Jiří Anger
Jiří Anger is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Film, Queen Mary University of London. He also works at the National Film Archive in Prague as a researcher and editor of the peer-reviewed academic journal Iluminace. He specializes in the theory and history of early cinema, archival film, found footage, and videographic criticism.
Anger’s texts and videos have appeared in journals such as NECSUS, Film-Philosophy, The Moving Image, [in]Transition, or Quarterly Review of Film and Video. For the article “Trembling Meaning: Camera Instability and Gilbert Simondon’s Transduction in Czech Archival Film,” he won the Film-Philosophy Annual Article Award 2022.
Anger is the author of the monograph Afekt, výraz, performance: Proměny melodramatického excesu v kinematografii těla (Affect, Expression, Performance: Transformation of the Melodramatic Excess in the Cinema of the Body, 2018). He is currently working on a monograph Towards a Film Theory from Below: Archival Film and the Aesthetics of the Crack-Up (Bloomsbury, Thinking Media series), and on an edited volume on the digitization of the earliest Czech films at the National Film Archive in Prague.
Anger’s texts and videos have appeared in journals such as NECSUS, Film-Philosophy, The Moving Image, [in]Transition, or Quarterly Review of Film and Video. For the article “Trembling Meaning: Camera Instability and Gilbert Simondon’s Transduction in Czech Archival Film,” he won the Film-Philosophy Annual Article Award 2022.
Anger is the author of the monograph Afekt, výraz, performance: Proměny melodramatického excesu v kinematografii těla (Affect, Expression, Performance: Transformation of the Melodramatic Excess in the Cinema of the Body, 2018). He is currently working on a monograph Towards a Film Theory from Below: Archival Film and the Aesthetics of the Crack-Up (Bloomsbury, Thinking Media series), and on an edited volume on the digitization of the earliest Czech films at the National Film Archive in Prague.
less
InterestsView All (12)
Uploads
Thinking Media series (editors: Bernd Herzogenrath and Patricia Pisters)
Order the book here: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/towards-a-film-theory-from-below-9798765107263/
Endorsed by Shane Denson (Stanford University) and Katherine Groo (Lafayette College)
Would it be possible to do film theory from below, through the perspective of moving-image objects? Could we treat accidental details in archival films, such as scratches, stains, and shakes, as speculatively and aesthetically generative features? Do these material actors have the capacity to create “weird shapes” within the figurative image that decenter, distort, and transform the existing conceptual and methodological frameworks?
Building on his theoretical as well as practical experience with the recently digitized corpus of the first Czech films, created by Jan Kříženecký between 1898 and 1911, the author demonstrates how technological defects and accidents in archival films shape their aesthetic functions and our understanding of the materiality of film in the digital age.
Jiří Anger, ed., Digitální Kříženecký: Nový život prvních českých filmů (Praha: Národní filmový archiv, 2023), 525 s.
Kniha k dostání zde:
https://www.eshop.nfa.cz/digitalni-krizenecky
Širší nominace na Magnesii Litera:
https://www.magnesia-litera.cz/kniha/digitalni-krizenecky-novy-zivot-prvnich-ceskych-filmu/
Filmy a doprovodné materiály:
https://krizenecky.nfa.cz
Kniha vychází z dlouholetého výzkumu, prezentace a kurátorství filmů Jana Kříženeckého z let 1898 až 1911 v nové digitální podobě. Digitalizace z původních nitrátních kopií a negativů průkopnické snímky nejen zpřístupnila, ale zároveň otevřela mnohé otázky po jejich minulosti i budoucnosti. Studie z oblasti filmové teorie, historie a archivnictví zkoumají proměnlivou materiální podstatu filmů, jejich oběh napříč epochami, kontexty a médii či možnosti, jak nově vzniklé digitální artefakty vystavovat nebo využít pro umělecký výzkum. Publikace rovněž zahrnuje rozsáhlou edici dokumentů, které se s Janem Kříženeckým a počátky české kinematografie pojí, a audiovizuální eseje, jež digitalizované artefakty rozkrývají tvořivou hrou s obrazy a zvuky.
Autorky a autoři textů: Jiří Anger, Lucie Česálková, Jaroslav Lopour, Jeanne Pommeau, Kateřina Svatoňová, Alena Šlingerová, Jan Trnka
Order the book here: https://www.ghmp.cz/en/artotheque/thinking-through-film/
Texts: Jiří Anger, Sandra Baborovská. Georges Didi-Huberman, Sergei Eisenstein, Noemi Purkrábková, Ondřej Vavrečka
Film je „forma, která myslí“, poznamenal již režisér Jean-Luc Godard. Skladba obrazů a zvuků dokáže formulovat určité ideje, ale také reflektovat materiální, formální a narativní prvky, jež filmové médium utvářejí. Přežívá však myšlení filmem i v době digitální a postfilmové? Projekt Myslet filmem se zaměřuje na způsoby, jakými současné audiovizuální umění filmovou řeč nejen posouvá, nýbrž i navrací k jejím kořenům.
Film is “a form that thinks,” as director Jean-Luc Godard once noted. Montage of images and sounds enables us to express certain ideas but also to reflect on the material, formal, and narrative elements that define the film medium. But does thinking through film survive in the digital and post-cinematic era? The Thinking Through Film project focuses on the ways in which contemporary audiovisual art not only pushes the film language forward but also brings it back to its roots.
Kniha postihuje vzájemné proměny mezi melodramatem a experimentálním filmem, potažmo mezi afektivním obratem v humanitních vědách a filmovou teorií. Východisko tvoří dvousměrný pohyb mezi melodramatickým excesem a teoreticko-filosofickým pojetím afektu (založeným primárně na myšlenkách Gillesa Deleuze). Melodramatický (nad)žánr využívá určitý repertoár výrazových prostředků k vyjádření krajních emocionálních stavů či situací, zejména utrpení, které plyne z nedosažitelnosti objektu touhy. Tento melodramatický exces se typicky uplatňuje v momentech, kdy děj ustrne v symbolickém uspořádání a vše se soustředí na gesta a pózy ohromených postav či na emocionálně nasycené předměty.
Melodramatický exces však nemusí být vázán jen na konvenční žánrové projevy. Pracují s ním také četné experimentální filmy, zejména „kinematografie těla“ 60. a 70. let napojená na avantgardní divadlo a operu. Skrze mediální operace s prostorem, časem a tělesností však melodramatickou formu ozvláštňují natolik, že přestávají být jednoznačnými emocionálními znaky. V rozpoznatelných a ustálených výrazech melodramatického patosu vyjevují drobné nuance, které může vystihnout právě pojem afekt. Afekt, často vymezovaný jen abstraktně či negativně, zde postihuje estetické jevy, při nichž se známé figury a formy stávají něčím jiným – ať už nabývají tvar, nebo jej ztrácejí –, aniž by figurami či formami být přestaly.
Podivuhodná kombinace ukotvení v melodramatické tradici a transformativních mediálních operací ve filmech Wernera Schroetera, Carmela Beneho či Kennetha Angera vede k tomu, že i nepostižitelný afekt získává svébytnou estetickou variantu, totiž variantu melodramatickou. Tato kniha ukazuje, jak tato proměna melodramatického excesu v melodramatický afekt funguje a jaké podněty může přinést pro studium afektivity ve filmu a jiných uměleckých odvětvích.
-----
This book deals with various possible ways in which the formalized expression of emotions that is characteristic of the melodramatic mode can be reinterpreted in the context of experimental cinema.
The main argument is based on two interrelated ideas. First, the melodramatic mode as a genre-bending category offers a wide repertory of stylistic features designed to express extreme emotional states or situations which can be encompassed by the term “melodramatic excess”. This type of excess manifests itself most visibly in moments of intense passion when the plot breaks down and freezes in a static or symbolic arrangement, either through close-up, tableau vivant or montage sequence. All attention is thereby focused on the heroes’ gestures and poses which express their emotional state face to face with an intense situation for which they cannot yet find an adequate response.
Second, certain experimental films manage to transform the melodramatic excess through “expressive and performative operations” with filmic space, time and bodies, turning the exterior representation of emotions into the immanent expression of affects. In this case, affect is understood as a certain variation of emotions which demonstrates the capacity of bodies to transform while suffering intense pathos, without ever stabilizing in recognizable gestures or symbols.
