This year’s edition of Orphans at MoMA, an annual collaboration with the NYU Orphan Film Symposium, celebrates the diversity of amateur and experimental cinema across the decades. Introduced by historians and archivists who specialize in the fun detective work of finding and identifying these vernacular films, the program features an eclectic mix: Hollis Frampton’s Less, from 1973, which teases a one-minute movie out of a manipulated Les Krims photograph; the charmingly absurd Doin’ the Raccoon, an amateur 1929 musical short made with the short-lived DeVry Cine-Tone system; Nicholas Viernes’s The Little Farmers of Reynoldsburg, Ohio, from 1936, which features rare Filipino American home movies from the Great Depression; delicate Japanese paper prints, including anime to rival that of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, that have not been seen since the 1930s and are accompanied live by Duo Yumeno on koto and cello; and a selection of untitled shorts from 1966 by Edward Owens, further revealing the brief but astonishing film career of a long-marginalized gay African American artist. The program is curated and presented by Dan Streible, the founding director of Orphans, who observes, “Most of the films in this program involve children and teens either using or posing for small-gauge cameras. A humor and a sense of naive wonder emerge from these experiments, whether in Paul and Glenda Fillinger’s educational short Celebration of Life: Trees, in which children (including their own) joyously explore the natural world, or in Nick Viernes’s revelatory home movie The Little Farmers of Reynoldsburg, Ohio, which captures ‘Little Margie’ in beautiful color and black-and-white images as she plays with animals on the family farm.”
Less. 1973. USA. Directed by Hollis Frampton. 16mm. 1 min.
Preserved by Anthology Film Archives.
See the Forest and the Trees: The Creative Work of the Fillinger Family. 2024. USA. Edited by Adrianne Finelli. Silent. 10 min.
Preserved by Prelinger Archives.
Celebration of Life: Trees. 1973. USA. Directed by Paul Fillinger, Glenda Fillinger. DCP. 12 min.
Preserved by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
Neapolitan Nights. c. 1929. USA. DeVry Cine-Tone. DCP. 3 min.
From the collection of Shane Fleming, scanned in 4K by Dino Everett
Doin’ the Racoon. c. 1929. USA. DeVry Cine-Tone. DCP. 3 min.
From the collection of Shane Fleming, scanned in 4K by Dino Everett
The Little Farmers of Reynoldsburg, Ohio. 1936. USA. Directed by Nicholas Viernes. 16mm. 15 min.
Preserved by Filipino American Historical Society of Chicago. Original Pilipino Music score by Les Talusan.
[Untitled: #16]. 1966. USA. Directed by Edward Owens. 16mm. Silent. 3.5 min.
[Untitled: #18]. 1966. USA. Directed by Edward Owens. 16mm. Silent. 3.5 min.
[Untitled: #19]. 1966. USA. Directed by Edward Owens. 16mm. Silent. 3.5 min.
[Untitled: #20]. 1966. USA. Directed by Edward Owens. 16mm. Silent. 3.5 min.
Preserved by the John M. Flaxman Library at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Japanese Paper Films. 1930s. 40 min.
Preserved by the Japanese Paper Film Project from the collections of the Toy Film Museum (Kyoto), Tsuyoshi Yamabata (The Itabashi Science and Education Museum), Kyoritsu Women’s University - Yo Sato Laboratory, Natsuki Matsumoto, Ashiya Kogan, and Machiko Kusahara.