Our collaboration with the NYU Orphan Film Symposium continues with an eclectic mix of newly preserved films, programmed by Orphan Film Symposium director Dan Streible in celebration of the centenary of the 16mm film gauge. 16mm was the longtime workhorse for documentary, student, independent, and experimental films, and while tons of prints survive, few get saved and projected in this small-gauge format. These new 16mm prints represent seven decades of filmmaking. The notable non-theatrical film distributor Thomas Brandon produced Tall Tales, a 1941 celebration of the American folk song featuring Josh White, Burl Ives, and Will Geer. In Whitesburg Epic (1971), Kentucky high school students interview locals about unemployment in their small coal-mining town. Their nascent group became the Appalshop film workshop, which still thrives and is now heroically recovering from a flood that inundated its archive of thousands of films. Artist Bill Brand’s career as a filmmaker and founder of BB Optics, a New York–based lab specializing in the preservation of experimental cinema, is represented with the work of three artists as well as himself: Raphael Montañez Ortiz’s Cowboy and “Indian” Film (1957–58), along with examples of Ortiz’s “ritual destruction” of 16mm prints, which spurred a new form of performance art in the 1950s, presented in celebration of his 90th year; Larry Gottheim’s multilayered Your Television Traveler (1991/2024), a film that remained unfinished until this new restoration; Roberta Cantow’s If This Ain’t Heaven (1983), which intimately documents the solitary life of one “Mr. G”; and Brand’s own Susie’s Ghost (2011), a meditation on personal loss through images, shot with aging 16mm film stock, of a rapidly changing neighborhood.
Tall Tales. 1941. USA. Directed by William Watts, Willard Van Dyke.
Whitesburg Epic. 1971. USA. Directed by Appalachian Film Workshop. Preserved by Appalshop Archive.
Golf. 1957. USA. Directed by Raphael Montañez Ortiz.
Cowboy and “Indian” Film. 1957–58. USA. Directed by Ortiz.
Newsreel. 1958. USA. Directed by Ortiz. All Ortiz films preserved by UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center with UCLA Film & Television Archive.
Your Television Traveler. 1991/2023. USA. Directed by Larry Gottheim, Preserved by SUNY Binghamton Foundation. World premiere.
Susie’s Ghost. 2011. USA. Directed by Bill Brand in collaboration with Ruthie Marantz. Preserved by Bill Brand.
If This Ain’t Heaven. 1983. USA. Directed by Roberta Cantow. Preserved by the New York Public Library. World premiere.
Program approx. 120 min.