The Moving Image

This issue’s special focus on archives and pedagogy responds to a series of recent, intersecting developments in the fields of film and media studies and film and media archiving, among them the expansion of graduate programs in moving image preservation and archiving, the central role of archives to film and media history’s increasingly broad media and historical purview, the current interest in bringing production of various kinds into the “studies” classroom, and the growth of digitized collections. All of this has presented pedagogical opportunities: ways for archivists and scholars to collaborate, for scholars to reconceive how archival materials enter the classroom, and for students to engage with media and its histories.

The importance of these opportunities is evident in the attention they have received in recent years, in, among other publications, Kate Fortmueller and Laura Isabel Serna’s Journal of Cinema and Media Studies Teaching Dossier “Teaching with Primary Sources: Media Studies and the Archive.”¹ Similarly, the articles collected here present case studies of recent pedagogical experiments that bring archivists and archives into the classroom and turn archives into classrooms— not just for undergraduate students but also for those at the K–12 and graduate levels.

K–12 education is at the heart of the first feature, Vincent Longo’s “Model Archives: Pedagogy’s Role in Creating Diverse, Multidisciplinary, Archival Users.” Critiquing the notion that digitization automatically results in expanded access to archival materials and greater diversity among users, Longo argues that pedagogy is an essential first step to broadening access. He does so through the cases of two digital archival projects carried out in the Orson Welles Collections at the University of Michigan Special [End Page x] Collections Research Center: one for K–12 educators and students, focusing on the War of the Worlds broadcast, and one for university users, focusing on Welles’s planned adaptation of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Colin Williamson, in his feature “ ‘Pagan Constellations in the Sky’: (Re)Animating Muybridge in the Film History Classroom,” examines the complex question of how to teach the history of early cinema to undergraduates inclined to see the material as “primitive,” surpassed by contemporary media in quality and sophistication. Over the course of a semester, Williamson approached this question by directly integrating digital media and media production into curriculum on early cinema. Taking cues from Andreas Fickers’s and Annie van den Oever’s experimental media archaeology, he devised ways to help twenty-first-century students understand not only the cinema of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but also, in his words, “what the archival remains of early cinema and proto-cinematic visual culture can teach us about our digital moment.”

Experimental media archaeology is also central to Bregt Lameris and Barbara Flueckiger’s “Teaching the Materiality of Film,” which describes the authors’ course on analog film, taught at the University of Zurich’s Department of Film Studies in collaboration with the Lichtspiel/Kinemathek in Bern. Teaching students directly in the Lichtspiel/Kinemathek— an institution that foregrounds analog film and its technologies— Lameris and Flueckiger brought them into contact with, among other things, film chemistry, film color, and film laboratories, focusing throughout on the senses: “touching, smelling, and hearing the technologies that form part of our cinema heritage.”

In “AV Archaeology: Excavating Film in University Special Collections,” Trent S. Purdy and Jennifer L. Jenkins describe another collaboration between film scholars and archivists, this time in the authors’ media archaeology course at the University of Arizona, which gave graduate students the opportunity to work closely with Arizona’s 16mm nontheatrical collections. Challenging the typical model of archival–scholarly collaborations, in which an archivist might spend only a single class session working with film history students, Purdy served as the course’s “embedded archivist,” allowing students not just to learn research methods and study topics in film, media, and local history but also to gain skills in handling, understanding, and categorizing media objects.

Philip Hallman and Matthew Solomon’s course Authorship and the Archive: Exploring the Film, Theater, and TV Collections of the U of M Special Collections Library is also a semester-long collaboration...