Guest Editor's Introduction

The world of moving image archiving that has emerged in the twenty-first century is more balanced and comprehensive than before.

Most moving image archives were once focused primarily on rescuing the artifact, the carrier that held the moving image program, and then preserving the content by creating a duplicate. With so many original motion picture and television programs already vanished, the emphasis was on reducing additional losses, the equivalent of triage on the battlefield. Acquisition would focus on the works, often ignoring supplemental material. Distribution information, trade magazines, posters, and production files were usually seen as ephemera, not items worthy of preservation and study themselves.

Supporting materials were emblematic of a tension that has long existed in this discipline—between whether a motion picture is art or social history, whether it is a creative expression of the auteur or of a creative collective, or whether it represents the social background of the time or reflects the audience through the reception at the time of release. With the need for preservation now well established among rights holders and funders, the scholar can take a more holistic view of preservation and history to ensure that the context of production has the same priority as the work itself. This context includes literary and cinema antecedents, technology, reception, exhibition, and so on.

The work of the historian now extends from documenting the original production, to capturing the intentions of the creators for future restorations, to gathering printed documentation that can be used to place the work in historical context. This issue of The Moving Image attempts to explore that broader approach to archiving.

Our first essay asks if film restoration is an art, a science, or both? And how does the restorationist make decisions when the original creators have left no clear guide as to their intentions? In "The Gray Zone," archivist Ross Lipman examines many aspects of past and modern archival practice. He examines models from the world of still photography that preceded moving image technology, as photographers faced the introduction of working systems that allowed them to qualify their choices. In this extensive, sensitive review, Lipman also looks at the dichotomy of the still and moving image, as integrating both artistry and science, with the creator—and now the archivist—able to choose. If, as Lipman argues, it is impossible to recreate an original viewing experience, then what criteria or thinking process should the archivist follow? This provocative article gives a structure to important issues of authorship and authenticity.

In our second feature, Scott MacQueen's analysis of the origin and difficult production of Warner Bros.' 1935 A Midsummer Night's Dream works on several levels. On the surface, we have a straightforward "making of" narrative of a troubled production, which resulted in a succès d'estime that enhanced the reputations, though not the careers, of all of the creative personnel involved. The stories include the conflict between the successful creative stage director, with an established reputation and ways of working, coming into conflict with an industrial production process. Already a subject of satire at the time—think of John Barrymore in Twentieth Century (1934)—this conflict of art and commerce also plays out in the present day. That there was such a concentration on German immigrants at Warner Bros. that German was spoken on the set of Midsummer demonstrates the strength of Hollywood in successfully assimilating the world's best filmmakers into a new environment. And finally, the desire of the studio to have prestige releases can be seen in today's award contests in which artistic elements are packaged to attract festival and award attention. Midsummer was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1935 in a field of ten films, most of which were adapted from books or plays, losing to the more popular Mutiny on the Bounty.

Copyright was once a backwater of the American legal profession, an area where change seemed to happen at a glacial pace—the 1909 Copyright Act had to be amended to protect motion pictures, yet the law was not subject to a major revision until...