Editors’ Foreword

With this issue, we, Donald Crafton and Susan Ohmer, finish our service as coeditors of The Moving Image. Over the past six years and twelve issues, we’ve had the pleasure of working with many international scholars in archival studies, and we are pleased to have brought their work to the attention of a wide audience. One of our initiatives has been to partner with scholars in already prominent or emerging areas in archival studies, and we are grateful to have had the opportunity to collaborate with Joshua Yumibe, Tami Williams, Dimitrios Latsis and Grazia Ingravalle, and Alice Lovejoy. We are also thankful for the continuing support of Jan-Christopher Horak, Paolo Cherchi Usai, Dan Streible, Michael Pogorzelski, and Dennis Doros.

It has been a privilege as well to work with Liza Palmer, the journal’s managing editor, who ensures that The Moving Image maintains rigorous professional standards, and with David Fideler of Concord Editorial and Design, who designs each issue. We also appreciate the support we received from Marsha Gordon, who made our transition to editors go smoothly. The University of Notre Dame College of Arts and Letters funded two graduate students to assist us, and we thank Erik Larsen and Courtney Smotherman, who have since launched their own careers. Notre Dame’s Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts funded the illustrations and cover of the special issue on color, and we thank them for this support. It has been an honor to serve the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) as coeditors of The Moving Image, and we wish every success to the journal’s new editor, Devin Orgeron.

This edition of the journal continues AMIA’s interest in the organizations that support educational, industrial, sponsored, and experimental films. The issue begins with

Alexander Kupfer’s history of university film collections and the proposals in the early 1920s to establish a National Film Negative Library that would collect, catalog, and copy negatives of previously overlooked films. Focusing on visual instruction programs at the University of Wisconsin and at Indiana University, Kupfer examines how administrators built collections by arguing for cinema’s utility as an efficient and popular pedagogical tool. Proponents of a National Film Negative Library believed such an organization would bolster the efforts of these university programs and stabilize the nontheatrical film field. Although the library did not come to fruition, Kupfer argues that it served as an important precursor to the creation of national motion picture collections.

Anne Major explores the practices and commitment of the orphan film movement (OFM) and its efforts to preserve the films of Helen Hill, an experimental artist who was living in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina devastated the city. Her death (as the result of a home invasion) shortly after Katrina struck stirred sympathy for her family and support for her work. Major looks at how the OFM mobilized to preserve and circulate Hill’s films and how her do-it-yourself aesthetic meshed with the OFM’s own commitment to supporting films that were artisanal and authentic. Major’s essay demonstrates how public understanding of a filmmaker’s work and life can be shaped by the organizations that celebrate both.

Lauren Bratslavsky traces the attempts of another notable media organization, the Museum of Modern Art, to envision an archive for television in the mid-1950s, when the medium was rapidly taking hold in postwar American culture. Although museum staff did not succeed in organizing an archive dedicated to television at that time, exploring their efforts enables us to understand the discursive construction of television’s value during this crucial period.

This issue also features a special focus dedicated to “Archives and Pedagogy” guest edited by Alice Lovejoy, whose separate essay following this introduction highlights the important contributions of this feature. We thank Alice for her excellent work in curating these essays and identifying key ideas in this area. As well, two interviews bring to our readers’ attention some interesting recent developments. Craig Leyland, a senior editor on the New Words team of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), talked with the editors about the OED’s recent...