Sarasota FF Screening Committee member and all around excellent writer Cullen Gallagher alerted me to the next iteration of the Orphan Film Symposium, taking place April 7-10 at the SVA Theatre at 333 West 23rd Street in Manhattan. I will (happily) be in Sarasota. launching our own festival, but if you can’t make here, the Orphan Film Symposium is offering the chance to catch some incredibly rare films in a theatrical setting. The program looks staggeringly good and I am really sad I can’t be there to see it. But if you’re not here, maybe you can be there? Highlights include:
Gustav Deutsch’s Film ist. a Girl and a Gun (2009), a narrative collage constructed using fragments from several European film archives, as well as the Kinsey Institute
The premiere of a new restoration of the landmark independent documentary The Cry of Jazz (1959), with filmmaker Edward O. Bland. Restored by Anthology Film Archives with funding provided by The Film Foundation.
With the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain (1938), the first film by noted photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, presumed lost until recently rediscovered in NYU’s Tamiment Library
From Argentina, film archivist-curators Paula Félix-Didier and Fernando Peña (discoverers of the complete 1927 version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis) unveil previously unseen cinema from the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires
The premiere of Andy Warhol’s Uptight #3 — David Susskind (1966), newly preserved by the Museum of Modern Art and the Warhol Museum
The premiere of a never-released film, The Velvet Underground Rehearses (1965), shot by Danny Williams, a member of Warhol’s Factory, shortly before his mysterious disappearance at age 27
Orson Welles’ Sketch Book (1955), a rare program made for British television and housed at the Munich Film Museum
You can get the full details at the Orphan Film Symposium website. Wish I could be there.,,
The SVA Theater
