The State of Orphan Films Editor’s Introduction

A little more than a decade ago, the term orphan film emerged as the predominant metaphor for motion picture preservation in the United States, and elsewhere. A decade ago, in September 1999, the first Orphan Film Symposium took place at the University of South Carolina. This special theme issue of The Moving Image presents ten essays derived from talks given at the sixth Orphan Film Symposium, held at New York University (NYU), in March 2008. Such a full-fledged publication, aptly in the AMIA journal, brings the work of the Orphan Film Project to a new level of achievement. Much as dozens of orphan films have been preserved by or for the symposium, many of the scholarly presentations heard at “Orphans” have subsequently been published on their own, in journals (including this one) and books.

In his editor’s foreword to The Moving Image 6.2 (Fall, 2006), Jan-Christopher Horak wrote enthusiastically about attending the fifth Orphan Film Symposium at the University of South Carolina, which focused on sponsored films. He described “a palpable sense of excitement” at the event and saw potential for “seismic changes to film and media studies,” based on the rediscovered works and new ideas presented there. “More than one participant predicted the opening of a whole new field, comparable to the sea change brought about by the FIAF Brighton Conference in 1978, which gave birth to early cinema studies. Indeed, there was a sense at Orphans 5 of history in the making. . . .” Horak concluded that the symposium might even enter “into the mythology of film historiography.” Such laud will be difficult to fulfill—and certainly made Orphans 5 a tough act for its sequel symposium to follow.

Independent of the Orphan Film Symposium, scholarly research into sponsored films has indeed begun to flourish. The Field Guide to Sponsored Films (National Film Preservation Foundation, 2006) by Rick Prelinger was a milestone. At least three anthologies are scheduled for publication by university presses in the year ahead: Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (Amsterdam, 2009) edited by Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau; Useful Cinema (Duke, forthcoming), edited by Charles Acland and Haidee Wasson; and Learning with the Lights Off: A Reader in Educational Film (Oxford, 2010), the brainchild of Devin Orgeron and Marsha Orgeron (incoming editors in chief for The Moving Image, by the way). Studies of other orphan genres are also on the rise, such as Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmermann’s edited volume Mining the Home Movie (University of California Press, 2008). The authors retrace the forces that have generated recent interest in amateur films. They note that the Orphan Film Symposium events “have functioned to generate new research and curatorial activities and have lent increased visibility to the orphan film cause. They have also provided a significant academic and curatorial context for amateur film research.”

This collection of essays from Orphans 6, then, joins an emerging body of scholarship. The sixth symposium focused on works of, by, about, for, against, and under “the state,” broadly conceived. Media archivists, scholars, filmmakers, preservationists, curators, lab experts, collectors, distributors, librarians, students, and other enthusiasts convened to share their passion for the preservation, study, and creative use of neglected motion pictures. For three full days and four nights, presenters addressed the role of orphan films in recording, constructing, and imagining the state. Some three hundred orphanistas from eighteen nations experienced forty hours of screenings, talks, discussions, and performances. Far from being a parade of government-sponsored propaganda and sober instruction on citizenship (“not that there’s anything wrong with that”), the symposium drew an exciting array of film and video that added humor to the sobriety and offset the propaganda with perplexity, nuance, beauty, and truthiness.

The first Orphan Film Symposium began with screening part of this never-released newsreel story. “Leon Trotsky, of the Soviet Republic” (as John Ford introduces him in this early sound newsreel) addresses the Movietone microphone—in Russian: “Comrades, by the irony of fate I play the role of Trotsky in the new Raoul Walsh production by the Fox studio.” The faux Trotsky is Boris Charsky, an actor in Walsh’s The Red Dance. Bewildered Fox employees behind him include Tom Mix (top left, in cowboy hat). Recorded on the Fox lot in Hollywood, January 27, 1928. Source: MVTN 0–282: Dedication of “Park Row” [1928], Fox Movietone News Collection, Newsfilm Library, Moving Image Research Collections, University of South Carolina. Reproduced with permission.

