Editors' Foreword

The keystone of this issue of The Moving Image is a section memorializing David Shepard, who died in January 2017. It is especially fitting that a journal devoted to the materiality of screen media should commemorate a person whose life was devoted to discovering, restoring, distributing, promoting, and proselytizing about classic cinema. One of your editors (Don), like so many in our calling, counts Shepard among his formative influences. Of course, our relationship changed over forty years. But I like to focus on the crystalline moments of our first encounter. Please pardon the self-indulgence. It was at a panel during the conference of the Society for Cinema Studies (ancestor of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies) at UCLA. I delivered a paper on a motif in early animation called "the hand of the artist," which, strangely, launched a concept that I was still grappling with in my book that came out in 2013. Shepard, who looked like the somewhat fanatical person pictured in Pamela Wintle's wonderful photographs reproduced in the memorial, greeted me with affection and enthusiasm after the presentation. His main interest was not in my talk but in my role at Yale University, where, since no one else was interested, I had become "curator" (and I use the term advisedly, given my total lack of knowledge at the time or training about taking care of film) of his beloved John Griggs Collection of 16mm films. We chatted for a long time, and he invited me to join him the next day on a tour of "his" Hollywood.

The expedition began at his home in West Hollywood. We drove around in his canvas-top Jeep, looking at some of the favorite spots he liked to show off: the house where John Ford lived; the Silver Lake staircase that was the site, in 1932, of Laurel and Hardy's Sisyphean struggles with a piano in The Music Box; the Kodak Fotomat in

Figure 1.

David Shepard preparing to perform as Winsor McCay inGertie the Dinosaur, Kansas Silent Film Festival, 2006. Photograph by Carol Yoho.

a strip mall with an amazing story. Originally, the guard stations at Disney's Hyperion Avenue studio were little replicas of the three houses in The Three Little Pigs. Only one was left—I forget which, but probably the one "made of brick"—and that's the one that had been repurposed as the drive-up Fotomat. Of course, the central attraction of the tour was a visit to Shepard's own holdings, then stored in a vast vault that UCLA and Technicolor shared. I held in my hands his then most prized possession, the original, unique, handpainted 35mm print of The Great Train Robbery (1903), now preserved at the Library of Congress. As one reads Ed Carter's oral history made with Shepard (greatly abridged for this issue), the humor, sly wordplay, erudition, and determined commitment to preserving film come through. For those of us who knew him, it is difficult to read the text without hearing David speaking the words.

Now, as Jan-Christopher Horak intimates in his introduction to the memorial, David Shepard was neither an uncomplicated nor an uncontroversial figure. He was one of a handful of collectors and agitators who circulated on the margins of fandom, archives, and academia. These domains frequently conflicted in his work, in his practice as an archivist and as a teacher. This is not the place to dwell on these relations, but Shepard's life and career, which were more or less inseparable, would make a challenging but revealing case study of our many definitions of "archivists" and how their practices and ideologies blurred with those of "collectors," "dealers," "preservationists," "restorers," "disseminators," and some less savory epithets as well. But for now, it is perhaps sufficient to point out that—as the testimonials gathered here from Kevin Brownlow, N. Ciccone, Patrick Loughney, Mike Mashon, David Pierce, and Pamela Wintle show—Shepard was a major influence on our field during its early days, when it was struggling for legitimacy. And that...