Towards a Film Theory from Below: Archival Film and the Aesthetics of the Crack-Up

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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 Kreneck 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.

Reviews

Towards a Film Theory from Below takes the films of Jan Kreneck 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 twojust one strange and specific detailto consider what difference the idiosyncratic or errant trace might make. Angers own work on the digitization of Krenecks filmshis deep understanding of the particulate matter of these images and the processes that contributed to their digital re-circulationposition 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 *
Jiri Angers intriguing question about what it would mean to do film theory from below resonates with recent interventions in new materialism and related strands of theory, but it does so with a specificity that is sometimes lacking in those fieldsand with clearer relevance to questions of the relation between human sensation and the technologically modulated material environments in which we live. In short, Angers questionand his detailed answer to ithas far-reaching philosophical significance that goes beyond traditional issues in film studies to implicate the very role of the human in a rapidly changing ecological and ultimately cosmological context. * Shane Denson, Associate Professor of Film & Media Studies, Stanford University, USA *
The breadth of theoretical knowledge and the agility of perspectives employed in this book are impressive Though the books main undertaking is in the field of film theory, its handle on the material specificities that characterize film will inform debates in aesthetics and humanistic study. * Millennium Film Journal *
Towards a Film Theory from Below is a freewheeling, mind-bending, ravenously curious piece of theoria. * Found Footage Magazine *
Highly engaging and carefully argued The books thorough and engaging theoretical reflection is an eye-opener that offers a completely refreshing take on film archiving Hopefully this highly original proposition will be picked up by film archivists and scholars alike. * The Journal of Film Preservation *
A provocative and engaging book. Anger examines film studies' hierarchies, arguing for a reconsideration of approach. The result is a work at once focused on the micro, but equally allowing for a broader mapping onto wider theories of film. * British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Awards, Runner-Up *

Author Bio

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.).