By watching many of these works now, we see films that contradict the stereotype of the genre as filled with artless, dry, conformist products. These short, midcentury films made for American classrooms offer a surprising range of qualities: artful and banal, timely and dated, stimulating and campy, weird and ingenious. Introductions to selections by Elena Rossi-Snook of the invaluable Reserve Film and Video Collection, New York Library for the Performing Arts, Skip Elsheimer of A/V Geeks (by conference), Juana Suárez and Dan Streible from NYU Cinema Studies.

Program runtime: 79 minutes

The16mm films to be projected:

Lunchroom Manners, Coronet, 1960, 10 minutes

The rude, clumsy puppet Mr. Bungle shows kids how to behave in the cafeteria.

Courtesy of A/V Geeks

A Lunchroom Goes Bananas, Coronet, 1978, 12 minutes

The food in a school cafeteria goes on strike [!] to protest kids’ poor manners.

Courtesy of A/V Geeks

The First Americans and Their Gods, Part One, Philip Stapp, 1969, 10 minutes

The International Film Foundation’s profound humanistic treatment of the subject.

Courtesy of the Reserve Film and Video Collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

Cities in Crisis: What’s Happening? (Ray Witlin, 1967) 21′ Universal Educ. and Visual Arts

Introduced by Juana Suárez

Roaches’ Lullaby, Eliot Noyes and Claudia Weill, 1973, 5 minutes

Interviews with three zealous New York City roach-haters.

Courtesy of the Reserve Film and Video Collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

Muzak, Tony Ganz and Rhody Streeter, 1972, 5 minutes

Meet the executives of the “efficiency through music” corporation.

Courtesy of the Reserve Film and Video Collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

Bodies, EDCOA Productions, 1975, 10 minutes

An uninhibited montage confronting inhibitions; from sexologist Robert T. Francoeur.

Ro-Revus Talks About Worms, South Carolina ETV, 1971, 6 minutes

This legendary public health film helped eliminate an epidemic Ascaris infestation.

Courtesy of A/V Geeks

Dan Streible, in addition to co-editing LEARNING WITH THE LIGHTS OFF, is an NYU cinema studies professor and director of the Orphan Film Project, a collective effort of media artists, archivists, curators, and scholars devoted to saving and screening neglected media artifacts. He programmed the 2011 Robert Flaherty Film Seminar and is now organizing the 8th Orphan Film Symposium, April 11-14, 2012, at Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens.

Devin Orgeron is Associate Professor at North Carolina State University and co-editor of The Moving Image, the journal of the Association for Moving Image Archivists. He is the author of Road Movies.

Marsha Orgeron is Associate Professor of Film Studies at North Carolina State University and co-editor of The Moving Image, the journal of Association for Moving Image Archivists. She is the author of Hollywood Ambitions: Celebrity in the Movie Age.

The 2010 Orphan Film Symposium took place in New York from April 7th through the 10th. Orphans director Dan Streible presented at UnionDocs earlier this year.

When nitrate film begins to decompose, the pictures it holds lose their form, dissolving into a gauzy chemical wash that dances on the surface of the projection. Your eyes flicker between the amorphous globules at the fore and the crystalline, precisely defined image beneath. You see a lot of this at the Orphan Film Symposium, a four-day event dedicated to resuscitating nitrate and other abandoned formats from the decay to which they are otherwise doomed. Held biennially since 1999, and in New York since 2006, when founder and chief curator Dan Streible transferred from the University of South Carolina to NYU’s Moving Image Archive and Preservation program, the symposium is about more than just arcane gauges and processes. It is an opportunity to exhibit and discuss films neglected by Hollywood and Washington Square Park alike. The orphans metaphor was coined by archivists to classify films that turned up in the vaults with no rights holder in sight. For the symposium the term has been expanded to articulate a state of being. “Neglect” is a capacious term, and Streible and the Orphans crew are generous with the definition, filling its contours with everything from never-exhibited home movies to lost classics, 16mm instructional films and locally-produced amateur narratives.

The allusion to Plato on the Orphans website might be a little grandiose, but neither “film festival” nor “conference” adequately convey the proceedings. A single day at the OFS rearranges your sense of film history, making apparent how paltry and circumscribed our understanding of that history really is. But it is rarely as dry or as pious as this makes it sound. Packing something like 80 films into its short run, it is a whirlwind tour of cinema’s back alleys and dead ends. There are dull moments here and there, but it is more than a sense of scholarly obligation that keeps people returning year after year.