In addition to screening material discussed in the following essays, the event presented an admixture that included:

• • Singapore Rebel (2005) and other political protest videos by Martyn See, which the Asian Film Archive took in at a time these were banned by law

• • an evening of short works by the late filmmaker Helen Hill, including The House of Sweet Magic (1981), a Super 8 stop-motion film she made at the age of eleven—which was rediscovered only days before the symposium (Harvard Film Archive now houses the Hill collection)

• • two artful amateur productions saved by the Center for Home Movies: Our Day (1938, a family portrait made in Lebanon, Kentucky, by Wallace Kelly) and Think of Me First as a Person (1960–75, a home movie compilation by the father of a boy with Down Syndrome)

• • Sunday (1961), Dan Drasin’s documentary about Greenwich Village protesters singing folk music in Washington Square Park (preserved by UCLA Film & Television Archive with funding from the Film Foundation)

• • Noticiario de Laya Films no. 3 (1937), a Catalan newsreel from the Spanish Civil War, formerly presumed lost (preserved by NYU Libraries with the Filmoteca Española)

• • the Academy Film Archive’s new preservation of Corporal Samuel Fuller’s amateur footage of his U.S. Army division’s liberation of Falkenau concentration camp in May 1945

• • 200 (aka Bicentennial, 1975), a three-minute piece of psychedelica by animator Vince Collins, done for the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) [!?]

• • two original 16mm camera rolls shot by cine-poet Jem Cohen at Ground Zero in 2004

As this partial list demonstrates, eclecticism is a precept of the symposium and inherent in the orphan film rubric. This translates into engaging forms of programming and expands our understanding of the history of film and other recording media. In this respect the biennial symposium has precursors that include the annual AMIA Archival Screening nights and programs within AMIA conferences, such as the Small Gauge Symposium in 2001 or the Regional Audio-Visual Archives screening in Montreal in 1999. Maryann Gomes, then director of North West Film Archive (UK), curated the latter. She entitled it “The Richness of the Regions: Projecting a Global Picture of the Twentieth Century” and screened an eclectic set of short works from around the world. The richness inspired curatorial decisions for the symposium and furthered my realization that historians are not seeing most of the films that exist to be studied.

Readers of The Moving Image no doubt know that an orphan film symposium is not a festival of movies about parentless children, but it is worth answering here the question often asked by both insiders and outsiders: what is an “orphan film”? There are two answers.

First, there is the legal problem of an orphaned reel as encountered in archival practice: a film whose rights holder/s (if they exist) have abandoned its care, or are unaware of the legal claim they have on it. Archives have sought the right to take proper care of such items without having to worry about legal trouble should an owner later appear. U.S. copyright law has reckoned with the phenomenon of “orphan works” in recent years, and the creative, legal, and archival communities continue to seek practical and legislative reforms that will allow these works to be preserved and used. Orphans 6 included a panel on these issues.

A second definition, however, explains the curatorial and intellectual energy associated with the phenomenon. Orphan films can be conceived as all types of neglected cinema. While a film might not be literally abandoned by its owner, if it is unseen or not part of the universe of knowledge about moving images, it is essentially orphaned. Its orphan-ness might be material, conceptual, or both. Physical deterioration obviously puts films at risk. In this sense, more moving image works are orphaned—or headed to the orphanage—than not. But even a preserved and well-stored film is orphan-like if its existence is unknown outside of the archive.

Although most material presented at the symposium over the past ten years was captured on celluloid, television and video have also been part of the project from the beginning. Likewise born-digital and digitized audiovisual content. Film prints projected on mechanical projectors continue to attract us. Such projection is increasingly a special event. So much so that we can say, ironically, mechanical reproduction on motion picture film has an “aura.”¹ However, pictures and sounds captured and carried on magnetic and digital media can also fit comfortably under the orphan rubric. [See, for example, Dylan Cave, “‘Born Digital’—Raised an Orphan?” The Moving Image 8.1 (2007).]

The term orphan film may itself morph into a post-celluloid phraseology, but the conceptual understanding of cultural productions that get neglected will remain a binding concept. Further, the conservator’s interest in the materiality of videotape, computer files, and future formats is an extension of issues earlier addressed in the science and practice of film preservation.

Of course casting too wide a net can make a concept untenable. The orphan film phenomenon maintains an affinity for neglected, lost, damaged, hidden, excised, rare, unique, odd, experimental, ephemeral, and utilitarian productions. Although they have their own compelling content and preservation issues, works such as, say, The Wizard of Oz, The Lord of the Rings, Yojimbo, Schindler’s List, or Seinfeld (not that there’s anything wrong with that) remain peripheral to the orphan film phenomenon. In this sense, the focus on orphaned material decenters the most popular and commercially successful movies. Rather the center is on recordings as historical documents. Orphan films are often “not-a-movie” films, artifacts not released theatrically: unfinished news-reels, outtakes, amateur works, test reels, unidentified footage, surveillance recordings, and works from other nontheatrical genres.

