Grief, rage, unemployment, lack of housing, food insecurity, police brutality, wildfires, lies, deportation, climate change, quarantines, loneliness, despair. We know this list is not new. We know the sexist, homophobic, racist, and classist institutions governing much of the world have created untenable conditions of domination and violence for a very long time. And yet, in late fall 2020, as governments fumble and a global pandemic wreaks ever greater havoc, a sense of urgency is palpable. “Do something,” the world cries. “Do something.”My task is to write this editorial note. But I’ve been stalling, feeling lethargic, and wondering what, after all, can words really do? Who will read them and when, and what does it matter anyway? Then I reread the contents of this issue. When a transgender programmer from the 1970s pounds a fist on the computer she invented and touts “different types of glitches, different circumstances”; when a Black womanist filmmaker shouts “Hell no!”; when a 1920s animator recalls the craftspeople crowded in her studio, synchronizing their efforts by “each of us mutually adjusting to the other”—when I read these and other voices gathered in these pages, I am galvanized by their power. I am reminded of why I became a writer and editor in the first place, why I so often have turned to words, whether chanted or murmured, recorded or written down, as catalysts that open “locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones of feeling, recharge desire.” When Adrienne Rich extolls poetry’s capacity to “reconnect us,” she calls for a relationship between reader and writer, between sign and feeling, that also forms the front line of defense against despair. And “despair,” she counsels, is “like war, a failure of the imagination.”1A certain leap of the imagination inspired this issue, which emerged out of the crisis generated by the first wave of COVID-19 in the United States. Unforeseen contingencies in early March 2020 prevented the guest editors from continuing their work. The organizing theme and prospective materials slated for this issue dissolved. As the journal’s incoming editor, still adjusting to the demands of the job, I was knocked off balance. Within that same week, the University of Washington in Seattle (where the FMH office is now located) became the first institution in this country to close its physical campus and transition to emergency online teaching in response to the pandemic. Amid these mounting anxieties, fortuity struck: two fascinating essays on the emergence, respectively, of computer art and glitch art in the 1970s crossed my desk almost simultaneously. I was inspired to conjoin these with another two essays that had been awaiting publication, both prize winners of the SCMS Women's Caucus Graduate Student Writing Award, and both examining aesthetic issues germane to Western cultures in the early twentieth century, the years in which cinema emerged. Happily, these four essays now form the “Emergent Art” section which closes this issue.Another bit of kismet gave rise to the “Urgent Media” section with which this issue opens. During those initial days of emergency online teaching, I sought solace by proofing our spring 2020 publication, a terrific issue on “Media and the Environment” guest edited by Jennifer Peterson. I was struck in particular by the conversation between Jamaican independent filmmaker Esther Figueroa and Terri Francis, director of the Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana University. Here Francis coins the phrase “urgent media” to describe the activist ethos in Figueroa’s videos and a “didactic narrative approach” that forgoes artistic experimentation in favor of “illuminat[ing] how human actions in various parts of the world, particularly the overconsuming Global North, have brought us to our current moment of unequally shared crisis.”2 Adopting the phrase “urgent media” from Francis (also an FMH board member), the journal’s Seattle office circulated a call for educators, preservationists, artists, filmmakers, activists, and curators of various sorts to sit down with one another (in an appropriately Zoom-ish manner, given the circumstances) and engage in conversations about urgent matters at stake for different collectivities and media forms.Part of my job now is to chart a path for the reader. But I am hesitant to overinterpret the five conversations that form this issue’s “Urgent Media” section, a gesture that runs the risk of artificially harmonizing a powerfully messy array of voices. Hopefully the reader will experience—or, better, overhear—a bit of intersubjective frisson: a moment of laughter, a pleasantly surprised retort, an unexpected flash of understanding emerging from the oscillation between two or more perspectives. Unlike the single-author or univocal essay, conversation by definition entails an interpersonal exchange, shaped in part by the contingencies of relationality. The point is not to valorize one mode over the other, since powerful arguments (and art) regularly emerge from “solitary work,” which sculptor and printmaker Elizabeth Catlett describes as an act of creation that draws “from our innermost feelings, ideas, emotions, knowledge.” What Catlett calls “solidarity” work, however, draws from “collective thought” and from “the give-and-take and coming together and a separating that are very important in developing ideas.”3A sustained reflection on the mutual exchange of “give-and-take” opens this section. For trans filmmakers Chase Joynt and Jules Rosskam, published conversations like this one extend an ethics and a praxis of intimate reciprocity. Their elegantly structured dialogue, “Toward a Trans Method, or Reciprocity as a Way of Life,” rejects the ideology of autonomous selfhood and fantasies of (cis-oriented, neoliberal) individuation. To understand the self as transitory and fragmented, as always in flux, as repeatedly co-constituted through relations with others, however, simultaneously invites perpetual uncertainty and vulnerability. Reciprocal relations between friends and artistic co-conspirators who care for and thus “create” one another literally provide a “way of life” for Rosskam and Joynt and, by extension, a trans method of filmmaking predicated on collaboration and aesthetic experimentation. While it may be possible to extrapolate a feminist and queer politics of intersubjective care and creativity from their discussion—one that supplements Michel Foucault’s conception of “friendship” and Eve Sedgwick’s call for “reparative” relationality—the exchange they enact in these pages pointedly extends from the lived trans experience, an ontology experienced as a dynamic relationality through which “the body-as-I-want-it must be in collaboration with the body-as-I-have-it.”4The urgent need for collaboration between artists and industries—both those that produce films and those that preserve them—shapes the ensuing two conversations in this section. In “We’d like to see trans people at the very top,” Ann Thomas, founder of Transgender Talent in Hollywood, ruminates on her company’s endeavors to educate and secure professional allies for trans artists and workers in the mainstream film industry. Her discussion with Laura Horak, director of the Transgender Media Portal and faculty member at Carleton College, invites us to peek behind the scenes, as it were, and glimpse the intricate relays between scriptwriters, casting directors, union organizers, directors, producers, and others in any one given production. Frankly, their discussion should be required reading for fans of Black trans actor Laverne Cox, who rose to prominence in Orange Is the New Black (Netflix, 2013–19), or for readers who admire the inclusion of a trans character, and likewise the performance of Zach Barack as one of Peter Parker’s classmates, in Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019). I do not mean to diminish the talent of either actor when I say that their celebrity status too easily functions as a fetish object. And fetishism conceals. It can be a ruse to distract the eye and mind from something that needs to be covered up. Insofar as the fetish is a metaphor for the displacement of meaning, then it obfuscates in this context the overlapping mechanisms through which talented trans individuals—both above and below the line—are disenfranchised, even traumatized, and continually rendered vulnerable as actants in the mainstream media industry.In contrast, it is the vulnerability of queer media undergoing material degradation, specifically the experimental Pixelvision videos that Sadie Benning shot between 1989 and 1998, that inspired preservationists Claire Fox and Nicole Martin to talk with Benning and related stakeholders in a series of telephone conversations during July and August 2020. In “Preserving Pixelvision: Image Vulnerability and the Early Video Works of Sadie Benning,” these talks scaffold Fox and Martin’s painstaking assessment of what it would entail to restore Benning’s videos, and the details fascinate. The precarious status of this body of work emerges in part from the peculiarities of the Fisher-Price PXL-2000 camera that Benning used, a device designed as a toy that records video information on audiocassettes. Moreover, as Benning recalls, they made further adaptations to the camera during their work in those years, such as removing the protective filter on the lens and incorporating a video composite output, thus generating a video format so idiosyncratic (so queer!) as to defy existing preservation norms. Because Benning repeatedly shot parts of their own body in extreme close-up—inviting the viewer to peer into a nostril, an ear, even pores of the skin—the sensation of intimacy generated by videos such as Me and Rubyfruit (1990) or Girl Power (1992) incentivizes a drive to preserve the work with as much fidelity, or proximity, to the original as possible.5Readers like myself who delight in Benning’s videos are encouraged to rewatch available versions while reading this issue. Others might screen Jules Rosskam’s astounding debut film transparent (2005), which examines the lives of nineteen female-to-male transsexuals who gave birth, or access Chase Joynt and Aisling Chin-Yee’s recent No Ordinary Man (2020), a feature-length documentary about jazz musician Billy Tipton, who was revealed to be biologically female after his death. While working on this issue I compulsively indulged in the media objects invoked and discussed, including an evening, now fondly recalled as “my night of glee,” when I browsed through season 6 of Glee (Fox, 2009–15) to find the scene in episode 7, “Transitioning,” when Ann Thomas appears in the center of a 197-person trans choir.If this mode of selective scanning momentarily felt suspect, a bit of bad form for a film scholar who resists the fickle rapidity of click-based media consumption, then my immersion in the short minjian (grassroots, from-the-people) videos shot in Wuhan, China, during the initial coronavirus outbreak dramatize the political and aesthetic power of social media such as Twitter, WeChat, and TikTok. The import of these videos governs a good portion of “Life in-between Screens: ‘The World, Two Meters Away,’” a conversation between Zhang Zhen, director of the Asian Film and Media Initiative at New York University, and Jiang Jiehong, director of the Centre for Chinese Visual Arts at Birmingham City University, UK, which Ellen Y. Chang translated from Chinese for the purpose of this issue. One video Zhang and Jiang bring to our attention has no title.6 It was shot