Between the melodramatic excess and the concept of affect (or affect theory) therefore emerges a “two-way movement”. On the one hand, certain experimental films (e.g., the films of Werner Schroeter, Carmelo Bene, or Kenneth Anger) are able to transform the melodramatic excess in such a way that it becomes affective, on the other hand, the term affect, often defined in abstract or negative ways, thereby gains a specific stylistic variant, the melodramatic one. This book strives to show how this two-way movement works and which new impulses it can bring into the contemporary affect studies and film theory.
UPDATE: Full book uploaded on March 6, 2021.
Watch the video essay here: https://vimeo.com/872459036
Mentioned in the Sight and Sound "Best Video Essays of 2023": https://www.bfi.org.uk/polls/best-video-essays-2023
During the twentieth century, housework has become an endless cycle of work that usually goes without social recognition. The technological innovations within the household and the policy of a family wage individualised the reproductive workers and isolated them in the social form of the “housewife”. The housewife then lives in an endless loop of daily routines of caring for the house and family. However, are there any continuities between this reproductive labour and the cognitive labour we perform in the digital space, as Kylie Jarrett indicates (Jarrett, 2015)? And is videographic criticism capable of not only showing but also analysing these continuities?
Our videographic essay Cycles of Labour, which remediates the daily routines captured in the film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975) through a simulated video-game interface. The essay takes the viewer through three stages in the cycle of extending the housewife logic into the digital sphere. It proceeds from introducing the evolution of reproductive labour to a playthrough that foregrounds the connections between reproductive and cognitive labour in the datafied society to a demonstration of how this development of housework translates into the labour of NPCs (non-playable characters) in video games. As a result, the videographic essay highlights that the heroine of Akerman’s film is not alone in her repetitive endeavours. In the virtual space, we are all becoming “digital housewives” (Jarrett, 2015).
Desktop documentary has firmly established itself as a reflexive form that directly addresses the screen-mediated nature of our lives. This genre on the border between film theory and practice treats the computer/mobile screen as both a camera lens and a canvas and seeks to depict and question how we explore the world through the screen. Crucially, unlike previous forms of cinematic theoretical practice, such as the 1970s counter-cinema, desktop documentary incorporates both reflexivity and narrativization. While it lays bare the inner workings of the apparatus, at the same time, it assimilates them into a relatively coherent and accessible narrative.
This paper aims to understand how this paradoxical marriage between reflexivity and narrativization works. In which ways can the desktop documentary genre be reconceived as a successor to the 1970s counter-cinema, and in which ways does it constitute a break from it? A term that will enable us to stage an encounter between the old and the new, narrativization and reflexivity, revealing and concealing, is suture. This concept and its recent revisions will present desktop documentary as a staged process of welding together elements surfacing and resurfacing on the screen that brings the author, the apparatus, and the spectator on the same plane.
The Nostalgic Construction of Inka Zemánková’s Star Image
See the accompanying video essay here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cjx5l8jK_ME
Inka Zemánková (1915-2000) is known as a pioneering Czech female swing singer, a symbol of burgeoning Czech popular music under the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Due to personal, cultural, and political circumstances, her professional career, spanning over sixty years, did not ever reach nearly the same level of fame and success as in the early 1940s. Since the 1960s, however, there were many waves of nostalgia for the singer (and the golden days of swing) driven by radio and especially television that strove to bring her back to the spotlight. Our study argues for the significant role of nostalgia and recycling in (re)defining Zemánková's star image, which cemented not only her status as the first Czech swing star but also many ongoing myths about her life as well as gender stereotypes. Analysis of written and audiovisual archival sources, focused particularly on television shows that involved Zemánková's iconic song Slunečnice (Sunflower) from the film Hotel Modrá hvězda (Hotel Blue Star, 1941), uncovers the ways in which nostalgic framing filtered the singer's star image through the gaze of prominent male figures of the Czech showbiz. It also demonstrates that the role of Inka Zemánková herself was far from passive: she exploited the nostalgic male gaze to revive her fame and support the myth of not fulfilling her star potential due to ideological persecution. The nuances of Inka Zemánková's stardom examined throughout the article are further demonstrated in the accompanying audiovisual essay Slunečnice očima gentlemanů (Sunflower Through the Eyes of Gentlemen).
The indexicality of film, generally understood as a connection between the object of reality and its photographic reproduction, remains a defining concept that distinguishes what cinema was and whether it persists in the digital age. Notably, the concept allows us to examine the ontological and aesthetic status of the digitised films from the analogue past. Nevertheless, the variety of material phenomena that appear in such artefacts requires us to reconsider the (f)actors that constitute indexicality.
The aim of this paper is to discern a specific indexical logic in the digitised films of the Czech cinema pioneer Jan Kříženecký. While the digitised films benefit from 4K image quality, their material deformations were not retouched but made more visible. These deformations include static electricity marks, which not only signify the original event of shooting the film but also intervene into the formation of figures in the represented world. Kříženecký’s short actuality The First Day of the Spring Races of Prague (1908) will highlight how such intrusive presence of a technological actor brings the quadruple logic of indexicality – torn between representation and materiality, and between trace and deixis – into play, and how it can be prolonged into a specific theoretical and aesthetic thinking.
Available here: https://www.eshop.nfa.cz/en/iluminace-1-2022-2
See the videographic essay The First Frames of Czech Cinema here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glwKEVJolMQ
Whenever a curator attempts to present films from the very beginnings of cinema to contemporary spectators, multiple pressing questions always come to mind. Shall the ephemeral one-minute scenes be shown individually or as parts of larger wholes, sorted out according to thematic or chronological affinities? How to successfully reproduce not only the films' content but also their inherent technological features or the distinctive quality of early cinematic experience? How is it possible to make the audience aware of the historical distance that the surviving archival artifacts covered? How can we navigate between the film materials' past, present, and future?
This study brings forth the idea that to understand the earliest cinematic works in a richer way, film curatorship may adopt a more creative and interventionist approach-not in order to turn the artifacts into something entirely different but to highlight their hidden cracks and ambiguities. More specifically, it examines a videographic essay titled The First Frames of Czech Cinema (Jiří Anger and Adéla Kudlová, 2021) that plays with the paradoxes and contradictions of the recently digitized films of Jan Kříženecký (1898-1911), or, more precisely, of the very first images of the works we see. Both the videographic essay and its written accompaniment showcase that curation of uncertain, disfigured, and fragmentary archival artifacts from the beginnings of cinema does not necessarily have to limit itself to filling the gaps; instead, it can embrace their lacunas as windows onto all the things that make the earliest cinema so strange and fascinating.
https://www.euppublishing.com/film-philosophy-award
Many experimental found footage films base their meanings and effects on an uncanny interaction between the figurative content of the image and its material-technological underpinnings. Can this interaction arise accidentally without artistic appropriation? A recently digitised film of the Czech cinema pioneer Jan Kříženecký, Opening Ceremony of the Čech Bridge (1908), presents such an exercise in accidental aesthetics. At one point, the horizontal and vertical trembling of the Cinematograph – obtained from the Lumière brothers – translates into the trembling of the figures on the bridge so precisely that the figurative and material spheres appear to cooperate towards a common aesthetic goal.
To account for such phenomena, film theory, found footage filmmaking, and archival practice need to join forces with philosophy. More specifically, Gilbert Simondon’s notion of transduction, a process based on the intersection of diverse realities within a domain, allows us to conceptualise the paradoxical interaction between the figurative and material dimensions and the unintentional meanings that arises out of it. Transduction enables the distribution of elements between these heterogeneous spheres while maintaining a certain (meta)stability of this distribution within a system. In the case of archival films in which transduction occurs without prior intention or expectation, we should seek ways how the specific moments of transduction can be foregrounded and prolonged. The connection between transduction and the “trembling meaning” in Opening Ceremony, understood within the wider context of camera instability in experimental found footage, will uncover the aesthetic potentialities held by the autonomous creativity of filmic matter and its interferences with the figurative content.
