The Packard Campus is excited to host to the tenth edition of the Orphan Film Symposium, April 6-9, 2016; the theme is “Sound,” both with and without moving images. “Orphans X” is presented in conjunction with New York University Cinema Studies and its Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program.
You can register for Orphans X here.
Cinema had barely been invented when the first attempts to add sound were made. Take, for example, the Dickson Experimental Sound Film (1896), where Thomas Edison Company engineer W.K.L. Dickson filmed himself recording a violin tune on a wax cylinder as two of his colleagues danced for the camera. The intent was to synchronize the sound cylinder with the film for some form of public exhibition, but the engineering challenges proved too great and the work was abandoned.
I tend to associate the Dickson Experimental Sound Film with the 1998 Domitor conference held in Washington, D.C., and which was devoted to “The Sounds of Early Cinema.” The Library had only recently acquired a cassette recording of the original wax cylinder from the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound of The New York Public Library via the Edison National Historical Park in West Orange, New Jersey; we had already preserved the film on 35mm. On the last day of