Editors' Foreword

On the plane back to North Carolina from the March 2011 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, we had a chance to start reading Caroline Frick's Saving Cinema: The Politics of Preservation (2011). The book's publication, more than any jacket blurb can indicate, is worth remarking on as a segue into this latest issue of The Moving Image. Perhaps most critically, Frick records and contextualizes a discussion that is no longer confined to the Association of Moving Image Archivists or the International Federation of Film Archives or any single organization. Appearing at a moment when it is most certainly needed, Frick's work, as its title indicates, accounts for the uncomfortable fact that our collective cinematic history and its well-being are—and always have been—influenced by personal, institutional, corporate, governmental, and global politics. History and history making are not pure or ideologically neutral endeavors, and this fact must be confronted and assessed by those who are in a position to influence the kinds of decisions that are made about moving image legacies every day.

Moving image legacies are also the subject of Alice Lovejoy's essay "Surplus Material: Archives, History, and Innovation in Czechoslovak Army Films." In this pioneering exploration of a neglected aspect of Czech and Slovak film history, Lovejoy explores a series of films produced in the 1960s by Czechoslovakia's Army Film Studio, which she contends "used unique and often experimental approaches to archival material to challenge official histories of the postwar period." Situating these films within a broader lineage of East European compilation filmmaking, Lovejoy analyzes the ways that archival footage was procured and deployed in a sampling of Czechoslovak Army productions. Her essay indicates the degree to which film historians working with archival materials contribute to a better understanding of the role played by archives not only as contemporary repositories of film history but also as points of access for historical images that demand the kind of critical scrutiny provided in this essay. Recalling the political and cultural context in which these films were produced, the use of archival evidence—and particularly the provocative editing of this material—enabled filmmakers to rebel against the intended meanings of historical images. Lovejoy's work, in other words, goes to the archive in an effort to more fully appreciate how and why a group of filmmakers themselves went to the archives.

The intended meanings of archival materials end up also being the subject of Cecilia Mörner's "Dealing with Domestic Films: Methodological Strategies and Pitfalls in Studies of Home Movies from the Predigital Era," albeit in a very different context. Mörner offers a perspective on best practices for working with home movie materials, alongside a discussion of home movie collections that reside in the Swedish film archive in Grängesberg. Mörner's article argues for the importance of looking beyond the images contained in home movies to improve researchers' understandings of this unique type of moving image holding, which resists many traditional film studies methodologies. Suggesting that home movie scholarship lacking ethnographic detail is often flawed, Mörner offers a case study to illustrate the many inaccuracies that might occur as a result of interpreters' reliance on visual codes and cultural assumptions that often guide readings of these highly personal, idiosyncratic materials. Suggesting that home movies themselves are not texts as we have come to define them because they are not narrative in nature, Mörner argues that attempts at textual analysis of home movies are futile. Although the suggestion might be controversial (reliant, as it is, on a fairly specific understanding of textuality), Mörner effectively reminds readers of the sometimes conveniently neglected fact that these materials have contexts that should, whenever possible, be brought to bear on scholars' and archivists' efforts to understand this particular kind of moving image.

Mörner's essay focuses on home movie collections in Sweden. Christopher Natzén's work stays within the same national framework, but focuses on the importation of a new technology for mainstream film exhibition. "'Have You Heard It Yet?' Advertising the First...