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/film.2021.0155
https://www.gla.ac.uk/research/az/screen/videoessays2023/
The whole contribution that includes the videographic essay, creators' statement and reviews by Jasper Stratil and Chloé Galibert-Lainé is available here: http://mediacommons.org/intransition/distant-journey-through-desktop
See the video here: https://vimeo.com/399684942
Alfréd Radok’s essay film Distant Journey (Daleká cesta, 1948) is a canonical classic of Czech cinema and a still unique answer to the question of how to express the inexpressible horrors of the Holocaust. However, such a self-reflexive film also needs a film theory that would extend this reflexivity in a videographic form, by means of using the images and sounds themselves and the context in which they appear in the digital space. The film’s “trick montage,” a technique that links storyline moments with archival footage of war destruction, Nazi emblems, and anti-Jewish terror within a single film shot, is thereby translated into the desktop interface and rethought anew.
The videographic essay was made on the occasion of the digital restoration of Distant Journey supervised by the National Film Archive in Prague.
The recently digitized films of the Czech cinema pioneer Jan Kříženecký (made between 1898 and 1911) demonstrate how even the sharpest 4K image quality may communicate physical damages and instabilities that were present in the film materials all along. A non-interventionist approach to digitization allowed to preserve marks of historical decay but, crucially, also many intrinsic properties of the used Lumière film stock, even if they interfered significantly with the figurative content of the image.
This article shows how such an intrinsic technological feature becomes a dominant actor in reorganizing the figurative and material processes in Kříženecký’s Grand Consecration of the Emperor Franz I Bridge (1901). The yellowish-orange color veil of uncertain origin, typical for early Lumière nitrate prints, serves as a filter that distributes the range of material elements – analog and digital, external and internal, human and non-human – across the image, and consequently determines what can or cannot be seen and recognized of its content. The examination of the veil’s function and context enables us to rethink the reversible relationship between figuration and materiality in digitized audiovisual heritage in a miniature yet condensed manner.
The digitization of all preserved films by Jan Kříženecký, the so-called pioneer of Czech cinema, gave birth to filmic artifacts with uncertain media status. While they benefit from the crystal clear quality of HD video and many new options for variation and circulation, the decaying materiality of nitrate prints and negatives has not been effaced but made all the more visible. This paper aims to examine how this hybridity influences the aesthetic effects of the films, notably how it brings these films closer to a certain tradition of experimental found footage filmmaking that involves deformative practices and plays with the tension between figurative and material components of the film image (and the “crack-up” that keeps this tension alive). The alignment between Kříženecký’s early cinematic works and found footage is highlighted to show how the deformative practices of experimental cinema and destructive operations of archival audiovisual documents are closely entwined. Furthermore, it also emphasizes how the hybrid materiality of the digitized artifacts and its unintentional infiltration into the figurative meanings of the films can make us see many ontological and epistemological problems of the film medium in a new light.
This paper focuses on the practice and theory of the audiovisual essay form, with particular emphasis on its actual and potential uses in the field of academic film studies. It explores the ways in which the audiovisual essay and the emerging videographic film studies can enrich current research methods, especially how they allow to examine audiovisual phenomena through the means of the audiovision itself, and not just through written texts, and also how the form responds to contemporary trends in film and media theory. Four selected audiovisual essays from the online platform [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic & Moving Image Studies serve as case studies which outline four predominant tensions of the form: between image and word, analysis and sensation, performativity and representation, authorship and spectatorship. The conclusion points out towards possible applications of the form in Czech film studies.
This paper concerns itself with theorizing affects in cinema. Affect, as understood by Deleuzian-Spinozist branch of “affect theory”, is not a subjective feeling, but an impersonal intensity which arises when bodies come into contact. In recent years there have been certain attempts to apply this notion of affect to cinema that, nevertheless, mostly reduced affect to an abstract, elusive intensity which causes immediate bodily sensation. This approach does not fully acknowledge that affect happens in-between, when the physical contact between bodies has not yet been actualized, and involves specific, heterogeneous duration(s). Moreover, it tends to conceive affect in singular, therefore ignoring the existence of various kinds of affects. I argue that Werner Schroeter’s film The Death of Maria Malibran (1971) makes visible the operation of a concrete affect, Leidenschaft (passionate suffering), which is essentially melodramatic, i.e. it is excessive, immanently expressive and performative, and produces new bodily becomings and relations.
Kniha k dostání zde:
https://www.eshop.nfa.cz/digitalni-krizenecky
Link na audiovizuální esej zde:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K4M1lgJIa8
Kniha k dostání zde:
https://www.eshop.nfa.cz/digitalni-krizenecky
Link na přidruženou audiovizuální esej zde:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLmBcQQI2wY
Order the book here: https://www.ghmp.cz/en/artotheque/thinking-through-film/
Order the full book here: https://namu.cz/operatori-novych-medii
The growing importance of the audiovisual essay, a form based on using existing footage for critical or research purposes, poses a challenge to many questions which film theory and film philosophy have been asking since their origins. One of these questions is how to overcome the distance between the film theorist and their film object and translate the sensory and affective engagement with moving images into academic writing. Digital manipulation presents scholars with many opportunities to narrow this gap, not only to analyse it but also to reflect upon the whole experience of touching the “unattainable object”.
There is a certain tendency in videographic film studies that focuses on these issues. Laura U. Marks’s concept of “haptic criticism”, concerned with erasing the distance between the film and its spectator, proves to be particularly useful in this respect. Audiovisual essayists such as Catherine Grant, Cristina Álvarez López, or Adrian Martin project their cinephiliac experience into manipulation with sound and images in the editing program, using operations such as slow-motion, split-screen, or distortion, and thereby giving the haptic criticism a concrete manifestation.
Nevertheless, this subject-object relation is not unidirectional – the author’s haptic manipulation clashes with the editing program. The film object imported into video-editing software becomes a mosaic of sounds and images, sorted in a way that makes them infiltrate into the creative process and confront the subject with a different mode of seeing. Some audiovisual essayists try to incorporate this complex interface, making visible how their cinephiliac and scholarly associations and insights are being reworked through technological mediation, yet often lack the conceptual tools to grasp these convoluted exchanges and transformations.
This essay aims to theorise this “anthropotechnical” interface, which emerges through the encounters between the haptic subject, the responsive yet elusive film object, and the mediating video-editing software. First, it focuses on the methodological questions linked to the conversion of haptic criticism into an audiovisual format. Second, it examines the “vitality affects” of haptic theorists and their impact on the shaping of moving images in audiovisual essays. Third, it analyses the position of the film object in the editing program and the creative possibilities that result from the clash between human and technological perspectives. Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona (1966), viewed through the audiovisual essays by Catherine Grant, serves as a case study that reveals how many forms a single film can attain through these haptic encounters.
Thinking Media series (editors: Bernd Herzogenrath and Patricia Pisters)
Order the book here: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/towards-a-film-theory-from-below-9798765107263/
Endorsed by Shane Denson (Stanford University) and Katherine Groo (Lafayette College)
Would it be possible to do film theory from below, through the perspective of moving-image objects? Could we treat accidental details in archival films, such as scratches, stains, and shakes, as speculatively and aesthetically generative features? Do these material actors have the capacity to create “weird shapes” within the figurative image that decenter, distort, and transform the existing conceptual and methodological frameworks?
Building on his theoretical as well as practical experience with the recently digitized corpus of the first Czech films, created by Jan Kříženecký between 1898 and 1911, the author demonstrates how technological defects and accidents in archival films shape their aesthetic functions and our understanding of the materiality of film in the digital age.
Jiří Anger, ed., Digitální Kříženecký: Nový život prvních českých filmů (Praha: Národní filmový archiv, 2023), 525 s.
Kniha k dostání zde:
https://www.eshop.nfa.cz/digitalni-krizenecky
Širší nominace na Magnesii Litera:
https://www.magnesia-litera.cz/kniha/digitalni-krizenecky-novy-zivot-prvnich-ceskych-filmu/
Filmy a doprovodné materiály:
https://krizenecky.nfa.cz
Kniha vychází z dlouholetého výzkumu, prezentace a kurátorství filmů Jana Kříženeckého z let 1898 až 1911 v nové digitální podobě. Digitalizace z původních nitrátních kopií a negativů průkopnické snímky nejen zpřístupnila, ale zároveň otevřela mnohé otázky po jejich minulosti i budoucnosti. Studie z oblasti filmové teorie, historie a archivnictví zkoumají proměnlivou materiální podstatu filmů, jejich oběh napříč epochami, kontexty a médii či možnosti, jak nově vzniklé digitální artefakty vystavovat nebo využít pro umělecký výzkum. Publikace rovněž zahrnuje rozsáhlou edici dokumentů, které se s Janem Kříženeckým a počátky české kinematografie pojí, a audiovizuální eseje, jež digitalizované artefakty rozkrývají tvořivou hrou s obrazy a zvuky.