The difficulties institutions encountered with not-a-movie material led to adoption of the orphan metaphor within preservation circles generally and the Orphan Film Symposium specifically. The informal term got picked up in hearings for the Library of Congress National Film Preservation Plan. The Librarian’s 1993 report on those discussions among representatives of American archives, studios, labs, and other stakeholders categorically defined the division between commercial movies and all “the other” films, “the ‘orphans’ singled out in testimony.”

If there is a single division that separates most of the preservation issues discussed in this report, it is between two categories of films: those that have evident market value and owners able to exploit that value; and the other films, often labeled “orphans,” that lack either clear copyright holders or commercial potential to pay for their continued preservation. In practice, the former are primarily features from major Hollywood studios; the latter—numerically the majority—include newsreels and documentaries, avant-garde and independent productions, silent films where copyright has expired, even certain Hollywood sound films from now defunct studios. For these films the urgency may be greatest.²

A year later the Librarian removed the scare quotes. Redefining Film Preservation: A National Plan urged “public investment” in orphan films. It advocated a “foundation to raise funds for the preservation of orphan films.” The National Film Preservation Foundation that emerged in 1996 has since provided grants to preserve more than 1,500 at-risk films. The foundation maintains the operational definition found in the 1994 plan, supporting a “broad range of materials of artistic and documentary value.”³

Newsreels often head the list of orphan categories, a fact relevant to the formation of the symposium. In 1998, George Terry, then dean of libraries at the University of South Carolina, asked me to organize a one-off conference on film preservation, one that would highlight his Newsfilm Library’s huge and wonderful collection of Fox Movietone newsreel outtakes (most of it nitrate). As a film historian I had not been directly involved with preservation. But when I first heard an archivist refer to newsreel outtakes as “orphan films,” the term resonated with prevalent strains of media history and cultural studies. Much media scholarship continues to address content outside of the mainstream—censored works, independent film, the avant-garde, cable access programs, nontheatrical film traditions, and the like.

Needing to learn more about preservation, I attended the 1998 AMIA conference, promoting an interdisciplinary symposium on the subject of orphan films. I got recommendations identifying the best speakers to invite. They all said yes—as did a like number of accomplished scholars who knew the archival world well. Several media artists who work with rich collections of archival films (Carolyn Faber, Alan Berliner, Péter Forgács, and Bill Morrison) came with recent work. This 1999 event was entitled “Orphans of the Storm: Saving ‘Orphan Films’ in the Digital Age.” The designation Orphan Film Symposium came later; through word of mouth, the shorthand “Orphans” stuck as a nickname for the event.

For whatever reasons, the forum for archivists, academics, and artists to talk without disciplinary borders worked. Participants urged a sequel. Though university resources were limited, archives, laboratories, and collectors began to offer help, their generosity allowing the symposium to grow. The Library of Congress staff in particular contributed greatly as informal technical and curatorial advisors. Private-sector sponsors came on board. The Selznick School of Film Preservation began bringing its students and the NYU Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) program followed suit. Later, master’s students from sister programs at the University of East Anglia, UCLA, and the University of Amsterdam joined in.

People from diverse professions and avocations have been symposiasts, all stirring the pot and enriching the experience. They share at least one thing, however: a passion for saving, studying, and screening neglected moving images. It was this dedication and enthusiasm that led me to hail them as orphanistas at the second symposium. Surprisingly the term continued to circulate. L.A. Weekly’s review of Orphans 2 ran under the headline “Orphanistas!” The 2003 Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival featured new work by Bill Morrison and Gregorio Rocha, who were introduced as orphanistas. A further type of legitimation followed when Mead festival audience member Emily Cohen published a review essay, “The Orphanista Manifesto: Orphan Films and the Politics of Reproduction” in American Anthropologist. (There is no actual manifesto, by the way.) Most recently, Caroline Frick’s forthcoming book Saving Cinema (Oxford University Press) asserts genuine influence to the preservation cause that orphanistas advocate, even referring to the “orphanista mantra.” (There is no actual mantra, by the way.)⁴

The symposium is also the planned culmination of year-round research and preservation work. The sample of authors, topics, and films in this issue is representative of the work of the Orphan Film Project. Essays cover historical periods ranging from the 1910s to the 1980s and forms as diverse as campaign films, state tourism promotions, agricultural and educational shorts, silent features, advertisements, home movies, artful propaganda, union films, religious broadcasting, military training films, and antiwar documentaries.

