedule for the late May symposium — Orphans Online — will be posted here in a few days. Meanwhile, a consideration of the short fragments used in the teaser sets up the issues we will be examining in depth — and suggests how neglected films can provoke thinking about water, climate, and migration. The uncanny footage called  If the Antarctic Ice Cap Should Melt? — outtakes (Fox Movietone News, 1929) is our emblematic

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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,”

[Read on. . . . ] An “Orphans International”

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!),

[Read on. . . . ] Program preview

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

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Thomas Elsaesser’s passing

Much more needs to be said about the passing of Thomas Elsaesser four days ago while in Beijing on a lecture tour. For the moment here is a link to listen to his keynote address to the 9th Orphan Film Symposium, The Future of Obsolescence. March 31, 2014, at EYE Film Institute Netherlands. He kindly gave permission to share it. 32 minutes. Thomas Elsaesser <www.thomas-elsaesser.com>, Professor Emeritus at the Department of Media and Culture of the University of Amsterdam, and Visiting Professor at Columbia University. He has authored, edited, and co-edited some twenty volumes on early cinema, film theory, German and

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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

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Twenty

Orphans at Twenty Dan Streible Orphans 2020 is nigh (and its call for proposals now open).   At the moment, however, 20 also reminds me that September 2019 marks the 20th anniversary of the Orphan Film Symposium.  The milestone prompts me to recall the experience of the first event now often called simply “Orphans.”  Some veterans of the 1999 gathering recently sent thoughts about it. September 22 through 25, 1999, the University of South Carolina in Columbia hosted a high-spirited group of symposiasts and attendees for a one-time only event we called Orphans of the Storm: Saving ‘Orphan Films’ in the

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Climate strikes back.

With the 2020 Orphan Film Symposium being devoted to Water, Climate, and Migration, the Global Climate Strikes on the Fridays of September 20 & 27, 2019 are of course relevant to how we are now conceiving of audiovisual recordings of these phenomena.  The 1929 Fox Movietone News outtakes catalogued as If the Antarctic Icecaps Should Melt?  connect neglect media artifacts to the global moment in a potent and uncanny way. Here’s a sample of the 10 minutes.  The University of South Carolina MIRC DVR provides the original Fox librarian’s notation:  “‘Scientists say gigantic frozen sea at South Pole could flood

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