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Given the timing of Jovanovic’s involved essay on the supposed demise of cinema I thought it would be appropriate to review a journal which I received over a year ago that represents an association whose aim it is to preserve cinema, the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA). The title of their journal is The Moving Image, which was released in the Spring of 2001. The journal is published twice a year in the Spring and Fall, and they have currently released three issues with a fourth (vol. 2, no. 2) on its way. The journal functions as a mouthpiece for archivists, historians, researchers, curators, and academics who are interested in the vast area of film preservation (and more broadly, the notion of the moving image). I stress the notion of ‘vast’ because the issues surrounding film preservation really do cover a large canvas, as the articles presented in their flagship issue attests to. Here is just a sampling of the sort of issues that stem from film preservation: 1) the actual hands-on skill and techniques of film restoration; 2) the influence on the latter of changing technologies, especially the new challenges and gains of digital technology 3) questions of economics, which greatly influences the films that are chosen to preserve, which in turn impacts on canon formation; 4) the role of cultural institutes such as universities and museums; and 5) the discovery and rediscovery of National cinema histories.
Two essays examine the impact and importance of the film museum, which stands in some contrast to the film archive: Haidee Wasson’s "The Cinematic Subtext of the Modern Museum: Alfed H. Barr and MoMA’s Film Archive" and Alison Trope’s "Le Cinéma pour le cinéma: Making a Museum of the Moving Image." Trope discusses how film made its way into the museum. According to Trope, early film museum exhibits, borrowing from the science museum, highlighted the technological and scientific development of film history by showcasing everything from pre-cinema toys to cameras to film projectors. No sooner than film became legitimized as an art form in the 1930’s, it became fetishized as an ‘art object’ behind glass walls in the museum. The Benjaminian ‘aura’ once lost through technological reproduction became re-inscribed through institutionalisation. The bridge between the...