We begin with Paolo Cherchi Usai’s 2008 keynote address on the state of state-run film and media archives around the world. He reflects on his Orphans of the Storm keynote from 1999—“What Is an Orphan Film?”—in the context of the “digital storm” of the intervening decade. The text appears here as it was delivered.

Two essays examine films of the silent era. Although the style and nature of the works they assess differ starkly, both involve the U.S. government (hero and villain). Jennifer Zwarich’s study of Department of Agriculture films is original on two counts. She analyzes a subset of a large corpus of little-known films produced by the USDA in the teens and twenties. Second, Zwarich argues that the filmmakers were progressive reformers, who succeeded in alleviating a social ill; this counters the many media studies that have presumed that state-sponsored bureaucracies simply reinforce status quo ideology and social structures. Juana Suárez and Ramiro Arbeláez, on the other hand, bring to light quite a different treatment of Uncle Sam. The Colombian feature film Garras de oro (1926) is a scabrous satirical harangue against Theodore Roosevelt, with a prologue in which “Tío Samuel” literally steals the isthmus of Panama from a map of Colombia. Preserved by the Museum of Modern Art and the Fundación Patrimonio Fílmico Colombiano twenty years ago, the film has not been substantially written about until now.

Jennifer Horne’s reintroduction to filmmaker James Blue’s three documentaries promoting the Alliance for Progress reverses the U.S.–Colombia power relations. These U.S. Information Agency productions skillfully walk the line between American propaganda and a liberal, humanist form of artistic representation. These three preserved films exist as beautiful 35mm prints at the National Archives. Horne suggests, as a few others have, that the study of USIA films merits a long-term research project, needing many contributors. [A note of serendipity: at Orphans 6, the rare screening of Garras de oro and Blue’s The School at Rincon Santo (1963) revealed that both conclude with a person singing the Colombian national anthem.]

The dynamics of filming through a national, or colonial, lens persist in the home movies about which Julia Noordegraaf and Elvira Pouw write. Their close examination of a set of amateur films shot in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) by a Dutch mine owner demonstrates how complex the content of a “home movie” can be. They ask us to reconceptualize these mute 16mm documents—and many others—not as “family films,” but as “extended family films.” Defining what constitutes a family is at least as difficult as categorizing people by national and ethnic identities.

The three remaining feature essays deal with American contexts, each focusing on a state (Georgia, North Carolina) or a local battleground (the 18th congressional district of East Harlem, New York City). Devin Orgeron looks at a subgenre of nontheatrical films, promotional “Vacationland” productions, which were familiar (to the point of cliché) in midcentury America. However, he then takes us to the exceptional treatment filmmaker George Stoney brought to such material in Tar Heel Family (1951)—one of many such exceptional works Stoney made while working in the mode of sponsored film. Craig Breaden’s report on the campaign advertisements for former Georgia governor Carl Sanders also shows us the exceptional: renowned documentarians David and Albert Maysles shot the long-form television ads in 1969–70 as work for hire. That Maysles 16mm films and elements are to be found in the political history library of a state university is yet another reminder of how disbursed and fragmented archival film material often is.

Charles Musser’s essay on a little-known New York-based production company is conspicuously longer than a typical journal essay, and for good reason. What began as a modest project—to show an obscure short preserved at the Museum of Modern Art—led to a major rediscovery, just as Orphans 6 was about to unfold. People’s Congressman (1948) was indeed interesting as part of Paul Robeson’s filmography, but it also opened up a need to know more about the sole on-screen credit, Union Films. Responsible for two dozen productions in its brief existence, the company played a significant role in the history of American documentary film. Headed by filmmaker and left-wing activist Carl Marzani, the organization’s output, Musser argues, counters the notion cultivated by past histories that leftist, American documentary was moribund between its heydays in the 1930s and 1960s.

Four short but incisive (and personal) pieces comprise this issue’s Forum section, also drawn from the Orphans 6 program. Eric Breitbart writes of his experiences as someone who made films both for the U.S. Army and the radical antiwar collective Newsreel (aka Camera News, Inc.). His remarks introduced a screening of The Army Film (1969), newly preserved as part of a Pacific Film Archives project. (PFA’s Pamela Jean Smith supervised the preservation, using a print courtesy of Greg Pierce’s Orgone Cinema collection.) Next, writer Paul Cullum and archivist Mark Quigley offer complementary perspectives on the fascinating niche television programming created by religious organizations. They show not only how voluminous these syndicated programs were but how underappreciated some of their bolder productions are, especially in the case of the long-running series Insight. Its episodes are now in the early stages of video preservation at the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

Another conception of an orphan. Eastman Kodak’s How to Make Good Home Movies (1958) included this suggestion that amateurs edit unessential footage out of their homemade films. (Thanks to Laura Kissel.)

