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Towards a Film Theory from Below
Archival Film and the Aesthetics of the Crack-Up
de Jiri Anger
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Description de l'ouvrage:
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.
À propos de l'auteur :
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.).Bernd Herzogenrath is Professor of American literature and culture at Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He is the author of An Art of Desire: Reading Paul Auster (1999) and An American Body|Politic: A Deleuzian Approach (2010)and editor of The Farthest Place: The Music of John Luther Adams (2012)and Deleuze|Guattari & Ecology (2009).His latest publications include the collections The Films of Bill Morrison. Aesthetics of the Archive (2017), Film as Philosophy (2017), and Practical Aesthetics (Bloomsbury, 2020).Patricia Pisters is Professor of Film Studies at the Department of Media Studies of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and director of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA). She is one of the founding editors of Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies, program director of the research group Neuroaesthetics and Neurocultures, and co-director of the research group Film and Philosophy. Publications include The Matrix of Visual Culture (2003); Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze (with Rosi Braidotti; 2012) and The Neuro-Image (2012). See for articles, her blog, and other information at www.patriciapisters.com.
Revue de Presse:
"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
"Jiri Anger's 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 fields-and with clearer relevance to questions of the relation between human sensation and the technologically modulated material environments in which we live. In short, Anger's question-and his detailed answer to it-has 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
Voir le site internet de l'éditeur Bloomsbury Academic
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