Autorky a autoři textů: Jiří Anger, Lucie Česálková, Jaroslav Lopour, Jeanne Pommeau, Kateřina Svatoňová, Alena Šlingerová, Jan Trnka
Order the book here: https://www.ghmp.cz/en/artotheque/thinking-through-film/
Texts: Jiří Anger, Sandra Baborovská. Georges Didi-Huberman, Sergei Eisenstein, Noemi Purkrábková, Ondřej Vavrečka
Film je „forma, která myslí“, poznamenal již režisér Jean-Luc Godard. Skladba obrazů a zvuků dokáže formulovat určité ideje, ale také reflektovat materiální, formální a narativní prvky, jež filmové médium utvářejí. Přežívá však myšlení filmem i v době digitální a postfilmové? Projekt Myslet filmem se zaměřuje na způsoby, jakými současné audiovizuální umění filmovou řeč nejen posouvá, nýbrž i navrací k jejím kořenům.
Film is “a form that thinks,” as director Jean-Luc Godard once noted. Montage of images and sounds enables us to express certain ideas but also to reflect on the material, formal, and narrative elements that define the film medium. But does thinking through film survive in the digital and post-cinematic era? The Thinking Through Film project focuses on the ways in which contemporary audiovisual art not only pushes the film language forward but also brings it back to its roots.
Kniha postihuje vzájemné proměny mezi melodramatem a experimentálním filmem, potažmo mezi afektivním obratem v humanitních vědách a filmovou teorií. Východisko tvoří dvousměrný pohyb mezi melodramatickým excesem a teoreticko-filosofickým pojetím afektu (založeným primárně na myšlenkách Gillesa Deleuze). Melodramatický (nad)žánr využívá určitý repertoár výrazových prostředků k vyjádření krajních emocionálních stavů či situací, zejména utrpení, které plyne z nedosažitelnosti objektu touhy. Tento melodramatický exces se typicky uplatňuje v momentech, kdy děj ustrne v symbolickém uspořádání a vše se soustředí na gesta a pózy ohromených postav či na emocionálně nasycené předměty.
Melodramatický exces však nemusí být vázán jen na konvenční žánrové projevy. Pracují s ním také četné experimentální filmy, zejména „kinematografie těla“ 60. a 70. let napojená na avantgardní divadlo a operu. Skrze mediální operace s prostorem, časem a tělesností však melodramatickou formu ozvláštňují natolik, že přestávají být jednoznačnými emocionálními znaky. V rozpoznatelných a ustálených výrazech melodramatického patosu vyjevují drobné nuance, které může vystihnout právě pojem afekt. Afekt, často vymezovaný jen abstraktně či negativně, zde postihuje estetické jevy, při nichž se známé figury a formy stávají něčím jiným – ať už nabývají tvar, nebo jej ztrácejí –, aniž by figurami či formami být přestaly.
Podivuhodná kombinace ukotvení v melodramatické tradici a transformativních mediálních operací ve filmech Wernera Schroetera, Carmela Beneho či Kennetha Angera vede k tomu, že i nepostižitelný afekt získává svébytnou estetickou variantu, totiž variantu melodramatickou. Tato kniha ukazuje, jak tato proměna melodramatického excesu v melodramatický afekt funguje a jaké podněty může přinést pro studium afektivity ve filmu a jiných uměleckých odvětvích.
-----
This book deals with various possible ways in which the formalized expression of emotions that is characteristic of the melodramatic mode can be reinterpreted in the context of experimental cinema.
The main argument is based on two interrelated ideas. First, the melodramatic mode as a genre-bending category offers a wide repertory of stylistic features designed to express extreme emotional states or situations which can be encompassed by the term “melodramatic excess”. This type of excess manifests itself most visibly in moments of intense passion when the plot breaks down and freezes in a static or symbolic arrangement, either through close-up, tableau vivant or montage sequence. All attention is thereby focused on the heroes’ gestures and poses which express their emotional state face to face with an intense situation for which they cannot yet find an adequate response.
Second, certain experimental films manage to transform the melodramatic excess through “expressive and performative operations” with filmic space, time and bodies, turning the exterior representation of emotions into the immanent expression of affects. In this case, affect is understood as a certain variation of emotions which demonstrates the capacity of bodies to transform while suffering intense pathos, without ever stabilizing in recognizable gestures or symbols.
Between the melodramatic excess and the concept of affect (or affect theory) therefore emerges a “two-way movement”. On the one hand, certain experimental films (e.g., the films of Werner Schroeter, Carmelo Bene, or Kenneth Anger) are able to transform the melodramatic excess in such a way that it becomes affective, on the other hand, the term affect, often defined in abstract or negative ways, thereby gains a specific stylistic variant, the melodramatic one. This book strives to show how this two-way movement works and which new impulses it can bring into the contemporary affect studies and film theory.
UPDATE: Full book uploaded on March 6, 2021.
Watch the video essay here: https://vimeo.com/872459036
Mentioned in the Sight and Sound "Best Video Essays of 2023": https://www.bfi.org.uk/polls/best-video-essays-2023
During the twentieth century, housework has become an endless cycle of work that usually goes without social recognition. The technological innovations within the household and the policy of a family wage individualised the reproductive workers and isolated them in the social form of the “housewife”. The housewife then lives in an endless loop of daily routines of caring for the house and family. However, are there any continuities between this reproductive labour and the cognitive labour we perform in the digital space, as Kylie Jarrett indicates (Jarrett, 2015)? And is videographic criticism capable of not only showing but also analysing these continuities?
Our videographic essay Cycles of Labour, which remediates the daily routines captured in the film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975) through a simulated video-game interface. The essay takes the viewer through three stages in the cycle of extending the housewife logic into the digital sphere. It proceeds from introducing the evolution of reproductive labour to a playthrough that foregrounds the connections between reproductive and cognitive labour in the datafied society to a demonstration of how this development of housework translates into the labour of NPCs (non-playable characters) in video games. As a result, the videographic essay highlights that the heroine of Akerman’s film is not alone in her repetitive endeavours. In the virtual space, we are all becoming “digital housewives” (Jarrett, 2015).
Desktop documentary has firmly established itself as a reflexive form that directly addresses the screen-mediated nature of our lives. This genre on the border between film theory and practice treats the computer/mobile screen as both a camera lens and a canvas and seeks to depict and question how we explore the world through the screen. Crucially, unlike previous forms of cinematic theoretical practice, such as the 1970s counter-cinema, desktop documentary incorporates both reflexivity and narrativization. While it lays bare the inner workings of the apparatus, at the same time, it assimilates them into a relatively coherent and accessible narrative.
This paper aims to understand how this paradoxical marriage between reflexivity and narrativization works. In which ways can the desktop documentary genre be reconceived as a successor to the 1970s counter-cinema, and in which ways does it constitute a break from it? A term that will enable us to stage an encounter between the old and the new, narrativization and reflexivity, revealing and concealing, is suture. This concept and its recent revisions will present desktop documentary as a staged process of welding together elements surfacing and resurfacing on the screen that brings the author, the apparatus, and the spectator on the same plane.
