In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Editors’ Foreword
  • Marsha Orgeron (bio) and Devin Orgeron (bio)

We write this foreword fresh from the Eighth Orphan Film Symposium, which took place April 11–14, 2012, at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, New York. As with all past Orphan Film Symposia, we find ourselves energized, inspired, and a little overwhelmed by the issues this gathering raises every two years. We watched many amazing, surprising, and important moving images that we would not have encountered elsewhere, thanks to the practice of discovery and sharing that has come to characterize this event. Central as these screenings are, however, they are only as important as a whole series of questions—some of them articulated explicitly, many of them simply “in the air”—about the future of this material and of moving images generally. These questions come up yearly at annual Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) meetings as well, but there is something about the broadly interdisciplinary spirit of Orphans that brings these issues to the fore. That so much time is given to the screening of media on the brink of oblivion or that pushes against ideas about what is worthy of our collective attention and resources reminds attendees of the mountains of material we’ve yet to encounter, acknowledge, grapple with, and incorporate into our understanding of film, media, and archival history.

Although The Moving Image serves a variety of interests and purposes, it occurs to us that one of its most important missions is to disseminate this kind of work on a regular basis, to prod and encourage our constituency to dig in and tend closely to media that are too often ignored or merely (and typically inaccurately) generalized about. Dan Streible’s special “Orphans” issue of The Moving Image (vol. 9, issue 1) is the most readily recognizable sustained attempt to do this work in print form. But the journal as [End Page vii] a whole is positioned to support this kind of scholarship on an ongoing basis, and the essays collected in this issue do much to underscore this commitment.

The issue kicks off with Deron Overpeck’s “‘Is This Pay-TV to Be the End for Us?’ Film Exhibitors Confront Pay Television, 1968–76.” Arising from the important body of scholarship on cable television (Michele Hilmes, Megan Mullen, Jennifer Holt) and film exhibition (Gregory Waller, Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, Taso Lagos) that has appeared in recent years, Overpeck’s essay casts an unfamiliar light on the National Association of Theatre Owners and the pivotal role this organization has played in attempts to protect, at a critical moment in their history, film exhibitors from the looming threat of cable television. Overpeck’s work is deeply archival, tending to the paper trail that tells this overlooked story. The narrative that emerges is as much about the history of film exhibition as it is about cable television, opening, as he phrases it, “a different avenue of film exhibition research, one that examines how the decisions made by media conglomerates put pressure on local theater owners and how local theater owners, in turn, responded to that pressure on the national level.”

From national policy, we move to artistic policy. Gerda Cammaer’s work in “Jasper Rigole’s Quixotic Art Experiments with Home Movies and Archival Practices: The International Institute for the Conservation, Archiving, and Distribution of Other People’s Memories (IICADOM)” takes a not unfamiliar but often too simply accepted notion (that the compilation film functions archivally) and reframes the idea, pushing it beyond the realm of unsubstantiated claim. Her task is assisted by the highly self-aware and archivally engaged work of Belgian artist Jasper Rigole, whose IICADOM project (2004) takes the idea of the archive as its primary subject. The compilations that make up Rigole’s fictitious IICADOM are especially open to this sort of discussion insofar as they directly confront, in their intentionality and execution, certain prevailing assumptions about the archival function. Like Rigole’s work, Cammaer’s examination is theoretically and creatively grounded, suggesting the degree to which these works might alter our ideas about archives’ effects on history and memory as well as on notions of the self and collectivity.

Like Gerda Cammaer...

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