Orphan Films

Although of unknown vernacular origin, the term “orphan film” emerged in the 1990s within discussions among archivists, referring to motion pictures abandoned by their legal owners. A decade later, the term entered scholarly cinema studies, where the concept expanded to refer to films that had suffered neglect. Archivists identified orphan films as a preservation problem. If a Copyright holder could not be identified or located, archives typically left the material untouched, rather than invest resources to preserve a film owned by others. As this problem has become better known, preservationists and archivists have lobbied for legislative relief, with limited success. The introduction of the archival term to scholarly circles has had a significant impact. For media studies, identification of the orphan film phenomenon has meant a historiographical shift: what does it mean to study the millions of obscure and neglected celluloid recordings that were not theatrical movies or art films? What does cinema history look like if the hundreds of thousands of nontheatrical films or millions of feet of home movies and newsreel outtakes are taken into account? For both historians and archivists, the broader concept of an orphan is often demonstrated by listing the variety of categories that fall under the umbrella term: sponsored films, silent shorts, home movies, scientific and experimental works, ethnographic footage, newsreel outtakes, training and educational films, medical studies, experimental and uncompleted works, and other ephemeral motion pictures. Because such productions record or create a much broader and tangibly different world than conventional moviedom does, subject specialists outside of cinema studies also study orphaned films. Since 1999, the biennial Orphan Film Symposium has convened a mix of archivists, scholars, and artists to screen and discuss neglected film and video, much of it newly preserved. Begun at the University of South Carolina, since 2008 the symposium has been supported by New York University, which continues a Web presence for symposium documents and digital viewing copies of some of the films presented, NYU Orphan Film Symposium. The symposium has led to substantive publications and DVDs; however, scholarly writing on Categories of Orphan Films comes from many sources. Note that while the medium-specificity of motion picture film is crucial to the phenomenon, increasingly the term “orphan film” has been expanded to include videotape and digital moving images.