NYU Adopts the Orphan Film Symposium
By Richard Pierce
NYU and the Department of Cinema Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts will host a festival and conference on the preservation, historical value, and creative use of films that time has forgotten, otherwise known as “orphan films.” Attracting more than 300 media artists, curators, archivists, scholars, preservation experts, students, collectors, and film enthusiasts from 17 nations, the biennial event is being held in New York City for the first time.
The sixth Orphan Film Symposium will be held March 26-29 at the Cantor Film Center, 36 East 8th Street. The program will be devoted to panel discussions and screenings that focus on saving and studying this eclectic group of neglected films. These moving images, shot in 16 countries dating back more than 100 years, range from a French film found in an Australian archive (The Invisible Men, 1906) to a Mexican filmmaker’s documentary made in the Ukraine (Naomi Uman’s Kalendar, 2008). Archivists originally coined the term “orphan film” to refer to motion pictures abandoned by their owners, but it also refers to any film outside of the commercial mainstream.
“This ongoing collaboration of archives, universities, artists, and laboratories continues to bring amazing but forgotten film and video artifacts back into the public light,” said cinema studies professor Dan Streible, director of the symposium. Since the first gathering at the University of South Carolina in 1999, the number of supporters and participants has grown steadily. According to Streible, “The participation of private-sector companies and non-profit organizations has lifted the project into a year-round research and preservation initiative.”
Companies contributing film and video preservation services to this year’s program include Kodak, Colorlab, Haghefilm, SAMMA Systems, Universal Studios, Ascent Media, Technicolor, and other labs. Partners from the non-profit sector include the Double R Foundation, the Maxine Greene Foundation, Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation, NYU Libraries, Filmoteca Española, and the Library of Congress.
This year’s screenings address the broad theme of “the state.” Among the highlights are premieres of newly preserved works, including: V—E +1 May 9, 1945, Samuel Fuller’s first film, documenting the liberation of Falkenau concentration camp (Academy Film Archive); La Venganza de Pancho Villa (1934), a compilation film by itinerant exhibitors along the Texas-Mexico border (AFI, with Cineteca di Bologna); Sunday (1961), Dan Drasin’s record of a protest against the ban on folk singing in Washington Square Park (UCLA Film & Television Archive); and Helen Hill’s home movies (2001-05), Super8 films of pre-Katrina New Orleans, part of a tribute to the late filmmaker (Harvard Film Archive).
The symposium is sold out, but NYU will provide a live blog throughout, and audio recordings of talks will be freely available at the event’s conclusion on the Orphan Film Symposium Web site: www.nyu.edu/orphanfilm.
