Welcome to the landing page for Orphans in Space: Forgotten Films from the Final Frontier. The short films and liner notes here are adapted from the two-disc DVD set of the same name, published in 2012.
We’ve made this new access site on the occasion of the fifth annual ROGER THAT! conference, February 19-20, 2021. Our Zoom discussion will be live at 4:00pm EST Friday. But this site will remain up for many moons.
NYU’s Orphan Film Project produces DVDs for nonprofit educational use. (We can’t sell them. But find it in many fine lending libraries. Or write to orphanfilm@nyu.edu.) Produced and edited by Walter Forsberg, Alice Moscoso, Dan Streible, and Jonah Volk. Booklet design by Kramer O’Neill.
The 40-page booklet can be downloaded from the Internet Archive.
For the asterisked titles below we have put video online for the occasion. These are web debuts for some, particularly those with added voice-over commentary and/or new music. Titles below are linked to videos, each with screening notes, extensively updated in 2021 for this occasion.
ROCKET SCIENCE disc 1
*Meteorites (1947) Pavel Klushantsev
*The Big Bounce (1960) Jerry Fairbanks
[Chimp Recovery] (1961) RCA Service Company
*Project Apollo (1968) Ed Emshwiller
*Teenage Cosmonauts (1979) Igor Rodachenko
*Zenith Star: Experiment in Space (1987) Martin Marieta
*…These Blazeing Starrs! (2011) Deborah Stratman
IMAGINED GALAXIES disc 2
*A Trip to the Planets (192?) maker unknown
*Beyond the Moon (1960-62) R. E. Barnes
The Flatt & Scruggs Grand Ole Opry Show (1961) WSM-TV
Carillon (Christmas) Parade (1968) WIS and WLTX-TV
*Astrovac: Zero Gravity Personal Body Wash Unit (1970) Fairchild Republic
*Men in Orbit (1979) John Lurie
about Orphans in Space: Forgotten Films from the Final Frontier
In producing the first Orphan Film Project DVD in 2010, space constraints prevented inclusion of two stellar but neglected movies available from NYU Libraries: John Lurie’s long-thought-lost Super-8 acid-trip, Men in Orbit (1979), and the irresistibly entitled Soviet 16mm time-capsule Teenage Cosmonauts (1979), one of hundreds of orphaned propaganda reels in the Communist Party USA collection.
When the stars aligned our interests with Lurie’s mock astronauts of late 1970s No Wave Cinema and late Brezhnevian cosmonautics, this second compilation became thematically destined for the moon and beyond. The results were a booklet and two-disc set — now shared on this website.
Thanks to the generosity of a dozen terrestrial archives, in-kind partners, and institutional supporters, Orphans in Space assembled fifteen works from an array of orphan categories — education, industrial, and sponsored films; productions by amateurs and artists; outtakes from newsreels, newsfilm, and television kinescopes; popular science, animation, corporate video, and state propaganda; even damaged daguerreotypes — each documenting or imagining celestial, human, or animal bodies in outer space. They include the work of anonymous and unidentified cinematographers as well as some true technical and cinematic masters, such as Pavel Klushantsev, Lillian Schwartz, Deborah Stratman, and Ed Emshwiller. The on-screen players include some usual Cold War suspects (Yuri Gagarin, NASA astronauts, William Shatner, Ronald Reagan) as well as obscure figures and computer-generated abstractions. All are presented with the rich historical context that is the raison d’être of the Orphan Film Symposium.
— Walter Forsberg, Alice Moscoso, Dan Streible, and Jonah Volk
about Orphans
The Orphan Film Symposium is a biennial gathering of scholars, archivists, media artists, curators, preservationists, librarians, collectors, distributors, documentarians, students, researchers, musicians, and others devoted to saving, studying, and screening all manner of neglected moving image artifacts. Born in 1999 at the University of South Carolina, the event informally known as “Orphans,” relocated to New York University in 2006. NYU Tisch School of the Arts and its Department of Cinema Studies integrate the work into the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation master’s program. In turn, NYU Libraries shares its invaluable resources.
The enterprise has grown into a year-round research initiative, culminating in the preservation of and new access to an eclectic array of rediscovered films and videos. An international network of individuals and institutions collaborate on what now constitutes the Orphan Film Project. Members also co-organize other events with partners. In between the 2010 and 2012 symposiums these included screenings with UCLA Film and Television Archive, San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, DOC NYC, Museum of Modern Art, the Wisconsin Film Festival, IFC Center, and Mexico’s Cineteca Nacional. Later biennials were held at Museum of the Moving Image (twice), Eye Netherlands Filmmuseum, the Library of Congress, and, for the pandemic edition of 2020, Orphans Online, a collaboration among NYU, Eye, and Mexico’s Documental Ambulante. Other OFS events have been hosted by the Academy Film Archive, Indiana University, Cinémathèque française, Austrian Film Museum, Wexner Center for the Arts, the Academy Theatre in New York, Dartmouth College, Film Forum (NYC), Oddball Films, Los Angeles Filmforum, the Exploratorium, and Mar del Plata International Film Festival in Argentina. In 2022, we set our sights on Montreal and Concordia University, where the symposium will be part of the consortial project Archive/Counterarchive <counterarchive.ca>.
Thanks to Glen Swanson and the Roger That! team.
See also Glen E. Swanson, “Review: Orphans in Space,” The Space Review, Sep. 21, 2020.