The Nostalgic Construction of Inka Zemánková’s Star Image
See the accompanying video essay here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cjx5l8jK_ME
Inka Zemánková (1915-2000) is known as a pioneering Czech female swing singer, a symbol of burgeoning Czech popular music under the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Due to personal, cultural, and political circumstances, her professional career, spanning over sixty years, did not ever reach nearly the same level of fame and success as in the early 1940s. Since the 1960s, however, there were many waves of nostalgia for the singer (and the golden days of swing) driven by radio and especially television that strove to bring her back to the spotlight. Our study argues for the significant role of nostalgia and recycling in (re)defining Zemánková's star image, which cemented not only her status as the first Czech swing star but also many ongoing myths about her life as well as gender stereotypes. Analysis of written and audiovisual archival sources, focused particularly on television shows that involved Zemánková's iconic song Slunečnice (Sunflower) from the film Hotel Modrá hvězda (Hotel Blue Star, 1941), uncovers the ways in which nostalgic framing filtered the singer's star image through the gaze of prominent male figures of the Czech showbiz. It also demonstrates that the role of Inka Zemánková herself was far from passive: she exploited the nostalgic male gaze to revive her fame and support the myth of not fulfilling her star potential due to ideological persecution. The nuances of Inka Zemánková's stardom examined throughout the article are further demonstrated in the accompanying audiovisual essay Slunečnice očima gentlemanů (Sunflower Through the Eyes of Gentlemen).
The indexicality of film, generally understood as a connection between the object of reality and its photographic reproduction, remains a defining concept that distinguishes what cinema was and whether it persists in the digital age. Notably, the concept allows us to examine the ontological and aesthetic status of the digitised films from the analogue past. Nevertheless, the variety of material phenomena that appear in such artefacts requires us to reconsider the (f)actors that constitute indexicality.
The aim of this paper is to discern a specific indexical logic in the digitised films of the Czech cinema pioneer Jan Kříženecký. While the digitised films benefit from 4K image quality, their material deformations were not retouched but made more visible. These deformations include static electricity marks, which not only signify the original event of shooting the film but also intervene into the formation of figures in the represented world. Kříženecký’s short actuality The First Day of the Spring Races of Prague (1908) will highlight how such intrusive presence of a technological actor brings the quadruple logic of indexicality – torn between representation and materiality, and between trace and deixis – into play, and how it can be prolonged into a specific theoretical and aesthetic thinking.
Available here: https://www.eshop.nfa.cz/en/iluminace-1-2022-2
See the videographic essay The First Frames of Czech Cinema here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glwKEVJolMQ
Whenever a curator attempts to present films from the very beginnings of cinema to contemporary spectators, multiple pressing questions always come to mind. Shall the ephemeral one-minute scenes be shown individually or as parts of larger wholes, sorted out according to thematic or chronological affinities? How to successfully reproduce not only the films' content but also their inherent technological features or the distinctive quality of early cinematic experience? How is it possible to make the audience aware of the historical distance that the surviving archival artifacts covered? How can we navigate between the film materials' past, present, and future?
This study brings forth the idea that to understand the earliest cinematic works in a richer way, film curatorship may adopt a more creative and interventionist approach-not in order to turn the artifacts into something entirely different but to highlight their hidden cracks and ambiguities. More specifically, it examines a videographic essay titled The First Frames of Czech Cinema (Jiří Anger and Adéla Kudlová, 2021) that plays with the paradoxes and contradictions of the recently digitized films of Jan Kříženecký (1898-1911), or, more precisely, of the very first images of the works we see. Both the videographic essay and its written accompaniment showcase that curation of uncertain, disfigured, and fragmentary archival artifacts from the beginnings of cinema does not necessarily have to limit itself to filling the gaps; instead, it can embrace their lacunas as windows onto all the things that make the earliest cinema so strange and fascinating.
https://www.euppublishing.com/film-philosophy-award
Many experimental found footage films base their meanings and effects on an uncanny interaction between the figurative content of the image and its material-technological underpinnings. Can this interaction arise accidentally without artistic appropriation? A recently digitised film of the Czech cinema pioneer Jan Kříženecký, Opening Ceremony of the Čech Bridge (1908), presents such an exercise in accidental aesthetics. At one point, the horizontal and vertical trembling of the Cinematograph – obtained from the Lumière brothers – translates into the trembling of the figures on the bridge so precisely that the figurative and material spheres appear to cooperate towards a common aesthetic goal.
To account for such phenomena, film theory, found footage filmmaking, and archival practice need to join forces with philosophy. More specifically, Gilbert Simondon’s notion of transduction, a process based on the intersection of diverse realities within a domain, allows us to conceptualise the paradoxical interaction between the figurative and material dimensions and the unintentional meanings that arises out of it. Transduction enables the distribution of elements between these heterogeneous spheres while maintaining a certain (meta)stability of this distribution within a system. In the case of archival films in which transduction occurs without prior intention or expectation, we should seek ways how the specific moments of transduction can be foregrounded and prolonged. The connection between transduction and the “trembling meaning” in Opening Ceremony, understood within the wider context of camera instability in experimental found footage, will uncover the aesthetic potentialities held by the autonomous creativity of filmic matter and its interferences with the figurative content.
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/film.2021.0155
https://www.gla.ac.uk/research/az/screen/videoessays2023/
The whole contribution that includes the videographic essay, creators' statement and reviews by Jasper Stratil and Chloé Galibert-Lainé is available here: http://mediacommons.org/intransition/distant-journey-through-desktop
See the video here: https://vimeo.com/399684942
Alfréd Radok’s essay film Distant Journey (Daleká cesta, 1948) is a canonical classic of Czech cinema and a still unique answer to the question of how to express the inexpressible horrors of the Holocaust. However, such a self-reflexive film also needs a film theory that would extend this reflexivity in a videographic form, by means of using the images and sounds themselves and the context in which they appear in the digital space. The film’s “trick montage,” a technique that links storyline moments with archival footage of war destruction, Nazi emblems, and anti-Jewish terror within a single film shot, is thereby translated into the desktop interface and rethought anew.
The videographic essay was made on the occasion of the digital restoration of Distant Journey supervised by the National Film Archive in Prague.
The recently digitized films of the Czech cinema pioneer Jan Kříženecký (made between 1898 and 1911) demonstrate how even the sharpest 4K image quality may communicate physical damages and instabilities that were present in the film materials all along. A non-interventionist approach to digitization allowed to preserve marks of historical decay but, crucially, also many intrinsic properties of the used Lumière film stock, even if they interfered significantly with the figurative content of the image.
This article shows how such an intrinsic technological feature becomes a dominant actor in reorganizing the figurative and material processes in Kříženecký’s Grand Consecration of the Emperor Franz I Bridge (1901). The yellowish-orange color veil of uncertain origin, typical for early Lumière nitrate prints, serves as a filter that distributes the range of material elements – analog and digital, external and internal, human and non-human – across the image, and consequently determines what can or cannot be seen and recognized of its content. The examination of the veil’s function and context enables us to rethink the reversible relationship between figuration and materiality in digitized audiovisual heritage in a miniature yet condensed manner.
The digitization of all preserved films by Jan Kříženecký, the so-called pioneer of Czech cinema, gave birth to filmic artifacts with uncertain media status. While they benefit from the crystal clear quality of HD video and many new options for variation and circulation, the decaying materiality of nitrate prints and negatives has not been effaced but made all the more visible. This paper aims to examine how this hybridity influences the aesthetic effects of the films, notably how it brings these films closer to a certain tradition of experimental found footage filmmaking that involves deformative practices and plays with the tension between figurative and material components of the film image (and the “crack-up” that keeps this tension alive). The alignment between Kříženecký’s early cinematic works and found footage is highlighted to show how the deformative practices of experimental cinema and destructive operations of archival audiovisual documents are closely entwined. Furthermore, it also emphasizes how the hybrid materiality of the digitized artifacts and its unintentional infiltration into the figurative meanings of the films can make us see many ontological and epistemological problems of the film medium in a new light.
This paper focuses on the practice and theory of the audiovisual essay form, with particular emphasis on its actual and potential uses in the field of academic film studies. It explores the ways in which the audiovisual essay and the emerging videographic film studies can enrich current research methods, especially how they allow to examine audiovisual phenomena through the means of the audiovision itself, and not just through written texts, and also how the form responds to contemporary trends in film and media theory. Four selected audiovisual essays from the online platform [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic & Moving Image Studies serve as case studies which outline four predominant tensions of the form: between image and word, analysis and sensation, performativity and representation, authorship and spectatorship. The conclusion points out towards possible applications of the form in Czech film studies.
