The 7th Orphan Film Symposium opens April 7 with a culturally diverse group of international films, artists, archivists, and professionals from 17 countries in attendance. Hosted by NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and its Department of Cinema Studies, the biennial gathering will meet at the newly renovated SVA Theatre, located at 333 West 23rd Street, through April 10.
More than 80 Presenters from 17 Countries with 80 Works to Converge on NYC
Hosted by Tisch School of the Arts and the Department of Cinema Studies
The 7th Orphan Film Symposium opens April 7 with a culturally diverse group of international films, artists, archivists, and professionals from 17 countries in attendance. Hosted by NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and its Department of Cinema Studies, the biennial gathering will meet at the newly renovated SVA Theatre, located at 333 West 23rd Street, through April 10.
More than 80 presenters will converge to exhibit 80 works (film, video, and digital) dating from 1894 to 2010. Each work addresses the theme Moving Images Around the World. Topics to be discussed include: film repatriation; mobility, distribution, and travel; national, regional, local, and transnational cinemas; and neglected archival material that sheds light on international aspects of history and archiving.
Highlights include:
· Gustav Deutsch’s Film ist. a Girl and a Gun (2009), a narrative collage constructed
using fragments from several European film archives, as well as the Kinsey Institute.
· The premiere of a new restoration of the landmark independent documentary The Cry of
Jazz (1959), with filmmaker Edward O. Bland. The film was restored by Anthology Film Archives with funding provided by The Film Foundation.
· With the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain (1938), the first film by noted photographer
Henri Cartier-Bresson, presumed lost until recently rediscovered in NYU’s Tamiment
Library by Juan Salas, a doctoral candidate in NYU’s Department of History.
· From Argentina, film archivist Paula Félix-Didier (co-discoverer of the complete 1927 version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis) unveils previously unseen works from the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires.
· The premiere of Andy Warhol’s Uptight #3 -- David Susskind (1966), newly preserved
by the Museum of Modern Art and the Warhol Museum.
· The premiere of a never-released film, The Velvet Underground Rehearses (1965), shot
by Danny Williams, a member of Warhol’s Factory, shortly before his mysterious disappearance at age 27.
· Orson Welles’ Sketch Book (1955), a rare program made for British television and housed at the Munich Film Museum.
Since its inception in 1999, the Orphan Film Symposium, under the direction of Dan Streible, associate professor in the Department of Cinema Studies, has become an international summit for those interested in the study, preservation, and exhibition of “orphan films.” Narrowly defined, an orphan film is a motion picture abandoned by its owner, or, more generally all manner of films outside of the commercial mainstream: silent and sponsored films, independent, industrial and avant-garde work, home movies, advertisements, and other ephemeral moving images.