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  • Editors’ Foreword
  • Susan Ohmer (bio) and Donald Crafton (bio)

Perhaps we should call this the special “Remix” issue of The Moving Image. We offer here an extraordinary range of topics of interest to our diverse readership—a veritable mash-up of ideas, subjects, and critical approaches. More specifically, though, we also propose some essays destined to expand—or blow up—traditional notions of what media archives are and their social function. It is no coincidence that we are receiving more submissions centered on archives’ adoption of the remix concept to reach their publics. These approaches shake up the notion that the Archive is a sacrosanct body of monuments frozen in time or in “a collection.” Rather, the public is invited to co-curate exhibits either by direct participation in and on-site manipulation of what is seen and heard or by self-curating a personal “show” utilizing digital facsimiles of materials supplied but not controlled by the archives. It’s no coincidence that institutions whose conditions of funding mandate reaching vast numbers of “eyeballs” are leading in this trend. But it is clearly in the best interest of all public archives’ sustainability to consider innovative means to energize and democratize their collections by attracting new users, be they flesh-and-blood patrons or virtual online participants in the coming big remix.

Ryan Shand brings to light the amazing genre-defining work of the Scottish pioneer of the “family film,” Frank Marshall. The filmmaker was a true “cinedad,” an auteur in 16mm who immortalized his home, his wife and kids, and his endearing dachshund puppies over four decades, into the 1960s. Although Marshall’s films are significant in their own right, given his talent for embedding his family and their environment within generic narratives inspired by mainstream film comedies, they are also important because they were part of an extensive UK feedback loop that involved amateur filmmakers, the trade [End Page vii] press (especially Amateur Cine World), and the robustly competitive film festival circuit. The closing segment in the loop is the Scottish Screen Archive, which has preserved and digitized Marshall’s work for all to see. As Shand demonstrates, these elements all combined to create the family film genre once synonymous with the “Frank Marshall style.”

Historical footage can be subject to remixing as well. Lucie Česálková explores various uses of footage documenting the Nazis’ destruction of the Czechoslovakian village of Lidice during World War II. After the war, the footage of atrocities was evidence in the trials of Nazi leaders. Later, it was incorporated into documentaries about the rebuilding and revival of the country. As Česálková documents, various government agencies debated how to use this material, seeing it as means both to memorialize that past and also to support postwar reconstruction efforts. Her discussion highlights the significance of the contexts in which archival footage is presented.

Philis M. Barragán Goetz examines the brief history of the American Film Institute’s Directing Workshop for Women, an effort begun in the 1970s to increase the number of women directing feature films in Hollywood and to mix up the industry’s gender ratio. Barragán Goetz documents the controversies surrounding the project and the conflicted reactions of its participants, who struggled for funding and access to equipment and expertise. The films that participants created through the workshop exist on VHS tapes. Barragán Goetz’s description of their fragile state reminds us once again of the tenuous condition of so much of film history.

Our Forum essays elucidate how remix is influencing contemporary media creation and exhibition and enabling the public to become involved as users and active participants. Viva Paci tackles the thorny ethical issue of archives restoring films that never were. Then she uses works by Christian Marclay and Al Razutis as case studies on how exhibition creates archives by recombining and redefining the nature of a media collection. She focuses on the ways these works share with traditional archives an ability to create a heritage culture. Paci’s word in the French original, le patrimoine, has a wider meaning than the English patrimony, which is used mainly in the legal sense to indicate tangible property inherited...

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