Introduction

We begin this issue of the Velvet Light Trap with a departure from the theme of failures, flops, and false starts in order to remember the life and work of our deeply missed colleague Rebecca Swender. Her posthumous contribution, entitled "Claiming the Found: Archive Footage and Documentary Practice," is a theoretical investigation into documentary filmmakers' use of recovered actuality footage. Swender's work both provides film analysts a lexicon with which to define the attributes of archive footage and offers illuminating descriptions of how four documentary filmmakers—Frank Capra, Emile de Antonio, Connie Field, and Marlon Riggs—appropriate archive footage in distinct ways. Her rigorous theorization and analysis serve as a touchstone for current and future film scholars.

We often say that history is written about successes: about the films that garner huge profits at the box office, about the shows awarded with record-breaking ratings, or about the early adopters of conquering technologies. Yet the media industry has also long been fascinated by failure. From blighted film productions (Heaven's Gate) to hapless filmmakers (Ed Wood), from stars that never rose (Karl Dane) to those that fell (Montgomery Clift), from shows that were brilliant but ultimately canceled (Freaks and Geeks) to shows that were critically maligned but nevertheless repeatedly renewed (Arli$$), from formats, venues, and platforms we miss (Technicolor and movie palaces) to those we never really had (HD DVD and Smell-O-Vision), failures, flops, and false starts have captivated our imaginations and expanded our understanding of the virtues and limitations of moving images and the industries that surround them.

For this issue of the Velvet Light Trap we asked film and media scholars to submit research that explored how failures culled from the vast pool of unsuccessful film, television, and new media projects, technologies, and strategies further our understanding of the haphazard and unlikely ways in which media forms, criticism, industries, and practices have developed. At stake is not just the question of understanding the generative mechanisms behind specific failures but also the more central inquiry: How is failure itself defined in these diverse contexts?

In "Hollywood Party, Jimmy Durante, and the Cultural Politics of Coherence" Allen Larson takes a closer look at a film and a star widely considered failures by media scholars (1934's Hollywood Party and Jimmy Durante, respectively). Larson points out that the former actually played to modest success upon its release and that the latter was among the most high profile of vaudevillian crossovers in the early sound era. Larson's argument, however, has wider implications than this correction to our historical understanding of Hollywood Party's reception. He suggests that Durante's performance style and, more specifically, his trademark personal slang walked a very delicate line: on the one hand, Durante was part of a long line of ethnic humorists; on the other, his language was entirely its own and circumvented the racism and classism of other established vaudeville acts. For Larson, in the last analysis, the disjunctive Hollywood Party is also a success, one that constitutes the classical film industry's "most provocative statement about who, and what, made Hollywood cinema itself."

Hollywood Party was stamped a failure decades after its release. More frequently, though, success and failure are labels attached at the moment of premiere or market release. However, several of the authors in this issue expand the notion and analysis of success and failure to include the more mundane moments of mediated experiences—where success might be accomplished years after the debut and where the label of "failure" or "flop" may have been ascribed too hastily. Certainly, this was the case for Nintendo's Virtual Boy console. Steven Boyer's "A Virtual Failure: Evaluating the Success of Nintendo's Virtual Boy" takes a long-term perspective, suggesting that the game console was declared a flop too hastily. His piece resurrects Nintendo's forgotten Virtual Boy system in order to reexamine the console's position within the history of gaming. Though the console's marketing, graphics, and gaming experience may have been lacking, the author notes that several features of Nintendo's Virtual Boy, like a focus on peripheral and haptic gaming apparatuses...