in Wuhan on April 4, 2020, when a woman holding a camera raced out of her apartment building, stumbling down the stairs and into the street. We hear her moan, yelp, gasp, and weep. Her irregular breathing and guttural keening dominate the audio, drowning out the ambient street sounds as she reaches an open road. This is her first moment out of doors following a seventy-six-day mandatory lockdown for the city’s eleven million residents. Arguably “the most remarkable long take from Wuhan during the pandemic outbreak,” as Zhang observes, the video went viral on WeChat, touching viewers from various countries and regions emotionally and deeply. Especially intriguing is the fact that any viewer’s response to this anonymous woman’s self-documentation depends, in part, on what is not there—on the visual disorientation generated by the jerky handheld frame and the scarcity of recognizable signs or figures in the visual field. In perhaps obvious ways, this long take communicates indirectly; it implies rather than explains. This is what it means “to intimate,” a rhetorical mode that operates through allusion, a mode in which comprehension often depends on a shared sensibility, experience, or context.While theories of intimacy thus often presume a spatial context (the proximity of bodies in a bed, a home, a land), the life and work of legendary Black filmmaker Zeinabu irene Davis foregrounds the plurality of locations and persons emotionally connected through a “diasporic intimacy,” specifically a diaspora of African and Caribbean women.7 From her award-winning short Cycles (1989), which celebrates the cyclical power of both ancestral rituals and female menstruation, through longer projects oriented around the numinous visions of an enslaved girl (Mother of the River [1995]) or the lived experience of a deaf Black woman (Compensation [1999]), the African female perspective in Davis’s films organizes “larger conversations of gender, race, sociopolitical discourses, and pride in African cultural coding and spiritual practices.” In “(Re)imagined Possibilities: The Resilience of the Black Woman Griot,” her conversation here with Berette S Macaulay and Savita Krishnamoorthy, co-organizers of the Black Cinema Collective in Seattle, Davis muses on her early training as the so-called baby of the LA Rebellion, her Haitian and African influences, and her sense of belonging in a long genealogy of Black women artists, writers, and activists. She is quick to acknowledge the profound influence on her work of Black men as well, among them legendary African director Ousmane Sembène. But Sembène’s problematic treatment of others, especially his family, raises ethical dilemmas that preclude for Davis a sense of intimate alliance or personal attachment. It is the lesser-known Caribbean documentary filmmaker Sarah Maldoror who models, as Davis enthuses, “a more holistic way of how I want to live my life as a filmmaker.”Who or what inspires any artist? Which communities offer sustenance, nurturing their members, and which aesthetics engender legacies that point to histories of such belonging? In turning to this issue’s “Emergent Art” section, we first confront the brilliant tenacity of German filmmaker Lotte Reiniger, whose 1920s silhouette films have maintained a reputation as simultaneously fascinating and utterly idiosyncratic. What theories, what methods, what archives might help us assess Reiniger’s epic fairy tale Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed, 1926), a film in which the entire narrative diegesis has been cut from sheets of paper and thin bits of lead? In “Visual Music and Kinetic Ornaments: Lotte Reiniger and the Animation Avant-Garde in Weimar Berlin,” Katherine Rochester responds by teasing out the proximity (literally, in terms of shared footage, and also figuratively, in terms of aesthetic sensibility) between Reiniger’s 1926 silhouette fairy tale and Walter Ruttmann’s abstract study Lichtspiel Opus 3 (1924), and by extension the proximity of Reiniger’s work to the whole of the avant-garde absolute film movement. Rochester shrewdly diagnoses the anxieties of male modernists who sought to valorize the self-professed poetry and presumed intellectual sobriety of absolute film by distancing their endeavor from the highly ornamental, handmade silhouettes made by a female director. And yet those repressed relationships resurface via Rochester’s archival probing, an achievement that simultaneously calls into question “enduring polarities such as abstraction/ornament, masculinity/femininity, optical/haptical, nonnarrative/narrative, and spiritual/material.”The pernicious association of ornament and femininity that plagued the reception of Reiniger’s early work reflects vehement concerns at the fin de siècle that denounced ornament as psychologically and culturally detrimental. As Rochester recalls, in articles such as “Ladies’ Fashion” (1902) and “Ornament and Crime” (1908), for instance, Adolph Loos “linked ornament to feebleness of mind, degeneration, and excess, citing women, savages, criminals, and homosexuals as the most acutely afflicted.” It will surprise no one that these same groups were perceived as susceptible to madness, prone to an involuntary plunge into unreason that, in turn, was indivisible from femininity. But a correlative set of ironies warrants equal attention. Just as male avant-garde animators distanced themselves from the feminine taint of handicraft while literally depending on women to handcraft the materials necessary for their films, publics in Western Europe and the United States distanced themselves from graphic scenes of “unreason” while sustaining a morbid fascination with the mentally ill.In “Strike a Pose: Performing Gestures of the Madwoman in Early Cinema,” Elyse Singer traces a