By Way of Introduction: Digitality and the Memory of Cinema, or, Bearing the Losses of the Digital Code

Soon after the 43rd Annual Robert Flaherty Seminar, "Exploration on Memory and Modernity," which took place in 1997 at Ithaca College, Ruth Bradley approached me about planning this issue on "Digitality and the Memory of Cinema." Co-curated by Patricia R. Zimmermann and Michelle Materre, this Flaherty Seminar departed from tradition by featuring work by film and video artists who also were experimenting with digital technology on platforms other than film. In addition to sessions dedicated to the CD-Rom and digitized video work of Muntadas, Reginald Woolery, and Leah Gilliam, participants were presented with an extensive salon of works on CD-Rom and the internet that challenged the conventions of screening and spectatorship which have been nurtured by cinematic culture since the days of Robert Flaherty.

What left a deep impression on me during the public discussions of memory and film in the digital era was less some participants' ambivalence about the growth of digitized cinema and more the keen sense expressed by many other speakers that digitality has something creative and critical to offer to the cinematic legacy. While some seminarians lamented digitality as the marker of the death of cinema, a great many others lauded it for providing a catalyst for the revival of forgotten cinematic histories, for the reinvention of cinematic form, and for the sharpening of theoretical reasoning. This approbation of the digital seemed most poignant when voiced by emerging artists such as Gilliam and Woolery who saw in the new technology a means for developing a reflective approach to historical footage from problematic films from which we have learned to distance ourselves. As discussed in the contribution to this issue by Joseph Milutis, they were able to capitalize on the code of digital editing to juxtapose sequences from films like Birth of a Nation and Imitation of Life with proposals counter to Hollywood's historical memory of the hierarchies of race. The wide range of CD-Roms in the digital salon also provided evidence of the new archival role of digital media and its sometimes uncomfortable relation to the nostalgic reminiscence of the days of Flaherty and his contemporaries in early cinema.

Resounding throughout the days of that Flaherty Seminar was the coda of the digital whose terms combine and shift with the ease and fluidity of bits and bites: appropriation/repetition/layering/simulation/retrospection. Indeed, the retrospective nature of repetition and digital coding, how initial sites are refigured through their contemplative re-citation and re-presentation, was said consistently to inscribe the new media in the memory and memorialization of its antecedents, cinema and video. Ruth and I left this seminar with the conviction that it would be beneficial to encourage theorists, artists, and curators to pen their thoughts concerning the legacy of the cinematic past in the digital future.

The historical focus of the Flaherty Seminar on independent cinema has been very influential on the shape of this issue. Rather than developing the issue solely around many of the digital themes prominent in contemporary cinema and its study (say, the Hollywood fascination with cyborgs, morphs, and techno- culture), I wished to provide readers with a wide spectrum of essays on new independent work in digital media, on theoretical reflections between new media and early cinema, and on artistic and curatorial projects that emphasize "interaction" over "spectating." An enthusiastic response to the call for submissions has resulted in a welcome collection of essays by leading international theorists, artists, and curators who reflect on the new media's formal and conceptual relation to what we know as "the memory of cinema." Key to the sensibility of the contributors is the newly energized collaboration between artist and curator in defining the memory of cinema through its presentation and display in interactive formats and milieux. For this reason we are particularly pleased to have...