Fifth Orphan Film Symposium: Science, Industry, and Education

The historian of cinema faces an appalling problem. Seeking in his subject some principle of intelligibility, he is obliged to make himself responsible for every frame of film in existence. For the history of cinema consists precisely of every film that has ever been made, for any purpose whatever.

Of the whole corpus the likes of Potemkinmake up a numbingly small fraction. The balance includes instructional films, sing-alongs, endoscopic cinematography, and much, much more. The historian dares neither select nor ignore, for if he does, the treasure will surely escape him.

—Hollis Frampton, 1971

I happened upon this quote when I was going through some old papers that date back to my days in Rochester at the George Eastman House. I seem to recall Clyde Jeavons, formerly of the British Film Institute, including this quote in a packet of materials he distributed to our class during his weeklong lecture series back in 1998. How timely that I should find this quote before heading off to the Fifth Orphan Film Symposium in Columbia, South Carolina, where I would be reuniting with my former colleagues from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum as well as many friends and colleagues I have had the privilege of working with. I suppose I was waxing nostalgic for my days spent poring over footage in the archives. While I am still poring over footage, now it is usually trying to find just the right film or video clip to incorporate into my lesson to try to explain to a classroom full of twenty-year-old film students that the Berlin Wall did indeed come down in 1989, even if they were still in diapers and have no recollection of a place once called the Soviet Union.

You see, I recently left the archives to return to the world of academia, pursuing a PhD in film and media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Yes, it is sunny and the beach is beautiful, but I miss those days stuck in dark, musty rooms winding through reels of film full of images of a world that existed before the Berlin Wall. What better place to feed this need than Columbia, South Carolina, during Orphans 5? It is indeed the only symposium of its kind, that brings together film historians, theorists, archivists, and technicians, and gets them all to sit together in the same darkened theater for three days, exchanging sounds, images, and ideas. It was just what I needed to cure my archival blues and to reinforce the reason for which I left the archives (only temporarily!) in the first place. Orphans's dedicated founder, Dan Streible, has hit on just the right mix of theory, practice, and performance, and, while I was waxing nostalgic for my archival days, the University of South Carolina was acknowledging just how much it was losing with Dan Streible's impending exodus to NYU, where I am certain he will continue to collaborate with archivists and scholars.

This year's symposium theme, Science, Industry, and Education, seemed tailor made for such a bittersweet adieu. As I read the words of Hollis Frampton quoted above, they seemed to echo the intentions of Dan Streible and the group he gathered in Columbia March 22–25, 2006. While all of us know that we will never recover "every film that has ever been made for any purpose," we come together for the very real possibility of recuperating and reexamining images from the past and present that we carry with us into our individual and collective futures—futures that converge for a moment that then continues to resonate for each participant after returning to his respective corner. At the risk of turning this review into a personal journal entry, I do feel compelled to comment on the observation that my personal pasts, presents, and futures seemed to collide this year at Orphans 5. Not only did I reunite with my fellow presenters and colleagues from Washington, D.C., and classmates...