Introduction

This special double issue, entitled "Inquiries, Speculations, Provocations," commemorates the move of Film History to its new editorial home in the Department of Communication and Culture's Film and Media Studies program at Indiana University. Taking over as editor-in-chief of a highly regarded, long-established scholarly resource is a challenging task, made even more daunting in this instance because Richard Koszarski has done such an impressive job editing Film History since he founded the journal in 1987. Under his guidance and through his tireless efforts, Film History has published scores of groundbreaking articles and special issues, thereby significantly cultivating and deepening what has been called the "historical turn" that redefined the study of film as an academic discipline over the past quarter century. Acknowledgment for making Film History so successful is due also to the long-serving members of Film History's editorial board, and especially to John Libbey Publishing (Richard's collaborative partner since 1993) and to the associate editors who were responsible for special issues over the years: John Belton, Janet Bergstrom, Stephen Bottomore, John Fullerton, Mark A. Langer, Daniel J. Leab, Kristin Thompson, and Paolo Cherchi Usai.

The move of Film History to Indiana University would not have been possible without the enthusiastic commitment of Indiana University Press. Linda Bannister, Judith Caldwell, and Kathryn E. Karas of the press have been encouraging and helpful at every step of the process. I am likewise very grateful for the strong support I have received from the Department of Communication and Culture and the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University. Jean Robinson, the college's executive associate dean, was instrumental in making it possible for me to take on this editorship. While completing his dissertation, David Church has done a superb job as assistant editor—his efforts and advice have been invaluable.

Rather than being asked to take stock of the discipline, predict its future, or articulate some shared methodology, the twenty contributors to this special issue of Film History were given full latitude to speculate about a research question, weigh in on a historiographical issue, or explore the implications of a particular piece of evidence—all within the space of about half a standard academic article. The result is a rich array of finely tuned microanalyses and pointedly provocative interventions. The issue highlights new resources, like the MPPDA Digital Archive (housed at Flinders University [http://mppda.flinders.edu.au]), and reaffirms the importance of situating motion pictures within a more expansive mediascape. Along the way, individual essays demonstrate what historians of film stand to learn from archival theory and practice, from ongoing debates over metahistory, from Walter Benjamin's evocative notion of constellation, as well as from scholarship in art history and the history of science, and even from theories of business cycles.

Most obvious and perhaps most important, all the contributors to "Inquiries, Speculations, Provocations" model the practice of historical inquiry. Or, rather, each essay puts practice on display, some more reflexively than others. Richard Abel and Donald Crafton, for example, ponder from quite different angles the historiographical implications of digitized newspaper archives, particularly as these sources expand what we know about the culture of silent film. Frank Kessler, in contrast, returns to a more traditional archival setting, home to fragmentary "orphan" documents whose significance is waiting to be discovered by the right researcher. Looking not toward the online keyword search or the puzzling archival orphan, Jane M. Gaines uses her essay to reintroduce essential questions about history making and the philosophy of film history.

Like Gaines, several of the authors provide what we might call panoramic views or reestablishing shots of the film-historical terrain. Ian Christie, Sabine Hake, and Abé Mark Nornes revisit the place afforded national cinema in our histories, past and present, and speculate about the importance of the regional and the transnational in film history. Surveying the implications of the current wholesale move to the digital production, distribution, exhibition, and preservation of moving images, Dan Streible insists that scholars pay heed to fundamental distinctions between "cinema shot on film" and the "all-digital movie."

Other essays in this issue shift the focus...