April 7-10, 2010
in New York City

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The Orphan Film Symposium marks its seventh biennial gathering of archivists, scholars, preservationists, curators, collectors, and media artists devoted to saving, studying, and screening neglected moving images. For Orphans 7, NYU Cinema Studies partners with the School of Visual Arts. All sessions will take place in the new, state-of-the-art cinema space at 333 W. 23rd Street: the Visual Arts Theater.

Registration limited to 250 people.

Theme: Moving Pictures Around the World

Following on the internationalism evident at the 2008 Orphan Film Symposium (at which 18 nations were represented), Orphans 7 focuses on transnational and global issues. How have moving images circulated across national and other boundaries? How are neglected archival materials accessed and used across and within borders?

More than 60 presenters address topics including: film repatriation; mobility, distribution, and travel; regional and transnational cinemas; migration and global/local dynamics; heritage, cultural property, and developing nations; and the many forms of neglected archival material that shed light on international aspects of history and archiving. See new works by media artists, including the recipients of the 2010 Helen Hill Award -- Danielle Ash and Jodie Mack.

The full program will be posted here in December 2009.

scheduled highlights include

▲ APEX: NYU's two Audio-Visual Preservation Exchange projects, with newly preserved films from (1) Ghana (Dept of Information Services), presented by Mona Jimenez, Jennifer Blaylock, & Manthia Diawara and from (2) Argentina presented by Paula Félix-Didier (Museo del Cine de Buenos Aires) and others

▲ Film Connection: repatriating American silent films from Australia, with Annette Melville (National Film Preservation Foundation), Meg Labrum (National Film and Sound Archive), Richard Abel, Erin Hanna, Nancy McVittie, and Buckey Grimm

▲ Paolo Cherchi Usai (Haghefilm Foundation) a history of film repatriation

▲ A Pictorial Story of Hiawatha (1903), films and lanterns slide by Katherine Ertz and Charles Bowden, presented by Nancy Watrous (Chicago Film Archives)

▲ Matthew Solomon (College of Staten Island, CUNY), the global circulation of Star-Films, 1896-2010, with a screening of Rip's Dream (1905, Georges Méliès)

▲ premiere of the restoration of The Cry of Jazz (1958), introduced by filmmaker Edward O. Bland, with Anna McCarthy (NYU) and Jacqueline Stewart (Northwestern Univ)

▲ NYU Tamiment Library's rediscovery of With the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain (1938), the first film by Henri Cartier-Bresson[!], introduced by Juan Salas and Alice Moscoso

▲ Vanessa Toulmin (Univ of Sheffield) Edison films, 1894-95, repatriated from the UK

▲ The Florestine Collection (2010), a film by Helen Hill completed by Paul Gailiunas

▲ Film ist. A Girl and a Gun (2009) Gustav Deutsch & Hanna Schimek, Vienna

▲ Modern Magician (1933), first film preserved for the Kinsey Institute, Gregory A. Waller (Indiana Univ)

▲ Stefan Drößler (Munich Filmmuseum) with Orson Welles Sketchbook (1955)

▲ Bill Brand (BB Optics), Andrew Lampert (Anthology Film Archives), Mark Toscano (Academy Film Archive), and Scott MacDonald (Hamilton College), on experimental restorations of films by Chick Strand, Ericka Beckman, et al.

▲ Fernando Peña (MALBA) on Afrodita (1928), a "French" film from Argentina

▲ Charles Musser (Yale Univ) showing The Investigators (1948, Union Films), script by Abel Meeropol, music by Serge Hovey

▲ early amateur films by women in New Zealand/ Aotearoa, India, China, Egypt, Algeria, Japan, the Philippines Kathy Dudding (New Zealand Film Archive), Kimberly Tarr (Smithsonian Institution) on Northeast Historic Film's Adelaide Pearson Collection, Mark G. Cooper (USC Moving Image Research Collections) Claudia Lea Phelps's 35mm amateur travel films

▲ Sergei Kapterev (Moscow Research Institute of Film Art) on rediscovered reels of Mikhail Kalatozov’s Their Kingdom (1928)

▲ The Augustas (1957-58), Scott Nixon's amateur film, introduced by Heidi Rae Cooley (USC)

▲ Another Pilgrim (1968) Elaine Summer's sponsored film for the World Council of Churches

▲ Susan Courtney & Laura Kissel (Univ of South Carolina) present the Helen Hill Award

▲ Pickles for Nickels (2009, Danielle Ash)

▲ Yard Work Is Hard Work (2008, Jodie Mack)

▲ Nico de Klerk (Nederlands Filmmuseum) and Julia Noordegraaf (Univ of Amsterdam) city promotion films

▲ the FilmStadt Wien project: Michael Loebenstein, Vrääth Öhner, Werner Schwarz (Univ of Vienna), Michael Cowan (McGill Univ), with films including Die Entdeckung Wiens am Nordpol [The Discovery of Vienna at the North Pole] (Ladislaw Tuszinsky, 1923) and Ein Film vom Wäschewaschen [A Film on Doing One’s Laundry] (1933)

▲ Center for Home Movies preservations: Wallace Kelly's New York, Helen Hill's New Orleans

▲ Jiří Horníček (Národní Filmový Archiv) the Czech amateur film The Soldier's Story (1938)

▲ Marsha & Devin Orgeron (Prague Institute, NCSU) with the Czech driver's safety film Nevíme dne [We Don’t Know When . . .] (1946)

▲ Terri Francis (Yale Univ) the Jamaica Film Unit's Parables, 1951-1957

▲ Origin of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata (Edison, 1909), piano accompaniment by Dennis James

▲ Scott Simmon (UC Davis) & Marty Marks (MIT) with a 1914 Texas-Mexico border ammunition smuggling docudrama

▲Thomas Elsaesser and Natalia Fidelholtz (Storycorps.org) showing home movies from Germany of the 1930s and 40s

▲ One Tenth of a Nation (1940) introduced by Carol Radovich (Rockefeller Archive Center), Julie Hubbert and Craig Kridel (Univ of South Carolina)

▲ filmmaker Esther B. Robinson presents newly-preserved films by Danny Williams, 1965-66 and Andy Warhol's Uptight #3 -- David Susskind (1966)

▲ Leah Kerr and Trisha Lendo (UCLA) the Mayme A. Clayon Library and Museum film collection, Kilroy Was Is Here (194?)

▲ restorations of 17.5mm films from Europe (Haghefilm, Nederlands Filmmuseum, & Martina Roepke, Utrecht Univ) and the U.S. (Colorlab and Michael Rothschild)

▲ filmmaker Bill Morrison & George Willeman (Library of Congress) present beautiful decaying nitrate

▲ Zhang Zhen (NYU) Hou Yao's A Poet from the Sea (1927), fragment preserved by the Cineteca di Bologna

▲ Bill Morrison with The Around the World Travel Diary of Mr. and Mrs. Felix M. Warburg and James H. Becker (1927) surveying Jewish refugee camps for the Joint Distribution Committee

▲ and more . . .

Questions? Dan.Streible@NYU.edu

NB: The symposium was previously scheduled to take place at the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, Packard Campus, in Culpeper, Virginia. However, due to uncertainty about the completion of technical upgrades to the Packard theater, the Library is unable to host. The LOC staff will provide films and other logistical support to the 2010 event, and looks forward to future collaborations.

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