The first issue of the journal Research in Film and History is based on the edited volume Film und Geschichte and Film als Forschungsmethode, published in 2015 and 2018 by Bertz + Fischer (in German). Prior to their publication in the journal, the articles were carefully reviewed and in some cases substantially revised. They are intended to serve as a catalyst for further debate, new research approaches, and critical discussion of existing interdisciplinary research into film and history.

The second issue of the journal Research in Film and History explores current research, debates, and projects at the intersection between the disciplines of film studies and history. The articles are based on the research by a group of leading international scholars who presented and discussed their recent theories and projects at the Research in Film and History conference in Bremen in November 2018.

The interdisciplinary refiguration indicates self-reflective challenging of the epistemological and methodological foundations of both film studies and history. The variety of directions that emerged from the versatile encounters between history and audiovisual media goes far beyond the discussions of the hierarchical relation of audiovisual materials to textual sources, questions of historical accuracy or objectivity.

Andrey Tarkovsky approached filmmaking as “sculpting in time,” which means that film is able to “capture time.” Furthermore, a film leaves traces through time that can be preserved, reproduced, recontextualized, as well as forgotten and lost. Along this line of thought, these audiovisual traces acquire both temporal and spatial dimensions, material and mnemonic capacities.

After a long period of neglect by archives and scholars, the varied histories of educational film have been the subject of investigation and re-evaluation since the turn of the millennium. The issue Educational Film Practices aims to move beyond the state of research into so-called ‘useful cinema’ by engaging with educational film as a prolific historical source and methodological testing ground for writing film history as a historiography of practices.

Questions have been raised about the trustworthiness of Soviet film footage of crimes from the WWII period for as long as the Russian cinematographic archives have existed. In the past, this footage and the concerns about it were mainly discussed through the lens of the Cold War. Today, the reasons for distrust are even broader in scope, due to the possibility of digital manipulation and the activities of the contemporary Russian propaganda machine, which has instrumentalised the history of WWII as part of its onslaught against Ukraine.

In recent years, both film studies and contemporary history including memory studies have increasingly recognized that films are not only sources of history, but are also instrumental in shaping our idea of the past. However, research of historical films that reflects on the films themselves as well as on archival sources for the reconstruction and contextualization of their production and of their impact on memory culture is still a desideratum, especially with regard to the cinematic legacy of National Socialism.