For this year’s symposium, titled “Moving Images Around the World”, presenters and panelists turned their attention to the circuitous routes movies travel once they have been released to the world: the twisting pathways that landed a lost Mutt & Jeff cartoon in a vault in Australia, and the sub-rosa supply chains that brought the Sandinista game shows and revolutionary melodramas of 1980s Nicaraguan TV to New York’s public access airwaves. In an age when digital distribution can make it seem like there is little of film history left to be discovered, the presentations here proved that there is still much languishing in crevices of the labyrinthine old world networks.

Most of the work that plays Orphans is decidedly minor. With few artistic pretensions, the amateur and instrumentalist films that line the roster wear contingency on their sleeves. But crammed into the symposium’s evening programs, there were a handful of recently-restored big ticket items likely to draw attention outside of dedicated orphanista circles. Among them was a pristine new print of Edward Bland’s The Cry of Jazz. Jonas Mekas introduced it, during an program devoted to late 50s/early 60s New American Cinema, in typically strident fashion, declaring that “to call it a ‘masterpiece’ would not be enough”. This is overstating the case. The film’s historical import is undeniable — it is radical black film produced in era not exactly brimming with African American filmmakers, and an essay film avant la lettre — but time has not been kind. Bland, a composer and scholar himself, transposes the argument developed in his book The Fruits of the Death of Jazz to the mouth of his protagonist, a young black musician at a party hosted by his clueless white friends. The acting is stagey and stiff. Didactic in the manner of a high school film strip, the story, as it were, is little more than a frame for Bland’s lecture. Things pick up when the montage carries us away from the party — economical and emphatic scenes of Chicago tenement life, and kinetic, high-contrast footage of Sun Ra and his Arkestra carry a visceral charge missing from the diegesis — but these highs are all too brief. The notoriously contentious debates that followed screenings of the film during its original run were clearly a result of its ballsy, self-assured thesis and not its rather unimaginative form.

The rest of the bill was reserved for Danny Williams, an unheralded Factory habitué who shot a handful of Warhol’s films before vanishing in 1966. The first on the program, here titled The Velvet Underground Rehearses, was developed forty years after the fact from an unprocessed roll found among Williams’ possessions, and is perhaps the earliest documentation of the VU. Though slight on the whole, it offers ample evidence of Williams’ sensuous feel for cinematography. Training his lens on Lou Reed and John Cale – already the band’s stars – he is not afraid to get close, honing in on even the minutest of their jittery, speed-addled gestures. He never rests, often pixelating them one frame at a time, zooming in and out, searching for a visual analogy to the scraping, jerky sounds his Bolex cannot capture. The second Williams film on the program is the real revelation. With Barbara Rubin, who steered a second camera, Williams shot Uptight #3 — David Susskind as a backdrop for Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, the series of concerts cum happenings he produced to showcase the Velvet Underground. Orphans marks the first time this footage has been shown by itself. Accompanied by T. Griffin’s live score, the new context gives Williams’ and Rubins’ images a temporal weight that would have been obliterated by the stage show. There is no editing to speak of — Williams’ and Rubins’ rolls have just been alternately spliced together. This means we see everything happen twice. The repetitions, combined with Williams’ dreamy slow-motion photography, lend the footage a warm, otherworldly glow that culminates in an almost ecstatic languor on the bus ride that concludes the film, as Williams abandons his human subjects to capture the clouds floating through the grey sky overhead.

There was much else here for devotees of the avant-garde. Most notably, a restoration of Manuel de Landa’s long unavailable Raw Nerves: A Lacanian Thriller. Equally playful and abstruse, de Landa’s sideways detective story is a dense, expressive fantasia on the acquisition of language, rendered in sickly sweet day-glo, and buried under layer upon layer of Bill Brand’s stunning, hyperactive optical printing. Also on view were three short films by Chris Langdon, the most productive artist of the nearly forgotten 1970s Los Angeles underground. It is hard to determine from the fragmentary, in-jokey work here whether Langdon was more than an prolific scenester, but it offered a tantalizing glimpse into a varied body of work begging for further research.

