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.
Perhaps the most brilliant aspect of any Orphan Film Symposium is the sheer eclecticism of its attendees. “Film” as a cultural/historical/physical artifact might provide the foundational avenue of inquiry, but really it’s just a point of departure for a lot of freewheeling discussion.
Music and musicologists have always been vital to the Orphans mix, and that’s especially true this year with the emphasis on sound. Case in point, an entire panel devoted to documentary film scoring:
- Julie Brown (University of London) on the original “atmospheric” accompaniment to the film The Epic of Everest (1924) that featured an orchestral score and Tibetan monks,
- Blake McDowell (Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture) on Paul Bowles scores for Bride of Samoa (1934) and Venus and Adonis (1935), and
- Haden Guest (Harvard Film Archive) on the rediscovery of the first talking film in the Irish language, Robert Flaherty’s Oidhche Sheanchais (A Night of Storytelling, 1935).
The panel will be moderated by Julie Hubbert from the University of South Carolina.