remarkably resilient topoi of gestures across stage and screen that derive from the condition French clinician Jean-Martin Charcot diagnosed as “hystero-epileptic.” Taking famed actress Sarah Bernhardt’s visit to the Salpêtrière Hospital’s living theater of pathology as a point of departure, Singer analyzes codified expressions of madness across genres as diverse as the medical film (La Neuropatologia [Neuropathology, 1908]), the nonnarrative cinema of attractions (Photographing a Female Crook [1904]), and transition-era melodramas (Le violon [The Violin, 1907], L’angélus de la victoire [Angel of Victory, 1916]). In all these variances, Singer argues, the performance of madness flaunts its status as performance, even when flirting with codes of authenticity and indexicality. This physiological approach to expressing the inexpressible thus anchors both character and viewer in the realm of representation, offering the assurance that “graphic scenes of unreason” would be contained in the madhouse while the bodies populating stage and screen posed in quiet stillness, their clasped hands raised in anguish.If madness can be tamed via routinized and repetitive representational patterns, could the same be said for data? What happens when an abundance of information overloads the human body’s sensory or visual capacities? Alternately, insofar as computers transform actions, events, and locations into data that is increasingly compressed—nestling into smaller and smaller spaces, from the floppy disk to the microchip—is the history of computational media also a history in which the body-as-data now exists inside these systems? If so, is there an outside to such technologies? And what prepositions appropriately describe our relation to the digital screen? Does the screen now function as an interface, a site of relationality between viewer and viewed, rather than a space understood as mirror, as window, or as high-tech canvas? The two essays that close this issue respond to such questions from a variety of perspectives. Both examine artistic experimentations in the 1970s commensurate with—or, better, deeply entangled in—the immense computational muscle flexing its power throughout that decade. While these essays were conceived and written separately, they speak to each other in intriguing ways. Their juxtaposition here is fortuitous.In “Encoded Perception: Remapping Vision in Lillian Schwartz’s Computer Art,” Helena Shaskevich examines the career of a young female artist invited to AT&T’s Bell Labs in 1968 as an unpaid “resident visitor,” a position Lillian Schwartz retained for another two decades. By virtue of Schwartz’s commitments to both science and art, quite literally by virtue of her position as an artist in a scientific lab, her early computer films revel in the extremes of both disciplines. On one hand lies the question of how to make sense out of informational abundance: Through which paradigms, forms, and patterns might data be visualized and managed? On the other lies the dizzying optical effects enabled by emergent software such as EXPLOR (Explicit Patterns, Local Operations, and Randomness), Kenneth Knowlton’s still-unfinished programming language, which was “designed for the manipulation of two-dimensional geometric patterns in black, gray, and white” but “also allowed for randomness to emerge during sequential operations executed between frames”—a dialectic Schwartz fully exploited in her first film, Pixillation (1970). In her careful examination of the ten computer films Schwartz made between 1970 and 1972, Shaskevich reveals an aesthetic and epistemological tension between machinic and sensorial vision, between presumably objective data and the contingencies of embodied perception.Nine years after Schwartz began her tenure at Bell Labs, transgender programmer Jamie Faye Fenton invented the Bally Astrocade, a video game and computer system that debuted in 1977 as the cheapest home computer system on the market. In “A Trans Historiography of Glitches and Errors,” Whitney (Whit) Pow traces the slippage between Fenton’s career as a programmer and her artistic proclivities, noting that “Fenton designed the console’s operating system and wrote the programming language it was built on, called Bally BASIC.” In other words, Fenton knew exactly what the user could and could not do; she even programmed the error messages and error logs. Fenton then proceeded to gleefully misuse that system, often by pounding the side of the computer with her fist or suddenly ejecting a cartridge. Fenton’s glitch art, such as her Digital TV Dinner (1978), thus emerges from the confluence of the biological and the machinic, the predictable and the unforeseen, the purposeful and the erratic. Always in flux, the glitch and its correlative, the error, animate Pow’s ambitious theorization of a “trans historiography” for digital media studies. This is powerful stuff. Indeed the almost delirious promise of the sustained glitch, the sort that becomes art in Fenton's hands, is the vision it offers of “something else,” an alternative to the prescribed operations of binary computer systems that mediate our very sense of being in the world.In this sense, glitch art calls us to question “What if?,” a question underlying what Adrienne Rich calls “revolutionary art.” A revolutionary art, says Rich, does not prescribe. It does not preach. Instead, it “reminds you (for you have known, somehow, all along, maybe lost track) where and when and how you are living and might live—it is a wick of desire.”8 Revolutionary art at its most powerful ignites the imagination. It works with words or images, cries or sounds, jump-cuts or codes to summon possibility, and stave off despair. I share this issue with readers in the spirit of encouraging all such heretical acts.