NYU Professor Leads Team of Archivists on Mission to Save Orphan Films in Buenos Aires

By Richard Pierce

      A team of American film experts and archivists, under the direction of NYU’s Dan Streible, associate professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts and associate director of the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program (MIAP), traveled to Buenos Aires last month to help the Museo del Cine preserve its orphan films. A small, under-funded city institution, the Museo holds a large and important collection of rare motion pictures, many in urgent need of preservation.
       The all-volunteer team of 12 included preservationists from the Museum of Modern Art, Harvard University, the University of Chicago, BB Optics film lab, as well as NYU faculty, staff, and students. Co-organizers of the project are NYU alumnae Paula Félix-Didier (MIAP ’06), director of the Museo del Cine, and Natalia Fidelholtz (MIAP ’06).
       The Museo del Cine collection is vast and comprises more than 65,000 reels of 16mm film alone. The films come from all over the Americas and Europe, produced as early as 1910 and as late as the 1970s. In 2008, Félix-Didier made international headlines when she uncovered a silent-era masterpiece long presumed lost—the director’s cut of the German film Metropolis (1927). Other “lost” films from early Hollywood and elsewhere are being found as the collection gets inspected.
       The group spent the last two weeks of May in Buenos Aires and devoted its time to the meticulous work of archiving. Films will be inventoried, inspected, repaired, identified, catalogued, and rehoused, with the most valuable finds prepared for laboratory preservation. All work will be done in collaboration with the museum’s staff of five, who will also receive training with supplies and equipment they have previously lacked.
       The Buenos Aires project is part of NYU’s Audio-Visual Preservation Exchange (APEX), which was established by Mona Jimenez, associate arts professor in the Department of Cinema Studies and associate director of MIAP, in 2008 to conduct a similar outreach in Accra, Ghana.
       The results of both the Ghana and Argentina initiatives will be reported and showcased with new prints at the seventh Orphan Film Symposium, April 7-10, 2010, at the Library of Congress, National Audio-Visual Conservation Center. For more on the symposium, visit www.nyu.edu/orphanfilms.