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From the Editor
Paolo Cherchi Usai

The NFSA Journal is the expression of our commitment to develop a dynamic discussion of recorded sound and moving image culture between the National Film and Sound Archive and the public.

We will do so without any concession to nostalgia, technical jargon, or theoretical elitism. Our aim is to make the work of the NFSA - acquiring, preserving and presenting moving images and sound recordings - accessible to a wider audience. We will be open to all kinds of scholarly and intellectual perspectives, as long as their underlying ideas are expressed clearly and in good faith.

The four collections of the NFSA (Documents and Artefacts, Indigenous, Moving Image, Recorded Sound), as well as the philosophical rationale behind its activities, will be our main areas of concern, and the NFSA curatorial team will be directly engaged in the developments of the journal. However, we will be open to other contributions from colleagues, students and practitioners in the field... CONTINUED

The NFSA Journal is published quarterly in print, and is available online as a PDF immediately after the publication of the next edition.

If you would like to subscribe, or receive a printed copy of any issue please contact us at journal@nfsa.gov.au

Editorial Panel

	Volume 4, No.1, 2009 Jazz and Nation in Australian Cinema: From Silents to Sound, by Bruce Johnson This article grows most immediately out of the Scholars and Artists in Residence (SAR) Fellowship held at the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) in October/November 2008, investigating the relationship between the history of Australian jazz and the formation of Australian identity.The broader background to this work was a professional interest in cultural history as an acoustic field, the particular example of music, jazz and especially its diasporic forms, and most specifically the deep interest in Australian jazz of a longtime active performer, and in policy development and administration. [PDF 181 KB]
	Volume 3, No.2/3, 2008 Crying in Color: How Hollywood Coped When Technicolor Died, by Russell Merrit Accounts of Hollywood color usually leave off with the ascension of 3 stripTechnicolor in 1932 and its near monopoly over commercial feature color production that lasted for the next twenty years. The 1950s in these histories is mourned as the decade when Technicolor was abandoned in favor of Eastman Color, yet another example of Hollywood’s decline. In this fallen age of shoddy, the original Eastman Color process is remembered as Technicolor’s cheap, unstable successor, notorious for its instability which became the mark of cut rate quality. [PDF 2.67 MB]
	Volume 3, No. 1, 2008 Innovations in Australian Cinema: An Historical Outline of Australian Experimental Film, by Alex Gerbaz Too often our national cinema seems to be an imitation of American and European forms, and we have few auteurs working in the mainstream. The appeal, then, of a parallel, but largely unseen, cinema – underground, avant-garde, experimental, or whatever you wish to call it – lies in the hope of experiencing something new, original and creative. [PDF 1.61 MB]
	Volume 2, No. 4, 2007 ‘A.K.A. Home of the Blizzard': Fact and Artefact in the Film on the Australian Antartic Expedition, 1911-1914 by Quentin Turnour The subject of this paper is the official motion picture record of the first Australian-backed expedition to Antarctica, the Australasian Antarctic Expedition (AAE) of 1911–1914, and the footage from this record preserved today in the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA). Its topic is a problem of cinema historiography. This archive of AAE film footage has a complex range of historical content and meanings: as primary documentation of the expedition and of man’s first contact with Antarctica’s natural history, as an artefact of the Edwardian popular culture in which it was created, even as data about the history of moving image preservation in Australia. But at the same time, this footage has another, far simpler and better-known identity: as a ‘classic’ ‘work’ of Australian national cinema, a documentary film known as Home of the Blizzard that has become iconic and fixed in Australia’s popular national cultural and social history narrative. [PDF 852 KB]
	Volume 2, No.3, 2007 Blue Movies in Australia: A Preliminary History, by Jill Julius Matthews Jill Julius Matthews’ paper sketches the outline history of adult cinema, and makes the case for the importance of its inclusion within film and cultural history, and in the collecting policies of the National Film and Sound Archive. “It can only be a sketch at this stage,” says Matthews, “reliant on vignettes and extrapolation, because the dominance of the classic paradigm has until recently dissuaded scholars from broader research and obliterated much of the evidence.” [PDF 393 KB]
	Volume 2, No.2, 2007 The Corrick Collection: A Case Study in Asia–Pacific Itinerant Film Exhibition (1901–1914), by Leslie Anne Lewis This collection held at the NFSA comprises approximately 135 early films shown by the Corrick Family Entertainers, a vaudeville-style musical troupe, during their international tours from 1901 to 1914. Dr Lewis's paper reveals a rich archival treasure which will inform a number of areas within the histories of both film and film archives. [PDF 423 KB]
	Volume 2, No.1, 2007 A Review of Digital Cinema by David Watson the NFSA's Head of Information Management, and The quest for a digital strategy – quixotic or realistic? The 20th century saw the rise of audiovisual media and with it the birth of audiovisual archiving, a profession that confronted many challenges in dealing with a variety of mostly analogue formats. With the increasing dominance of digital formats, the current century will see far more profound challenges for audiovisual archivists. [PDF 326 KB]
	Volume 1, No.1, 2006 A Charter of Curatorial Values by Paolo Cherchi Usai This paper is an overview of the main cultural principles governing the activity of curators, with special reference to audiovisual collections in the context of the national and international archiving community. [PDF 751 KB]