Overview

Operating between film theory, media philosophy, archival practice, and audiovisual research, Jiri Anger focuses on the relationship between figuration and materiality in early films, experimental found footage cinema, and video essays. Would it be possible to do film theory from below, through the perspective of moving-image objects, of their multifarious details and facets, however marginal, unintentional, or aleatory they might be? Could we treat scratches, stains, and shakes in archival footage 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 Kríženecký between 1898 and 1911, the author demonstrates how technological defects and accidents in archival films shape their aesthetic function and our understanding of the materiality of film in the digital age. The specific clashes between the figurative and material spheres are understood through the concept of a “crack-up.” This term, developed by Francis Scott Fitzgerald and theoretically reimagined by Gilles Deleuze, allows us to capture the convoluted relationship between figuration and materiality as inherent to the medium of film, containing negativity and productivity, difference and simultaneity, contingency and fate, at the same time, even within the tiniest cinematic units.

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Towards a Film Theory from Below takes the films of Jan Kríženecký as starting points for a series of dazzling close readings and deep revelations about the afterlives of film artifacts and the figurative effects of moving-image material. Anger commits to a radical kind of method and a profoundly small scale. Each chapter moves from just a film frame or two—just one strange and specific detail—to consider what difference the idiosyncratic or errant trace might make. Anger’s own work on the digitization of Kríženecký’s films—his deep understanding of the particulate matter of these images and the processes that contributed to their digital re-circulation—position him among a crucial community of archivist-scholars who are capable of reorienting our understanding of film matter and its contingent figurations. * Katherine Groo, Associate Professor, Lafayette College, USA *

Author Information

Jiri Anger is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Queen Mary University of London, UK. He also works at the National Film Archive in Prague, Czech Republic, as a researcher and editor of the peer-reviewed academic journal Iluminace. His specialization lies in the theory and history of early cinema, archival film, found footage, and videographic criticism. Anger is the author of two monographs, two edited volumes, and numerous journal articles (NECSUS, Film-Philosophy, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, etc.).

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