1 Introduction: “Out of the Dark Stacks and into the Light: Re-viewing the Moving Image Archive for the 21 st Century” Volume 4, no. 1 Guest edited by Sophie Cook, Rachel Webb Jekanowski, and Papagena Robbins The archive, as a concept and a physical repository of historical traces and material fragments, holds a central place within contemporary film and media studies. The archive is not only a location for historical research; it also functions as a source of images and materials to be mined by filmmakers and media artists. For decades, film scholarship regarded the archive as a repository, in which a humanities scholar or historian could access the past by delving into the boxes and stacks of files held within. Studies of documentary film and avant-garde found footage cinema, in particular, focused on the film archive as a source of artistic and historiographical materials. After the archival turn in Anglo-American film and cultural studies scholarship in the 1990s, film and media scholars increasingly approach the archive as an object of critical study in its own right. Increasingly, the moving image archive is both mined and theorized to revise histories of film theory, production, and circulation, especially in post-colonial and transnational film scholarship. As such, the archive becomes as much a site of hermeneutical struggle, privileged access, contested histories, and loss as it is a site of creative inspiration and cultural preservation. With the transnational and global turn in film scholarship, a greater analysis of the circulation and display of archival materials and moving images is necessary to understand how archival access might impact the current assessment of global and local shifts. Accordingly, this issue of Synoptique is dedicated to exploring both the sites of moving image archival preservation and display (such as art galleries, institutional archives, private collections, and the World Wide Web), as well as the socio-political, historical, and creative circulatory networks that connect them. This issue seeks to inquire into the myriad ways in which archive studies—and the scholars and practitioners who drive the discipline—have transitioned away from the traditional library