Those who headed to With the Abraham Lincoln Brigade In Spain because of its billing as Henri Cartier-Bresson’s first film were likely disappointed. Though Juan Salas’ meticulous research confirms that it was indeed Cartier-Bresson, rather than co-director Herbert Kline, behind the camera, the 16mm distribution print from which the one here was struck had been improperly transferred, chopping down the photographer’s original 35mm framing. The film does not then bear the mark of Cartier-Bresson’s compositional intelligence. Nevertheless, the newsreel, a piece of light propaganda distributed to raise funds to return wounded American soldiers to the States, is clearly the work of someone confident in a photographic idiom. There is nothing tentative in these slices of battlefield life, just a thrill with cinema’s unique spatio-temporal dimensions. While there are portraits of individual soldiers and staged tableaux directly indebted to the still image, the film is peppered with the kind of odd camera work and idiosyncratic emphases alien to the blunt emotional clarity that characterizes the professional newsreel. Woven in Surrealist-inspired quick cuts, the two-reeler never quite achieves a narrative propulsion, though individual vignettes, such as a camp soccer game during which we ping pong between athletes and audience, suggest that Cartier-Bresson was something of a natural storyteller.

Alongside the stewards of film history’s fragile detritus, Orphans attracts contemporary filmmakers who scavenge this material for their own work. Bill Morrison, whose Decasia is a symphony of the nitrocellulose textures described above, is a regular, and this year Gustav Deutsch was on hand with his wife and frequent collaborator Hanna Schimek to exhibit two new such projects – FILM IST. a girl & a gun and Eros Exotica. The latest addition to Deutsch’s FILM IST. series, a girl & a gun stitches the ornate settings of pre-war European melodrama to Kinsey Institute pornography, arranging a vague narrative of ballroom flirtation turned to rape and murder. Deutsch’s cast of masked barons and vulnerable housewives are decelerated to a menacing slow-motion creep, the somber mood underlined by the portentous, bass-heavy score. With intertitles that quote from Sappho, Hesiod and a host of other classical sources, Deutsch is reaching towards a kind of mythopoetic account of the sexual violence lurking in the grain of every exposed strip of celluloid. Comparatively buoyant, Eros Exotica is a scrapbook examination of early cinema’s Orientalist imagination. Composed from the scraps of films large and small produced in Europe and the U.S. between 1897 and 1936, it pictures a world tinted in Gatorade hues, and peopled almost exclusively by snake charmers, topless belly dancers, black face minstrels, and wild-eyed fakirs.

Deutsch is a master craftsman with an eye attentive to every aspect of the frame. But it is difficult, in this context, not to find his assemblages a little ponderous, not to feel in every cut the maker’s elbow at our ribs, nudging us to notice the clever connections he has made. Having spent the week exploring the nuances of less grandiloquent work, the preening, self-serious artistry evinced in these films seems almost parodic. If there is anything to be learned from the lectures at Orphans, it is that context is almost always more interesting than the trendy mystifications of the mash-up. Deutsch wrenches his clips from their rich historical soil and grinds them into a soupy and familiar pomo mash. Where most of the films screened at the symposium enlarge our sense of the world, these two films just enlarge our sense of Gustav Deutsch.

Though most of its presenters speak the casually auteurist language in which most contemporary film discussion is framed, the actual films in the symposium undercut any notions of the director’s supreme authority. What is interesting about the works here, filtered though they are through thousands of small decisions and competing agendas, has little to do with deliberate self-expression. Much of this material — Martina Roepke’s compilation of 17.5mm home movies shot in the first fews years of the 20th century, the footage of 1930s Shanghai refugee camps that Greg Wilsbacher presented, the Super-8 fragments Walter Forsberg captured in Iraq in the months following the U.S. invasion — has not been structured for public consumption. It is a powerful exercise to watch this stuff on its own terms, to grant it a status greater than footnote or curio. These films teach a certain patience that alters our perception of what is important on the screen. The Orphan Film Symposium returns us to film’s fundamental naïve powers — the thrill of seeing pockets of the world rarely exposed, of beholding how people in long past epochs and distant places actually moved, and the kind of spaces they moved through — the convincing approximation of the texture of everyday life that more often than not, cinema only claims to provide.