This paper concerns itself with theorizing affects in cinema. Affect, as understood by Deleuzian-Spinozist branch of “affect theory”, is not a subjective feeling, but an impersonal intensity which arises when bodies come into contact. In recent years there have been certain attempts to apply this notion of affect to cinema that, nevertheless, mostly reduced affect to an abstract, elusive intensity which causes immediate bodily sensation. This approach does not fully acknowledge that affect happens in-between, when the physical contact between bodies has not yet been actualized, and involves specific, heterogeneous duration(s). Moreover, it tends to conceive affect in singular, therefore ignoring the existence of various kinds of affects. I argue that Werner Schroeter’s film The Death of Maria Malibran (1971) makes visible the operation of a concrete affect, Leidenschaft (passionate suffering), which is essentially melodramatic, i.e. it is excessive, immanently expressive and performative, and produces new bodily becomings and relations.
Kniha k dostání zde:
https://www.eshop.nfa.cz/digitalni-krizenecky
Link na audiovizuální esej zde:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K4M1lgJIa8
Kniha k dostání zde:
https://www.eshop.nfa.cz/digitalni-krizenecky
Link na přidruženou audiovizuální esej zde:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLmBcQQI2wY
Order the book here: https://www.ghmp.cz/en/artotheque/thinking-through-film/
Order the full book here: https://namu.cz/operatori-novych-medii
The growing importance of the audiovisual essay, a form based on using existing footage for critical or research purposes, poses a challenge to many questions which film theory and film philosophy have been asking since their origins. One of these questions is how to overcome the distance between the film theorist and their film object and translate the sensory and affective engagement with moving images into academic writing. Digital manipulation presents scholars with many opportunities to narrow this gap, not only to analyse it but also to reflect upon the whole experience of touching the “unattainable object”.
There is a certain tendency in videographic film studies that focuses on these issues. Laura U. Marks’s concept of “haptic criticism”, concerned with erasing the distance between the film and its spectator, proves to be particularly useful in this respect. Audiovisual essayists such as Catherine Grant, Cristina Álvarez López, or Adrian Martin project their cinephiliac experience into manipulation with sound and images in the editing program, using operations such as slow-motion, split-screen, or distortion, and thereby giving the haptic criticism a concrete manifestation.
Nevertheless, this subject-object relation is not unidirectional – the author’s haptic manipulation clashes with the editing program. The film object imported into video-editing software becomes a mosaic of sounds and images, sorted in a way that makes them infiltrate into the creative process and confront the subject with a different mode of seeing. Some audiovisual essayists try to incorporate this complex interface, making visible how their cinephiliac and scholarly associations and insights are being reworked through technological mediation, yet often lack the conceptual tools to grasp these convoluted exchanges and transformations.
This essay aims to theorise this “anthropotechnical” interface, which emerges through the encounters between the haptic subject, the responsive yet elusive film object, and the mediating video-editing software. First, it focuses on the methodological questions linked to the conversion of haptic criticism into an audiovisual format. Second, it examines the “vitality affects” of haptic theorists and their impact on the shaping of moving images in audiovisual essays. Third, it analyses the position of the film object in the editing program and the creative possibilities that result from the clash between human and technological perspectives. Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona (1966), viewed through the audiovisual essays by Catherine Grant, serves as a case study that reveals how many forms a single film can attain through these haptic encounters.
More information here: https://iluminace.cz/index.php/en/article?id=232
Mentioned in the Sight and Sound "Best Video Essays of 2023": https://www.bfi.org.uk/polls/best-video-essays-2023
This video essay examines the transnational popularity of Uruguayan actress and singer Natalia Oreiro. It focuses on her star image in the context of cultural transfers between Latin America and Post-Communist Europe.
The essay is part of the Screen Stars Dictionary project (Ariel Avissar & Vicente Rodríguez Ortega). Read the curatorial statement here: https://tecmerin.uc3m.es/project/screen-stars-dictionary/?lang=en
A translation of Jiří Anger and Tomáš Jirsa, "We Never Took Deconstruction Seriously Enough (On Affects, Formalism, and Film Theory): An Interview with Eugenie Brinkema," Iluminace, vol. 31, no. 1 (2019), 65-85. https://www.iluminace.cz/en/artkey/ilu-201901-0006_we-never-took-deconstruction-seriously-enough-on-affects-formalism-and-film-theory-an-interview-with-eugen.php?l=en
Em entrevista realizada por Jiří Anger e Tomáš Jirsa, a teórica americana Eugenie Brinkema explica sua abordagem formalista ao terror e outros “gêneros corporais”, fala da dimensão ética da violência e os desafios da análise afetiva para a teoria do cinema, ao mesmo tempo em que oferece uma ampla gama de maneiras inspiradoras de como tornar o pensamento através do filme esteticamente generativo e conceitualmente enriquecedor.
See the video here: https://vimeo.com/717316599
Mentioned in the Sight and Sound "Best Video Essays of 2022": https://www.bfi.org.uk/polls/best-video-essays-2023
This videographic essay is part of a project Once Upon a Screen, edited by Ariel Avissar and Evelyn Kreutzer.
See the video essay here: https://vimeo.com/showcase/8660446/video/589261646
All the TV Dictionary entries are available here: https://vimeo.com/showcase/8660446
The interview was recorded on the occasion of Prof. Brinkema’s visit to the PAF — Festival of Film Animation and Contemporary Art, Olomouc, in December 2018, where she participated as a juror in the Other Visions competition of Czech moving image.
The project was realized under the supervision of the Národní filmový archiv, Prague.
https://artycok.tv/cs/post/historie-medii-v-otiscich
Online prostředí se nám často jeví jako prostor zdánlivého bezčasí. Prostor, kde se artefakty minulosti hromadí bez ohledu na jejich původní kontext a kde po uspokojení okamžité poptávky zase mizí. Lze však (post)digitální krajinu využít k oživení ztracených, chybějících či vytěsněných médií, objektů, aktérů či rozhraní? Tematická kolekce audiovizuálních esejí ukazuje online prostor jako labyrint fragmentů a otisků analogové i digitální historie, jež lze spekulativně „dourčit“ tak, aby rozehrály neotřelé výměny mezi „kdysi“ a „teď“ a také uskutečnily alternativní či nerealizované budoucnosti.
Seznam esejí:
Chloé Galibert-Laîné & Guillaume Grandjean: GeoMarkr
Johannes Binotto: Metaleptic Attack
Cormac Donnelly: Pan Scan Venkman
Karin Spišáková & David Scharf: Teletext Revival 2.0
Jiří Anger, Veronika Hanáková & Jiří Žák: Digitální Kříženecký v paralelních světech
Andrea Rüthel & Megan Dieudonné: Safari(Browser)_The_Nature_ofmy_Computer.mov
https://artycok.tv/en/post/traces-of-media-histories
The online environment often appears to us as a space of timelessness. A space where artifacts of the past accumulate regardless of their original context and where they disappear again after satisfying immediate demand. But can the (post)digital landscape be used to revive lost, missing or displaced media, objects, actors or interfaces? A thematic collection of audiovisual essays allows us to understand the online space as a labyrinth of fragments and traces of analogue and digital histories that can be speculatively ''reconfigured'' to play out surprising exchanges between ''then'' and ''now'' as well as to create alternative or unrealized futures.
Video Essays:
Chloé Galibert-Laîné & Guillaume Grandjean: GeoMarkr
Johannes Binotto: Metaleptic Attack
Cormac Donnelly: Pan Scan Venkman
Karin Spišáková & David Scharf: Teletext Revival 2.0
Jiří Anger, Veronika Hanáková & Jiří Žák: A Tale of Two Desktops
Andrea Rüthel & Megan Dieudonné: Safari(Browser)_The_Nature_ofmy_Computer.mov
https://www.filmovyprehled.cz/cs/revue/detail/prvni-ceske-filmy-nebudou-nikdy-dokonceny-rozhovor-s-jirim-angerem
2022: https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/polls/best-video-essays-2022
2021: https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/polls/best-video-essays-2021
2020: https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/best-video-essays-2020
2019: https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/polls-surveys/best-video-essays-2019
Vyšlo rovněž v tištěném čísle Filmu a doby (4/2021):
https://filmadoba.eu/archiv/fad-4-2021/
The amateur and private filmmaking practice during the socialist years in Romania (1945-1989) didn't become an extensively researched field, although the history of the non-professional use of the medium of film can disclose the intricate relationship between the socialist reality and the medium, but also between the totalitarian cultural project and the possibilities of the individuals living in its confines. The purpose of this paper is twofold: to delineate the history of amateur filmmaking in pre-1989 Romania, and to put under scrutiny the methodological possibilities and pitfalls of an endeavour like this. When the films are missing due to different reasons (they were not digitized yet,
or they were thrown into the garbage), the history of amateur filmmaking is the easiest to grasp through life stories. Thus the interview and the concept of oral history become the most suitable methodology
to render the individual memory into data for history. The first part of the article pursues this concept and the autobiographical narratives seemingly fulfil the role of the historical documents. Nevertheless, the second part of the article reveals these stories as partial truths by putting the oral history data in the context of other interviews and scrutinizes the discourse of educational handbooks.
