Editors’ Foreword

The first issue of The Moving Image for 2011 marks two important milestones: the journal is embarking on its second decade of publication at the same moment that the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) is transitioning into its third decade of existence. The journal and its sponsoring association have racked up substantial histories worth reflecting on at this juncture, and this issue commemorates the occasion with a substantial Forum section that records perspectives on how AMIA began, what the organization has accomplished, and what role it might play in the future. A society built around the archival profession owes itself a record of its existence, and we hope that these pages will begin to fulfill that function in a way that will prove useful for current and future generations of moving image archivists and scholars looking back to the organization’s roots and development.

One refrain repeated throughout this issue’s Forum concerns the international possibilities that AMIA might continue to explore as it evolves in the years to come. The Moving Image is, in fact, playing a pivotal role in this effort. For this reason, it seems especially appropriate that the articles in this issue are international in both scope and origin. Furthermore, the essays collected here revolve around the value of not just moving image holdings but paper archives, collections that allow these authors to reconstruct film histories that would otherwise have been unknowable.

Sarah Street’s “Negotiating the Archives: The Natalie Kalmus Papers and the ‘Branding’ of Technicolor in Britain and the United States” is an account of the author’s research at the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles, where Kalmus’s papers reside. Kalmus, a major figure in the history of color film, has been written about in a variety of contexts, perhaps most notoriously in Eleanore King Kalmus’s at times rather one-sided 1993 book Mr. Technicolor. A collaboration between Technicolor’s cofounder and president Herbert Kalmus and his second wife, Mr. Technicolor all but writes Natalie Kalmus out of the company’s history. Street, on the other hand, demonstrates the underexplored reach of Kalmus’s influence on British productions and on British popular culture more broadly. Street’s research narrative is a familiar one to scholars who believe (and hope) that the archive will contain answers to pressing questions, and it offers those who have not been able to travel to the Herrick both a sense of the Kalmus collection’s relevance and a reproduction of the complete finding aid for these materials. As often as not, archival research leads to new questions. Street’s narrative, however, serves to remind us that the archival record is never complete and always needs to be read against a range of other texts. Street’s work also indicates the degree to which the preservation of moving image culture involves a great deal more than the preservation of just moving images.

Eric Smoodin, in “Going to the Movies in Paris, around 1933: Film Culture, National Cinema, and Historical Method,” takes this notion a step further. Smoodin’s research, which takes its cue from other regionally focused studies of filmgoing habits, differs in both its subject and its approach. As Smoodin writes, “despite [an] abundance of possibilities for the movie enthusiast from the period and also the mythic status of Paris as a movie capital during the interwar years, we still know very little about going to the movies there in the 1930s.” While Smoodin’s research is archivally reliant (focused, as it is, on the journalism of the decade), perhaps equally interesting is his attempt to frame the city and its vast cinematic networks in archival terms. The implications here are twofold. On one hand, the city’s inhabitants (and also the press) function like archivists, assigning value to films and influencing their movement. On the other hand, Smoodin’s research reveals useful new contextual information for archives to consider as they ponder their own collections. His cinematic geography of the city, in other words, excavates meanings that have shifted, and these shifts, Smoodin suggests, are a critical part of...