Digital and Data Humanities Summer Fellowships Cohort Archive

Playing with Past, Present, Future: How Eye Filmmuseum’s Orphan “Bits & Pieces” Can  Reinvigorate Cinema and Media Studies

Increased access to orphan-film repositories such as Eye Filmmuseum’s Bits and Pieces allows both artists and scholars to find new meanings in and through these forgotten visual records of the past. Engaging with such archival materials to create found-footage films is not only theoretically stimulating with questions of cinematic ontology, but also pedagogically valuable as they challenge what film historian Katherine Groo calls, “the stasis of film history.” This project is interested in how these once-neglected films can be woven into the spatiotemporal fabrics of today, imagining new possibilities of teaching orphan and found-footage films at the undergraduate level.