About the event
by Jiří Anger
When film and media studies turn to archives, they often approach them as sites of power, capable of normalising and silencing certain voices, yet – owing to their unstable, tectonic nature – also able to resuscitate forgotten histories. But what might we gain if we bracketed this power dimension and instead looked at archives from below, through the lens of the audiovisual objects they struggle to contain, with all their cracks and crevices that complicate our recognition of what is depicted in them?
Drawing on my monograph 'Towards a Film Theory from Below: Archival Film and the Aesthetics of the Crack-Up' (2024), this talk proposes an archival film theory anchored in singular, malleable objects that produce aesthetic effects through encounters with their material underpinnings – whether signs of wear and tear or properties inherent in their manufacturing processes.
A starting point is a formative encounter with the corpus of digitised (yet unrestored) early actualities by Czech cinema pioneer Jan Kříženecký, recontextualised alongside contemporary found footage and video-essay practices. What I call weird shapes – speculatively and aesthetically generative forms emerging from tensions between figuration and materiality – serve as entry points into a theory of media archives, and by extension media theory more broadly. Such a theory begins by problematising what its objects are and could be, and whether their value should be governed so strongly by intentionality alone. Taking these weird shapes seriously also offers a way of returning to questions of power in a more nuanced and materially grounded manner.
About the speaker
Jiří Anger is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Queen Mary University of London and a researcher at the National Film Archive in Prague, where he also edits the journal Iluminace. His work brings media theory into dialogue with videographic scholarship and archival practice.
He is the author of two monographs and four edited volumes, as well as numerous journal articles and video essays published in Screen, Film-Philosophy, NECSUS, [in]Transition, and other platforms. At the 2025 BAFTSS Awards, his book Towards a Film Theory from Below: Archival Film and the Aesthetics of the Crack-Up received a Runner-Up Prize for Best Monograph, and his collaborative video essay Cycles of Labour: In the Metaverse, We Will Be Housewives won the Best Videographic Criticism category.
How to attend
This event is open to all, and free to attend. You can reserve your spot on Eventbrite.
