Editors’ Foreword

Your new general editors of The Moving Image greet you! We proudly embark on our first term with enthusiasm, curiosity, and a little trepidation—trepidation because we want to please, inform, and stay current with our readers’ interests and aspirations, yet we are aware that you, your expertise, and your interests are very diverse. Furthermore, the profession is changing, along with the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) itself. We also begin with terrific respect for the dedication and hard work of our predecessors, Marsha Gordon and Devin Orgeron, and their great production team. We humbly aspire to follow in their footsteps.

The readership of The Moving Image ranges from archivists to educators, executives to interns, students to historians, librarians, and other parties interested in film, television, video, and digital image preservation. The journal has reflected and bolstered these interests over the years in articles and Forums that have delved into the practice of the profession and in essays that have appealed to our broader interests in the history and significance of our moving image heritage. The new editors wish to continue this trend. We plan to encourage contributions that enlighten us on important aspects of recognizing, restoring, archiving, and disseminating moving images. We will also solicit articles that place these practices in larger cultural and industrial contexts: the distribution and reception of media—those that have operated within established national networks and those that have not; the political, commercial, and social networks within which archives reside; the technological sphere as represented in media; and technological practices, including digital practices, as reflected in preservation activities. We believe that AMIA’s membership will want the best scholarship and the most interesting and relevant Forum articles on a wide variety of subjects, including those that will expand their horizons beyond the currently familiar. In short, we are interested in publishing contributions that focus on the materiality of film and moving image media, including their cultural and industrial materiality.

One of your general editors grew up at the feet of Howdy Doody and Edward R. Murrow. The other enjoys watching Mad Men on her iPad. Between the two of us, and most of you, we have experienced the media universe’s mind-boggling expansion, but never more rapidly or profoundly than in the last decade. Everything in the world, it seems, has gone digital. Not only has this a ected the generation, transmission, exhibition, consumption, and application of images but, furthermore, digitization has changed the way archives capture, process, store, restore, and provide access to their holdings. Look for frequent coverage of this developing transformation of the preservation field. Even so, if every article in every issue were devoted to some aspect of moving digital imagery, we still would not be able to cover everything. The journal itself reflects the trend—it is already available as a digital subscription (http://www.jstor.org/r/umpress). By the end of our term, though, it’s likely that this will be the primary delivery system for The Moving Image, along with, we suspect, the majority of scholarly journals.

Meanwhile, the contents of the journal will continue to be highly readable and to present valuable research. In addition to the detailed practical format you expect, look for articles on international topics. Watch for discussions of nontheatrical media, including orphans. Expect articles on precinema as well as on contemporary media, animation, and even gaming. And anticipate, in 2015, a special issue devoted to a single topic, restoring color, to be guest edited by Joshua Yumibe.

In this current issue, you will enjoy a wide array of research and Forum contributions on problems and issues that at first might seem peripheral but in fact are central to the field. Mariana Johnson lucidly investigates prolific Cuban filmmaker Santiago Álvarez’s revolutionary newsreels (Noticiero ICAIC Latinoamericano) and the complex issues surrounding their preservation on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register. Josh Glick’s richly researched article explores David Wolper’s Los Angeles–based documentary studio and its attempts to narrate in a reassuring way the tumultuous events of the early 1960s in the United States. Focusing on...