Finally, with much sadness, six colleagues offer tributes to a major figure in the world of film archiving, William S. O’Farrell, who passed away in 2008, at age 54. Like many in our field, I was guided into understanding moving image archiving as a profession, practice, and passion by the funny, learned, and generous Bill O’Farrell. When the Orphan Film Project was looking to get its legs, he was an early supporter. Hearing about the first symposium, he was determined to make the second. So he and his protege Charles Tepperman drove the one thousand miles from Ottawa, Ontario, to Columbia, South Carolina, straight through. When a scheduled speaker cancelled, O’Farrell stepped up and gave an impromptu presentation on 9.5mm to 35mm blowups (and sang a little improvised tune about the 9.5mm gauge!). Although unable to attend the 2008 symposium, he nevertheless contributed to it. Here’s some of what he e-mailed to me:

From:woofa@canadianfilm.com

Date: November 2, 2007

I talked today with JoAnne Stober (Nat. Archives) to look at a very interesting film called Friendly Interchange made in 1961. She wants to present at Orphans. (Under other circumstances I’d consider doing this myself.)

The film was by Alma Duncan and Audrey McLaren, who left the NFB and made 3 animated films under the company name Dunclaren Productions.

My dad knew Alma and Audrey, and in the 1980s he righted a wrong. Crawley Films numbered their own productions with P numbers. By some quirk, the Dunclaren films were assigned P numbers. When the 1983 donations came in, he and I noticed the problem. He called Alma and Audrey, had the films deaccessioned, and properly urged them to donate the films.

Regarding “The State” Orphans theming: You will love this. Friendly Interchange is about the idea of free trade between the U.S. and Canada. And no one has seen this film in almost 50 years.

Plus, it adds some Canuck-U.S. content. :-)

JoAnne Stober did indeed screen and introduce the Library and Archives of Canada’s 35mm print of Friendly Interchange. Bill was right: this film about a decidedly unsexy topic was unexpectedly beautiful.

Symposiums aside, the orphan metaphor has got legs—and a history. In Hollywood lingo the term has long referred to undistributed movies. As early as 1979, UCLA announced an extension course called “Orphan Films.” But it simply consisted of screening and discussing eight auteur films that had distribution difficulties, nothing approaching the current conception of orphanhood.⁵ In the twenty-first century, however, the copyright limbo problem has internationally become deemed an orphan issue. Even the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) has taken up the vocabulary, albeit cautiously. Its April 2008 “Declaration on Fair Use and Access” states that FIAF “supports efforts to clarify the legal status of ‘orphan’ motion pictures.” Only weeks later, the European Digital Libraries Initiative announced a specific concerted effort, issuing a memorandum of understanding on orphan works. Significantly, representatives of content owners and rights holders joined with archives, libraries, and other cultural institutions to sign the document. Its aim is to make the digitization of cultural resources (including films) lawful in the European Union (EU) when copyright owners cannot be identified. In November 2008, the EU launched an Internet destination, dubbed EUROPEANA, to aggregate digitized material, orphaned and otherwise, including “photographs, films, and audiovisual works.”⁶ Web portals such as this, alongside the Internet Archive, Library of Congress projects, European Film Treasures, and other digital repositories present a potential contradiction. Thousands of orphan and archival films and videos are now being made accessible and impacting research and teaching in a positive way; but mass-scale digitization alone should not undo the preservation consciousness that the orphan film metaphor was designed to mobilize.

As Paolo Cherchi Usai notes near the beginning of his keynote text, the phrase orphan film has itself reached popular parlance via the Internet, especially through Wikipedia, the presumed and de facto oracle of public knowledge. The English-language Wikipedia offers a good and useful definition (“. . . any film that has suffered neglect”), he advises. Any similarities between the Wikipedia entry for “Orphan film” and the ideas and words expressed in this editor’s introduction are rather intentional.⁷

A final note about Internet resources: Audio recordings of Orphan Film Symposium presentations are available for playback and download. The Web site NYU.edu/orphans hosts the 2008 recordings; the 2006 recordings can be accessed at SC.edu/filmsymposium. Both sites link to the text of programs from Orphans 1 through 5, all held at the University of South Carolina. NYU has scheduled the seventh symposium, “Moving Pictures Around the World,” for April 7–10, 2010, at the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia.