Orphan Film Symposium, Explanation of "Orphan Widow," and Keynote Address

Orphans 6 (Orphan Film Symposium, 6th iteration) kicked off officially this morning in the Cantor Film Center. Richard Allen, the Chair of NYU Cinema Studies, introduced organizer and faculty member Dan Streible by saying all kinds of nice things about him, including holding up Streible's new book, Fight Pictures, and reading passages from Charles Musser's introduction. If you've been following along in previous posts, I am Streible's spouse, and I am sometimes known as the "orphan widow."

Because Streible spends an unreal amount of time preparing for Orphan events, I came up with this witticism to describe my status. I'm actually listed in the official program that way. I really haven't felt much like the widow at all for Orphans 6, however, probably because he's often at home and on the computer, and I'm also at the keyboards, blogging half the day. We spend quality time at home sitting on the couch with our laptops and watching TV at the same time.

Back to the symposium. The first bit of orphan film was from the University of South Carolina's Fox Movietone Newsreel collection and was footage from 1929 showing sights and sounds of New York's Radio Row (Wikipedia entry). The camera caught the action of the neighborhood from the top of a truck, showing the streetscapes and people in this once vibrant section of the Lower West Side.

Paolo Cherchi Usai's keynote address focused on the dilemmas facing state-run media archives, and as he spoke, he showed us a silent film from the National Film and Sound Archive in Australia. I'm not sure what year the film was made, but it was some sort of older instructional film to show the evolution of animals as upright walking creatures. The film opened with crawling, low-riding animals such as alligators and moved up to primates. The shocker came at the end, with a humiliating racist depiction of indigenous Australians. After the film concluded, Usai pointed out that the film was at at one point "de-acquisitioned," or "orphaned, but it's now back in the archive's collection. The larger issue, he explained, was the potential for all of cinema history, as film, to become orphaned in the digital age.

Image: early arrivals, Orphan Film Symposium, Thursday morning, March 27, 2008.