Dossier: Materiality and the Archive

For some film and media scholars, the materiality of media may provide an ongoing fascination; for others, materiality may only become visible during occasional archival research. For film and media archivists, however, interacting with stocks, screens, and servers is part of daily life. For this issue, we approached a number of well-known archivists and asked them to reverse the traditional, service-based relationship between archivists and scholars in which archivists often provide scholars with a needed service. For this dossier, we wanted to know what media scholars can do for media archivists. We asked archivists to tell us what questions they have about the media material, with the hope that their needs might guide scholars in their pursuit of material mysteries.

The answers we received did indeed highlight areas ripe for research, but they also pointed to fundamental methodological questions. Perhaps not surprisingly, the digital conversion was a central issue in the responses. But so, too, was an anxiety about the approaches taken by media scholars. Contributors posed some hard questions, ranging from how we can develop a scholarly vocabulary for home movies, to whether humanities training is up to the task of preparing scholars to grapple with the complex technologies of media.

We hope that readers are stimulated and inspired by these pieces, and we deeply thank all of our contributors for their participation.

• The Tantalizing Challenges of the Home Movie Archive
• Dwight Swanson (bio)

In 1998, when I was finishing my initial training as an archivist, film scholars’ areas of expertise were broadening beyond the cinema, as indicated by growing interest in ephemeral films and the early rumblings of the Orphan film movement. Still, films were still films (even if they were on video) in the sense that they were nearly always discrete, complete, finished items. Having decided to focus my career on home movies, I ended up working with much more amorphous films that are frequently complicated mixtures of gestures, shots, and sequences spread over hours of a family’s collection. The stuff that home movie archivists deal with often comes in as a cardboard box full of reels, some of them 8mm, some of them 16mm, maybe some hi-8 and VHS videotapes thrown in for good measure. Some of them are labeled, some are not. Some are edited, titled, and lovingly crafted, while some are barely viewable or were never processed at all. No matter how hard we work at sorting, organizing, and cataloging, the nature of the material means that there are nearly always complications that require scholars to untangle.

Rick Prelinger, who is arguably the person currently posing the most challenging questions to home movie archivists, writes in his provocatively titled essay “Do Physical Objects Have the Right to Exist?” that “information is archival capital, but too much information is a liability.” Currently, that information, as far as home movies are concerned, is becoming less and less visible in its original analog forms as archival backlogs pile higher and higher and the old technologies become unavailable. Archivists are struggling mightily to find the technology and funding to make them available digitally, and progress is being made, but the challenges of providing online access to such a mass of materials are daunting. A recent focus of home movie archivists is to use the Internet to create virtual collections of home movies from both public and private archives so that for the first time scholars have access to vastly greater numbers of films, with the belief that this access will guide deeper understanding. While we may be able to offer some curatorial pointers, we will need to rely upon researchers and other viewers to uncover the most significant discoveries.

Frankly, home movies are often a mess, which makes unleashing them all the more interesting. Because they were primarily created as domestic documents, by screening home movies in public or watching them with a researcher’s eye, we are asking them to do something that they weren’t originally intended to do. Other genres of films developed canons based on some consensus shared (however tentatively) by audiences, critics, and scholars. Home movies...