One day I'll get to Orphans, which moved from Columbia, SC, to NYU with Dan Streible. "Not a festival, not a conference, but a symposium," Orphans brings together academics, archivists, and artists together to, um, geek out.
A glossary of terms:
Narrowly defined, an orphan film is a motion picture abandoned by its owner. More generally, the term refers to 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. The films on display are rediscovered gems, orphans that have been adopted and saved from neglect and deterioration.
Plus, they brought the world Ro-Revus. [See above.] And would you check out some of the highlights from this lineup, which kicks off at 8 p.m. tonight with a screening of the first flick on the list.
-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
-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
-From Argentina, film archivist-curators Paula Félix-Didier and Fernando Peña (discoverers of the complete 1927 version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis) unveil previously unseen cinema 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
-Orson Welles’ Sketch Book (1955), a rare program made for British television and housed at the Munich Film Museum
I am particularly gutted to miss the films of this year's Helen Hill winner,* Jodie Mack, having fallen in love with her "Yard Work Is Hard Work" at IndieGrits last year. Also, Bill Descasia Morrison will be co-presenting excerpts from nitrate !!! films, including Pathé's stencil-colored The Life of Christ (1908).
And then there is the music. Ganked directly from the Orphans blog, because it works up to a punchline too funny to paraphrase:
Since orphan films are often discovered without sound, a score, or even information on how they were originally screened (assuming they were screened at all), there is always a question of how to present the films to an audience in a way that will be both authentic and entertaining. Many of the pieces featured in this year’s Orphan Film Symposium fall into this silent dilemma, including a variety of works from the silent era and amateur films recorded without sound. After careful discussion on how to best screen each film, decisions were made to present several with an appropriate soundtrack or live accompanist, provide a lecture or narration for others, and to keep a few (very short) films completely silent. Music was the preferred option whenever possible, which lead to a few controversial choices.
One of these situations involves providing piano accompaniment for the historical stag film The Janitor (ca.1930, Kinsey Institute Film Archive). While perhaps not historically "accurate" (was a pianist present at this type of screening?) the music, performed by Ed Pastorini, will certainly relieve some awkwardness associated with watching pornography with our colleagues in total silence.
*Along with Danielle Ash