Filosof a historik umění Georges Didi-Huberman vyučuje na École des hautes études en sciences sociales v Paříži. Vydal řadu knih věnovaných teorii a historii obrazů (Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde, Paris: Minuit 1992). Jeho výzkumné pole sahá od renesančního až po současné umění, s konkrétním důrazem na vědeckou ikonografii a její využití v umění 20. století. Rovněž publikoval široce diskutovanou knihu o vizuální reprezentaci holocaustu (Images malgré tout, Paris: Minuit 2004). Ve svých pracích dává najevo inspiraci fenomenologií a psychoanalýzou, zvláště jej ovlivnili Walter Benjamin, Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida či Aby Warburg. V posledních letech zkoumal zejména tvorbu uměleckých individualit, jako je Pier Paolo Pasolini nebo Jean-Luc Godard (Passés Cités par JLG, Paris: Minuit 2015). Rozhovor se uskutečnil v rámci konference Mezinárodní konference teorie a filosofie médií Dis/appearing, pořádané Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie Weimar a Filozofickou fakultou Univerzity Karlovy v květnu 2015.
Panel Early Cinema: From Pedagogy to Diplomacy (Chair: Aurore Spiers, University of Chicago)
Read more about the conference here:
https://domitor.org/conference/2024-vienna-conference/
Participants: Ariel Avissar (Tel Aviv University), Colleen Laird (The University of British Columbia), Jemma Saunders (The University of Birmingham), Charlotte Crofts (University of the West of England Bristol)
Watch our video essay on Natalia Oreiro and cultural transfers here: https://vimeo.com/828945268
Find the recording here:
https://vimeo.com/915533687
Panel: Un/Making Archives: Will DiGravio, Lily Ford, Jiří Anger & Veronika Hanáková, Chair: Chloé Galibert-Lainé, Respondents: Chiara Grizzaffi, Vicente Rodriguez Ortega
We are videographic theorists and practitioners that deal, among other things, with digital archives. One of us focuses on born-analog artifacts (re)discovered in the online landscape; the other obsesses over disappearing gimmicks from the early days of the Internet. Although we have a background in media theory and experience with archival practice, every time we start creating a video essay, we find ourselves feeling like beginners. Not only do we still not know what digital matter can do (to paraphrase Baruch Spinoza), but the media objects we choose are always incomplete, marginal, forgotten, or altogether weird.
This is why we have decided to join forces on a video essay that would stop us from beating ourselves up over insufficient knowledge and mastery and embrace the things that seem to hold us back – the inaccessibility of our research objects, malfunctions, blind alleys, shortages, and so forth. The essay we are currently developing comments upon and makes fun of the research and creative process that went into our previous investigations of obscure artifacts in the online landscape, such as digitized early Czech films, archaic precursors of desktop documentaries, idiosyncratic wipes, early GIFs, DVD menus, or Tumblr aesthetic. Our goal is to show that such an improvisational, trial-and-error approach can lead to an articulation of a specific research method to approach weird digital objects – an approach that is academic yet aware of its limits and takes playfulness deadly seriously. Let us thus proclaim our work-in-progress as an exercise in self-reflexive videographic amateurism.
Panel "Uses of Archival Footage", Chair: Jaimie Baron, Speakers: Jiří Anger, Melinda Blos-Jáni, Senjuti Mukherjee
Panel Archives as Images: Chair: Milan Hain, Speakers: Eleni Varmazi, Jiří Anger, Anna Fin, Sarah Pollman
See the videographic essay Distant Journey through the Desktop here:
https://mediacommons.org/intransition/distant-journey-through-desktop
The aftermath of the Second World War brought several newsreels, documentaries, and essay films that attempted to deal with the inexpressible horrors of the Holocaust. A particularly resonating response to the trauma was presented by a Czechoslovak film Daleká cesta (Distant Journey; Alfréd Radok, 1948), based on the director’s relatives' experience of the Terezín Ghetto. Among other things, the film employs the “trick montage,” an editing technique that interlaces storyline moments with clips from period newsreels and propaganda documentaries within a single film shot. This approach demonstrates that neither “documentary” nor “fictional” images of Holocaust atrocities exist in isolation and may constitute an archive only as long as they are compared and juxtaposed.
However, what happens to the trick montage within the online landscape? Does it maintain its subversive power when it appears in the desktop interface filled with multiple frames and pop-up windows? Does Radok’s relational vision of Holocaust memory become compromised, or is there a way to actualise its potential for contemporary visual regimes?
The paper aims to present and contextualise a videographic essay Distant Journey through the Desktop (Jiří Anger and Jiří Žák) that addresses these questions. By isolating the trick montage sequences from the original film and projecting them into various software interfaces, the essay examines new ways in which the relational mode of seeing can contest the audiovisual memory of the Holocaust without drowning in the sea of interchangeable content. Further, the paper shall testify to the potential of videographic scholarship, a discipline bridging the gaps between film studies, digital humanities, and artistic research, to reflect on how we encounter traumatic archival images in the online space.
Panel G5: Remediating the archive with care: ethics of reuse (Sponsored by Cultural Memory and Media & the New Media workgroup) - Chair: Niamh Thornton, Speakers: Jiří Anger, Nadica Denić, Lucie Česálková, Respondent: Tom Rice
See the videographic essay Distant Journey through the Desktop here:
https://mediacommons.org/intransition/distant-journey-through-desktop
The aftermath of the Second World War brought several newsreels, documentaries, and essay films that attempted to deal with the inexpressible horrors of the Holocaust. A particularly resonating response to the trauma was presented by a Czechoslovak film Daleká cesta (Distant Journey; Alfréd Radok, 1948), based on the director’s relatives' experience of the Terezín Ghetto. Among other things, the film employs the “trick montage,” an editing technique that interlaces storyline moments with clips from period newsreels and propaganda documentaries within a single film shot. This approach demonstrates that neither “documentary” nor “fictional” images of Holocaust atrocities exist in isolation and may constitute an archive only as long as they are compared and juxtaposed.
However, what happens to the trick montage within the online landscape? Does it maintain its subversive power when it appears in the desktop interface filled with multiple frames and pop-up windows? Does Radok’s relational vision of Holocaust memory become compromised, or is there a way to actualise its potential for contemporary visual regimes?
The paper aims to present and contextualise a videographic essay Distant Journey through the Desktop (Jiří Anger and Jiří Žák) that addresses these questions. By isolating the trick montage sequences from the original film and projecting them into various software interfaces, the essay examines new ways in which the relational mode of seeing can contest the audiovisual memory of the Holocaust without drowning in the sea of interchangeable content. Further, the paper shall testify to the potential of videographic scholarship, a discipline bridging the gaps between film studies, digital humanities, and artistic research, to reflect on how we encounter traumatic archival images in the online space.
Click here for more information: https://blogs.umass.edu/videoessay/
Click here for more information: https://necs.org/conference/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/NECS-2022_final-programme.pdf
Archival theory and practice still tend to hierarchize between audiovisual artifacts worth preserving and those that are not, and the increasing amount of images, screens, and interfaces in the digital sphere has only broadened the number of objects that risk disappearing without a trace.
One of these lost audiovisual objects is the star wipe, a type of film transition that connects two images or sequences through a wipe in the shape of a star. This editing technique and special effect in one, associated with 1980’s television as well as the early digital era, ostentatiously makes itself visible, with its blatant excess being manifested both in the image content and in the highlighted temporality of transition from one image to another.
