“Film Heritage and Environmental Sustainability. Cultural Policy, Stewardship, and Technologies”

Guest editors (in alphabetical order):
Luca Antoniazzi, Daniela Currò, Simone Venturini

Proposals due: May 5, 2024

Final manuscripts due: November 30, 2024

The Moving Image, the peer reviewed journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, invites submissions for possible inclusion in a special issue on film heritage and environmental sustainability. Despite its conceptual malleability, sustainability is increasingly taken as a key concept in assessing good practice in collection stewardship and long-term viability of digital preservation. In some parts of the world, sustainability is also an increasingly relevant preoccupation of public funding bodies and private donors. Despite notable exceptions, sustainability has not been explored enough in the context of film archival studies and its potential is not yet fully developed.

The overall objective of this special issue is threefold: (1) to shed light on the environmental impact of the film archival sector; (2) to assess whether, in the face of the climate crisis, film policies, archival and programming/exhibition practices, infrastructures, and technologies are transitioning towards environmentally sustainable stewardship; (3) to sketch out lessons learned and best practices that might be applied to different institutional and geo-political contexts.

We welcome contributions from a diverse range of research traditions, including film heritage studies, the humanities, cultural production, cultural policy, media infrastructure studies, and information science. We also welcome contributions from practitioners, cultural managers, policymakers, and the film archival community at large.

Potential topics include:

• Energy and resource-efficient labor processes and organizational models in film archiving
• Cultural and technological policies for sustainable film heritage
• Gender, class and race implications of new ‘green’ policies and practices
• Green digital stewardship and curatorship
• Archival e-waste, obsolescence, and rare earths extraction
• Power consumption and carbon emissions in film conservation and data preservation
• Sustainable facilities and buildings in film archival institutions
• Good (green) practice in traditional film archiving
• Sustainability and film archiving grassroots innovations in the context of the Global South
• Promoting sustainability within and outside film heritage institutions
• The institutional politics of greening film heritage

Types of Submissions:

• Feature articles: Double-blind peer reviewed research papers, 4,000 – 6,000 words
• Forum pieces: Shorter, less formal pieces, including interviews and “notes from the field” discussing case studies on single institutions or archivists’ own work, such as specific projects or policy initiatives, 2,000 – 3,000 words
• Reviews: reviews of recent books, media (e.g., DVDs, Blu-Rays), conferences, film festivals, and exhibitions, 700 – 1,000 words

Submission guidelines

Please send initial proposals and final submissions to special issue co-editors Luca Antoniazzi, Daniela Currò, Simone Venturini at sustainability.tmi@gmail.com.

Proposals must be submitted by May 5, 2024 for initial consideration and should include: (1) a 250-word abstract, (2) four key words, (3) a 100-word bio of the author(s), (4) the type of paper you would like to write (e.g. feature article). Proposal review will be completed by May 31, 2024. For any questions regarding this CFP, please contact the co-editors prior to the proposal submission deadline.

Completed manuscripts will be due for editorial review by November 30, 2024. All manuscripts should be submitted as a Microsoft Word email attachment, double-spaced throughout, using 12-point type with 1 -inch margins, following the 17th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style.