In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Editors' Foreword
  • Marsha Orgeron (bio) and Devin Orgeron (bio)

This themed issue of The Moving Image began in earnest at a roundtable lunch (we mean that literally!) that took place during the 2010 Orphan Film Symposium in New York City. Around that table sat the two of us with Andy Lampert (Anthology Film Archives), Jeff Lambert (National Film Preservation Foundation), Liz Coffey (Harvard Film Archives), Mark Toscano (Academy Film Archives), Bill Brand (BB Optics), and Ken Eisenstein (University of Chicago). We gathered this group to talk about the potential of theming an issue of the journal on the subject of experimental or avant-garde moving images and the archive, and the result of that initial conversation appears in the pages that follow.

The assistance provided by this group gave considerable momentum to the issue, and we are especially grateful to Ken Eisenstein and Ross Lipman, whose enthusiasm for and interest in this material ignited our own. Our sense from the start was that this was an auspicious time for this topic to receive the kind of focused attention a special issue would provide, and our informal lunch meeting confirmed this. Recent presentations, exhibitions, symposia, publications, screenings, websites, archival donations, and a more general resurgence of interest in experimental media indicated a need for a space in which to consider this subject and its relationship to and implications for the archive. The Alternative Projections symposium in Los Angeles in November 2010 is an excellent case in point. A sort of soft opening for Filmforum's ambitious Alternative Projections Project—an online portal exploring the community of filmmakers, artists, curators, and organizations who contributed to the creation and presentation of experimental film and video in Southern California in the postwar era (the website went live in July 2011 at http://alternativeprojections.com/)—the symposium and the excitement it generated [End Page viii] signaled a change in this material's at times precarious status both inside and outside of the academy and the archive.

Our intuitions about the subject's timeliness were further supported by the overwhelming response we had to our call for proposals. When all was said and done, we received over sixty proposals for the feature and Forum sections—a truly impressive and, we suspect, unprecedented number for The Moving Image. With the assistance of our many advisers from the Editorial Board as well as from the larger experimental media community, we painstakingly thinned the proposals and, in the months since, have been working with authors and readers on the submission, evaluation, and revision process. We realized early on that we could easily have themed several issues on this subject. The volume and quality of the proposals and essays we received that, for one reason or another, did not make it into this issue suggest the vibrancy of work in this area, which extends well beyond our admittedly rather focused parameters.

What does appear in the pages that follow—four feature articles, eight shorter think pieces, two interviews, and two collaboratively authored Forum essays—represents a spectrum of current views on and research in this exciting and challenging field. Having now immersed ourselves in this world for a short time, we feel convinced that experimental media is being attended to—by archivists, exhibitors, distributors, and scholars—in ways that promise to change the landscape of the discipline—of several disciplines, really—in the years to come.

We begin the issue with Juan Carlos Kase's "Encounters with the Real: Historicizing Stan Brakhage's The Act of Seeing with one's own eyes." Kase's argument is a highly nuanced variation on a theme we are seeing more frequently in the pages of The Moving Image, namely, that our access to the archival material surrounding moving images can alter, sometimes radically, our sense of the place these films and their makers occupy in history. While many of us celebrate, for example, the release of a small fraction of this material on DVD or other digital formats (Criterion's By Brakhage collection, for example), we need more than thoughtful liner notes to come to terms with work this personally, geographically, and technologically specific. Kase sums it up most succinctly when he writes...

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