Editors' Foreword

Figure 1.

"What you call clutter, I call archives." Steven Smeltzer, http://www.smeltzercartoons.com/, 2016. Used by permission.

This issue of The Moving Image examines the margins of cinema through archives, some real, some virtual, some manipulated, and some personal.

It also features the journal's first ever (but we hope not its last) archive-oriented cartoon. The point of this graphic by Steven Smeltzer (who will happily custom-draw cartoons for any occasion, by the way) is highly topical: archives are in the minds of the beholders. The articles and Forum essays herein focus on apparatus, collections, and assemblages, and possibly "clutter," that have been ignored, disparaged, not known, or not realized to be archival in nature—until now, as our authors vividly demonstrate.

The parade of para-archival studies begins with Marsha Gordon and Dino Everett's exploration of the forgotten medium of "3mm: The Smallest Gauge." These miniscule films, despite our tendency to equate such small formats with home movies, in fact were developed by a prolific inventor who conceptualized his system as contributing to the 1960s space program. Therefore, these rare 3mm films—complete with mag sound tracks!—and their associated tools are not only artifacts of a particular time in the development of the material basis of film but markers of technology's function at a certain geopolitical epoch in history.

Sure, we've all seen those film leaders with their hypnotic flashes, countdowns, and arcane messages to projectionists, but have we really looked at them? Matthew Soar has—a lot—and he shares with us the fascinating chronicle of this commonplace but crucial bit of seen-but-unseen cinema in "The Beginnings and the Ends of Film: Leader Standardization in the United States and Canada (1930–1999)." Among his most intriguing findings are that the "Society" leader that the Society of Motion Picture Engineers distributed widely seems never to have been actually ratified by the Society and that, whatever standard prevailed at any given time, studios, labs, projectionists, and eventually archivists more or less ignored it. It is also fascinating to consider the cultural ramifications of the ways artists have been able to transform leader imagery, this cinematic "clutter," into works of art.

In their wide-ranging study of Herzog's documentary recombination of the video shot by Timothy Treadwell, titled "Action, Avatar, Ecology, and Empire: Databases, Digitality, Death, and Gaming in Werner Herzog's Arctic," Scott MacKenzie, Anna Westerståhl Stenport, and Garrett Traylor orchestrate game and database theories, the exploration genre, and the traditional representations of the Far North to arrive at a new and very dense understanding of the place of Grizzly Man (2005) in contemporary culture. They focus on key gaming concepts, such as avatars, gamic action, death, the formation of empires, and the function (or complete absence) of indigenous people, and show how these schemata play out, literally, to place the film outside the traditional concepts and redefine it as a kind of database. This provocative piece invites us to expand the concept of film and video production generally. In selecting material for documentaries, how often are the results the products of organizing extensive material relationally, or even randomly, rather than simply narratively or chronologically? The authors point out that Herzog's "voice-of-God" narration and his Arctic ideology sometimes appear to be at odds with Timothy Treadwell's own intentions and beliefs.

Beatriz Tadeo Fuica and Julieta Keldjian's "Digital Super 8mm: Evaluating the Contribution of Digital Technologies to Film Archives in Latin America" investigates the practice of using Super 8mm—another small gauge we often associate with domestic filmmaking—as a means of documenting social change, in their case, during the period of Uruguayan dictatorship, 1973–85, and the subsequent transition to democracy. The dramatic rescue and identification of unique prints challenge the dominance of big, centralized national archives in the role of preserving such films, highlighting the contribution of local, nonprofessional "enthusiasts" and the function of noncinema archives. The authors also make the important point that access alone isn't the goal...