Orphans Recap: Tributes and Discoveries

World traveler Aloha Wanderwell Baker posing for a publicity photo. Courtesy Aloha Wanderwell website.

Over thirty films screened at "The Real Indies: A Close Look at Orphan Films," a series presented on October 31 and November 1 by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and NYU's Orphan Film Symposium. Filmmakers and archivists were among the enthusiastic viewers at the Academy Theater at Lighthouse International in Manhattan.

Friday night opened with a Halloween tribute to writer and director Jack Hill, whose Spider Baby was screened in a new 35mm print. Hill thanked Quentin Tarantino and Harvey Weinstein, who helped liberate the Spider Baby negative from a film lab, where it had been classified "Abandoned Property."

The director, who now lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, reminisced about Lon Chaney, Jr., and Mantan Moreland, veteran actors approaching the end of their careers in Spider Baby, and B-movie mainstay Sid Haig. Hill also talked about how to shoot a feature film in twelve days, with a budget of $50,000. What's surprising today is how effective Spider Baby is despite Hill's limited resources. A long sequence following actor Karl Schanzer through a decrepit mansion is a tour de force of silent film techniques.

The Saturday morning program "Pioneering Women" featured fascinating 35mm restorations of works by Aloha Wanderwell Baker, who filmed several globetrotting expeditions in the 1920s. She joined her husband Walter Wanderwell on endurance trips, driving specially adapted Fords across deserts and mountains, and later filmed tribes in South America. When he was murdered in 1932, Aloha continued her travels with her second husband Walter Baker.

Connie Field introduced her Oscar-nominated The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter in a new restoration from the Academy Film Archive. She spoke about preservation issues, which she experienced first hand when leader disintegrated onto the negative for Rosie that had been stored in a lab. Field described the extensive casting process for Rosie, which contrasts interviews with five World War II-era women factory workers to propaganda films of the time.

"We interviewed over 700 women all over the country," Field revealed. She then tape recorded 250 subjects on cassettes before picking forty to videotape. "I would meet women and they were wonderful, but then I saw them on video and they weren't coming across. Whatever was going on between me and the person didn't reflect itself on video. So out of the forty I picked five to be in the film."

"Altered Reality," the afternoon program, included Necrology by the structuralist pioneer Standish Lawder, an atypical student film by the noted music documentarian Les Blank, and Organic Afghan, a 1969 animated short by Bill Brand that had never been screened to the public.

The segment also included Bedtime Story, a remarkable 1981 collage by Esther Shatavsky, who cut individual frames of a "Gunsmoke" episode into pieces and then animated them. Andrew Lampert at the Anthology Film Archives is still trying to track down information about the reclusive Shatavsky.

Bill Morrison presented a 35mm screening of his 2005 Outerborough, with live musical accompaniment by violinist Todd Reynolds. Propulsively exciting, Outerborough reworks an 1899 Biograph short, Across Brooklyn Bridge, that was shot on 68mm film. The Academy Theater was the perfect venue for Morrison's widescreen movie.

Morrison also introduced several short fragments in the evening program, "Visions of New York," including scenes from the 1917 World Series. The fragments were found under an ice skating rink in Dawson City, Canada, in 1978.

Bruce Goldstein of Film Forum showed Broadway by Day, a remarkable 1932 travelogue that spanned the Bronx, Harlem, Times Square, and Battery Park in seven minutes. Brian Meacham from the Yale University Film Study Center introduced an equally worthy short, 3rd Ave. El, shot in 1955 by amateur filmmaker Carson Davidson. His compositions and exposures showed extraordinary skill. (The short was one of two he made to receive Oscar nominations.)

Along with a sneak peak at the Museum of Modern Art's restoration of the 1913 "Lime Kiln Club" feature starring Bert Williams, the segments included an excerpt from I Think I'm Gonna Like It Here, a student film by Chris Columbus.

Elena Rossi-Snook from the New York Public Library spoke about the Youth Film Distribution Center, an opportunity for city youths to experiment with filmmaking. Black Faces was an exhilarating blast of collage and chants put together in 1970. Steve Siegal and Phil Buehler were teenagers when they made the exuberant Coney Island, a 1973 short that captures a world that has largely vanished.

"The Real Indies" showcased just how wide-reaching the film world is, juxtaposing works from major studios with experimental pieces meant for private audiences. But as many archivists agreed, accessibility has become a major issue. Few of these films will reach the public. Even if some titles show up on platforms like YouTube, the online experience can never match film projected in a theater.

Dan Streible, director of the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program at New York University and an Academy Film Scholar, will be one of the presenters at the next orphan screening, Orphans at MoMA: An Amateur Cinema League of Nations on November 18.