Saturday night’s show, curated by critic Cullen Gallagher, was devoted to Robbins Barstow. Since the mid-1930s, Barstow has produced almost every variety of amateur film you could imagine, projecting them on jury-rigged screens for friends and family around Hartford, and providing live narration. In the early 90s, Barstow began transferring his 16mm projects to video, and committing his road-tested voiceovers to tape. He has risen to some degree of prominence over the past few years within the amateur film community, screening his work at Home Movie Day, and on the internet, by making a selection of his films available on archive.org. The Library of Congress added his 1956 Disneyland Dream to the National Film Registry in 2008. The film is an account of the Barstow family’s contest-won trip to Disneyland. Mixing his travel footage with staged reenactments and voiceover commentary, Barstow documented his family for a mass audience that did not materialize until more than 50 years after the fact. Animated by his enthusiastic small-gauge aesthetic and lively, Jean Shepardish voice, Disneyland Dream is an authentic articulation of the kind of upbeat 1950s nuclear family that has elsewhere been hollowed out by pastiche and parody. Barstow honed his craftsmanship through decades of microproductions, but his particular sensibility and talents are apparent from his first narrative film, Tarzan and the Rocky Gorge (1936). Made when he was 16, and starring his brothers and neighborhood friends, Barstow’s Tarzan variation makes tangible all the excitement and vigor that went into its production. Gallagher’s lineup also included Youth and the Future, an earnest but lighthearted response to FDR’s ‘Four Freedoms” speech that Barstow made with settlement house teenagers in 1943, and a recent making-of video companion to Disneyland Dream, whose stiff editing and strange compositions suggest that film is really Barstow’s medium.

Apart from their naive charms, Barstow’s films provide a unique visual trace of vanished milieux; Disneyland in its first year of operation, 1940s Chelsea, the growing Connecticut suburbs. Places such as these may be present in big budget movies shot on location, but their details are usually obscured by the dictates of story and star. Over the weekend, Streible remarked that one of the things that drew him to orphan films was their “documentary evidence of place and time”. He exercised that appeal on Sunday’s show, organizing the program around the idea of oprhan as documentary. The nine films he screened surveyed more than a century’s worth of such evidence taken around the world. Newsreel outtakes comprise a sizable fraction of orphaned material, and it is largely thanks to such footage that Streible’s program had the temporal and geographic range it did; from the front of the Spanish Civil War with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to downtown New York’s old Radio Row. Seeing these images removed from their original current events or human interest context gives them a sort of avant-garde diffidence, their silent repetitions taking on a structural gravity. Another highlight was trilogy of propaganda films James Blue made for the US Information Agency to promote the Alliance for Progress overseas. In narrating each of the pieces, all shot in Colombia, Blue attempts to undercut any imperialist strain carried by the project by emphasizing the work being done by Colombians themselves. While he doesn’t entirely avoid the tones of noble savage paternalism, Stevan Larner’s photography earns Blue’s claims to humanism, his dense grayscale detailing the faces of the Colombian cast, and capturing the landscape in all its particularity. Sunday, directed by Blue’s contemporary Dan Drasin in 1961, begins with idyllic scenes of a weekend morning at the park before narrowing on its real subject: a demonstration by neighborhood Folk singers and admirers protesting the denial of their request to perform in the park. For a while it seems like a quaint portrait of the incipient counterculture on the cusp of being radicalized, but things suddenly turn ugly when the police officers who were initially just gruff and dismissive begin pushing and fighting with the crowd of upright, mostly white, middle-class folkies. Streible pointed out that Drasin’s film served as a template for many of the brash, partisan protest movies that became so common later in the decade. When the outsized brutality of the police response here puts an ironic, angry spin on the complacent serenity of Sunday‘s opening, it is easy to how Drasin’s work echoes in later portrayals of Vietnam demonstrations, and student takeovers.

The risk of Streible’s broadmindedness is that it could make the ‘orphans’ category so wide as to be meaningless from any standpoint other than the archivist’s. While these films should certainly be restored and made available, there’s something essentially quixotic about the enterprise. “Orphan films” is capacious enough a definition to include every errant scrap of celluloid or bit of scanline. It is the same problem faced by the descriptive linguist intent on accounting for every last speech act: given a finite amount of time, it is neither possible nor desirable to will away judgment or exclusion. During one of his introductions, Streible said that his early experiences combing through archives taught him how little he knew about film history. But are we really talking about the same history? Can we compare overexposed turn-of-the-century surgery footage and The Rules of the Game on even broadly similar grounds? Streible’s strong, varied program suggests that we can. He chances incoherence in the service of a richer understanding of the medium, and a denser historical purview. Documentary, far more than fiction, is greater than the sum of its parts. Almost of all of the films screened this weekend are interesting in their own right — not just out of archaeological obligation, they are entertaining and engaging for even a casual viewer — but they are most exciting when they begin to fill the gaps in both our filmed history and our history of film. Streible gives us access to spaces we have never seen and genres whose existence we were only dimly aware of; he expands and deepens our understanding of the documentary tradition, stimulating our sense of possibility in each of its instances. The eccentricities of the Orphan Film Symposium do not unravel our ability to discuss the form, they make the conversation worthwhile.