Towards a Film Theory from Below

Archival Film and the Aesthetics of the Crack-Up

Jiri Anger

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2024
• ISBN:
  9798765107287
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: What Is Film Theory from Below?
• 1 Keep That Image Burning: The Color Veil and the Cinema That Never Stops Ending
• 2 Do Archivists Dream of Electric Horses?: Static Electricity and the Quadruple Logic of Indexicality
• 3 Trembling Meaning: Camera Instability and Transduction in Archival Moving Images
• 4 The Milestone That Never Happened: The Scratched Kiss and the Failed Beginning of Czech Cinema
• 5 Touching the Film Object with Surgical Gloves: Frankensteinian Frames and the Fragile Malleability of Cinematic Faces
• 6 Shaping the Unshapeable?: Videographic Deformation and the First Frames of Czech Cinema
• Conclusion: Digital Kříženecký Off the Scale?
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Supplements
• Index
• Copyright