Despite the excessive character of the star wipe, the editing gesture is no longer to be found in the current audiovisual field. It occasionally resurfaces as a parodical yet nostalgic effect in popular culture, e.g., in TV shows The Simpsons and Better Call Saul; however, it stopped being used in professional editing and almost disappeared from the mainstream.
Which leads us to a question: how and why preserve something that is often perceived as a disposable gimmick? How to archive something that does not have a material substance, that exists only as a connection of two or more images? We aim to offer means for understanding the star wipe as a challenge to the prevailing epistemological biases of the archival world against immaterial, ephemeral, hybrid, and supposedly low-brow cultural elements. Combining tools of contemporary archival theory with a more practical approach inspired by videographic criticism, we will outline ways to bring the star wipe back to life and attempt to preserve the unpreservable.
Click here for more information: https://aestheticsfilmstudies.weebly.com/
See the videographic essay The First Frames of Czech Cinema here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glwKEVJolMQ
In the last few years, videographic research has firmly established itself within film and media studies. However, contemporary archival film theory and practice exploit videographic approaches only sporadically. While some archives and museums (e.g., EYE Film Institute or Austrian Film Museum) have experimented with videographic essays, their use of digital tools has been predominantly associated with the digital humanities. Scholars such as Barbara Flückiger, Adelheid Heftberger, or Christian Gosvig Olesen demonstrate how computer-assisted tools can help us analyze, catalog, and annotate archival moving images. Yet, would it be possible to employ digital software in another manner – for the purpose of research that would be less empirical and data-driven and more epistemological and creative?
This paper will introduce videographic research that is being developed at the Czech National Film Archive. Its general aim is to investigate what kind of object an archival film can become when imported into various kinds of software. Focusing on archival fragments which are already distorted almost beyond recognition, digital tools are employed to distinguish between different material traces and gestures but also create another layer of deformation that inevitably problematizes the integrity of the respective film object. Therefore, videographic exploration makes the archival material strange in order to unmask the variety of actors that co-constitute archival footage in the digital space. To show how this approach works in practice, a videographic essay on the opening frames of the first Czech films made by Jan Kříženecký between 1898 and 1911 will serve as case studies.
Umělecká teorie a praxe se navzájem potřebují, avšak povaha jejich komunikace je čím dál obtížněji postižitelná. Na jedné straně jejich vztah podléhá trendům specializace, fragmentace a rozrůzňování jazyků, na straně druhé se (i díky novým technologiím) nabízejí stále bohatší možnosti překvapivého propojování a prorůstání. V oblasti filmových a mediálních studií rozvíjí druhou z těchto cest tzv. videografická kritika, v níž se film coby předmět zkoumání stává zároveň nástrojem tohoto zkoumání. Tvořivá manipulace s obrazy, zvuky a texty v odborných audiovizuálních esejích vystihuje, do jaké míry lze spojení teorie a praxe využít k proměně našich představ o tom, jakými prostředky je možné provádět reflexi a výzkum filmu a audiovizuální kultury. Cílem příspěvku bude představit videografickou kritiku jako přístup, který neumožňuje pouze neotřelé způsoby analýzy a interpretace hotových děl, ale především vede k rozkrývání předpokladů, které formují střetávání diváka/teoretika s jeho objekty zkoumání v současné mediální krajině.
The recent digitization of the first films of Czech cinema, made by Jan Kříženecký between 1898 and 1911, gave birth to archival artifacts with uncertain aesthetic and material status. While the films now benefit from sharp picture quality (allowed by scanning the materials in 4K), their physical deformations have not been effaced but made visible. Among other things, the digitization preserved the damages and instabilities caused by the original nitrate prints and negatives and the cinematographic apparatus obtained from the Lumière brothers (e.g., a yellowish-orange color layer, marks of static electricity, or camera trembling). Crucially, these deformations often interfere with the figurative content of the images and significantly affect their meanings and effects. How to account for these accidental deformations that emerge without prior artistic intention and are not necessarily products of decay and the ravages of time?
This paper will investigate Kříženecký’s early cinematic works as exercises in accidental aesthetics that are closely intertwined with the found footage phenomenon and the “second life” of archival moving images in general. The term “crack-up”, loosely inspired by Gilles Deleuze, will allow us to conceive the numerous clashes between figuration and materiality in the films as always already present potentialities of early archival artifacts. Materialist film theory, archival practice, and experimental found footage films will join forces to demonstrate that such accidental deformations do not depend on artistic intervention and can be analyzed as distinctive aesthetic phenomena in their own right.
The panel takes the most recent presentations of the films of Jan Kříženecký as its starting point. Due to their specific nature (length, fragmentation, historical artifactuality etc.), Národní filmový archiv, Prague, has decided to primarily present them in the form of a live event, where commentary complements their actual screening. Yet, at the same time, they also exist and circulate carefully curated as a DVD/BD edition, and generally also as “moving images” on the internet and in various other forms, oftentime stripped off their context or contextualized quite anew.
Given the landscape of earliest cinema, or “film pioneers”, there are of course numerous other examples of attempts at presenting similarly challenging documents to a wider public – be it the Lumière! compilation film (T. Frémaux, 2016), The Great Victorian Moving Picture Show (British Film Institute, 2018) or The Brilliant Biograph (EYE Filmmuseum, 2020). The discussion will therefore investigate the options film heritage institutions have when restoring and curating such pioneering works, striving to provide their audiences with both historical learning and cinematic enjoyment.
Panelists:
Jeanne Pommeau (Curator and Restorer, Národní filmový archiv, Prague)
Jiří Anger (DVD/BD Editor and Researcher, Národní filmový archiv, Prague)
Elif Rongen (Curator Silent Film, EYE Filmmuseum)
Chaired by:
Matěj Strnad (Head of Curators, Národní filmový archiv, Prague)
The digitization of the “first Czech films” made by Jan Kříženecký between 1898 and 1911 gave birth to a body of work that simulates an authentic archival imprint of history yet is riddled with fissures, ellipses, and uncertainties. While the digitized films benefit from the highest picture quality available, their deformations and instabilities were not retouched but made all the more visible. Providing context and sorting them into categories is no longer enough – we should open the digital files in our video-editing software, discern and isolate their cracks, and find out whether they can make us see the films’ historical content anew.
This paper aims to introduce possibilities that videographic film studies offer for curating and studying digital archival artifacts. Manipulation with pre-existing sounds and images may alter the films’ historical content in numerous (and often undesirable) ways. However, it may also allow us to target the cracks in individual images and conceive them as irreversibly and inextricably presupposed in their constitution. Experimenting with physical deformations such as (dis)coloration, static marks, or camera trembling thus enables us to embrace that even milestones such as Kříženecký’s films are inevitably part of Katherine Groo’s “bad film histories” – always incomplete, never coinciding with themselves.
Panel "Objects of Nostalgia: Materiality in Genre Film and Television"
VIDEO AVAILABLE HERE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kUwtjl9mSI
To this day, desktop cinema has been understood mainly as a form suitable for investigating the current online environment. Would it be possible, though, to project the form into the past, confront it with a historical precedent?
Among many other things, Alfréd Radok’s Holocaust movie Distant Journey (Daleká cesta, 1948) is renowned for its “trick montage” technique, which establishes an interaction between two images – fictional scenes in a smaller frame and documentary/newsreel footage in a larger frame – within a single film shot. This technique, from today’s perspective nearest to the split-screen mode, not only establishes a relation between two visions of the Holocaust but also imagines a way in which two or more images can be compared and transformed. Although it is often considered a mere precursor of Radok’s later multi-screen projections at the experimental theatre Laterna Magika, the trick montage bears the potential to engage with multiple layers of reality on one plane in a critical, media-reflexive manner.
For this purpose, me and Jiří Žák created a videographic essay Distant Journey through the Desktop (2020), which aims to analyse Radok’s film through the desktop approach. The trick montage sequences are isolated from the film and projected into the editing software and, by extension, into the computer user interface. Thus, the film’s operations with distinct yet mutually involved layers of representation can be rethought both retrospectively – in terms of desktop cinema’s historical heritage – and prospectively – in terms of Distant Journey’s legacy in the digital age.
See the video here: https://vimeo.com/379957245
Video ke zhlédnutí zde: https://vimeo.com/318991656