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 conference affirmed that the debates addressed in Issue 1: The Long Path to Audio-Visual History remain highly relevant to current research at the intersection between film and history. Issue 2 follows seamlessly on from issue 1, and can in many ways be seen as a version 2.0.

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.