Jirí Anger, "Towards a Film Theory from Below: Archival Film and the Aesthetics of the Crack-Up" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

Jiří Anger is a scholar, archivist, and videographic critic devoted, as he says in this interview, to "making weird shapes shine." In this episode of New Books in Film, Anger sits down with Alix Beeston to discuss his award-winning book Towards a Film Theory from Below: Archival Film and the Aesthetics of the Crack-Up. 

Anger's book is an experiment in theorizing film "from below," from the perspective of moving-image objects themselves. Its revelatory readings of single frames from the digitized first Czech films by Jan Kríženecký challenge what we think we know about film materials, histories, and spectatorship. These early film objects are defined and deformed by scratches, stains, tears, and shakes that Anger takes seriously as part of an "accidental aesthetics" which reveals the creative potential of material traces and processes — beyond their shaping through human intention.

How does doing film theory from below complicate our understandings of creativity and agency? What forms of scholarly or artistic interventions into film materials does it prompt? What are the ethics of "touching" or manipulating archival objects for the sake of restoration, dissemination, or interpretation? Reflecting on both his written scholarship and videographic practice, Jiří offers thoughtful answers to these and other vexing questions for all who seek to reimagine film history and theory through the archive's preponderance of idiosyncratic forms, disruptive materials, and weird shapes.

Towards a Film Theory from Below is out now with Bloomsbury Academic. Anger builds on the work of the book in A Tale of Two Desktops: The First Czech Films in Parallel Worlds, a new videographic essay coproduced with Veronika Hanáková and Jiří Žák.

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