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The task of chronicling the early years of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television [1] is akin-at least so it seems in retrospect-to writing my own professional obituary. After all, the Historical_Journal of Film, Radio and Television dominated my life for the better part of two decades, years which produced pride and, in the end, some regrets. I offer the following as a personal reminiscence; nothing more and nothing less. Significant papers from my years as founding editor in 1980-1992 were transferred to the present editor; the rest have not survived. What is important is the journal itself. It is the hero of the story.
What proved to be particularly stimulating was going back through those challenging years and reacquainting myself with articles which-10 or 20 years ago-I had rashly blue-lined according to Henry Fowler's magisterial Modern English Usage `guidelines'. My pre-publication decision to duplicate the table of contents on the back cover made the initial task of getting a sense of the `landscape' of 19 plus years all the easier. Those articles were and remain seminal contributions to a now not so very new or controversial field-the international history of film, radio and television. Running through the recently published index of the journal [2], although enormously useful, is no replacement for slowly leafing through those issues from beginning to end, one after the other, volume after volume. Those collected volumes are an impressive memorial to those authors and their ground-breaking scholarship.
Twenty years ago the founding of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television came at the conjunction of a series of significant developments amongst European historians, research institutes and universities located primarily in Denmark, the UK, The Netherlands and the Federal Republic of Germany. A sensitivity, particularly within a select group of British historians, led by Paul Smith amongst others, as to the importance of contemporary newsreel and documentary film material in the teaching of contemporary history, as well as the potential value of such material as historical sources, had led to the development of the InterUniversity History Film Consortium, as well as the British Universities Film and Video Council. In Denmark, at the University of Copenhagen, Professor Niels Skyum-Nielsen founded his Filmseminar at the Historical Institute in 1965, which...