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 serves as an editor of the peer-reviewed academic journal Iluminace. His research focuses on the intersections of media theory, videographic scholarship, and archival practice, with a current interest in the media archaeology of computer-based writing and video editing.
He is the author of two monographs, four edited volumes and special issues, and numerous journal articles and video essays. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in leading academic journals such as Screen, NECSUS, New Review of Film and Television Studies, [in]Transition, and Film-Philosophy (where he won the Article Award in 2022). His most recent book, Towards a Film Theory from Below. Archival Film and the Aesthetics of the Crack-Up (Bloomsbury, Thinking Media series, 2024), was awarded the Runner-Up prize for Best Monograph by the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS).
Anger’s collaborative video essays, focusing on the excavation of marginalized artefacts and interfaces of the early digital era, have also received significant recognition. One of these works, Cycles of Labour: In the Metaverse, We Will Be Housewives (2023, co-authored with Veronika Hanáková and Martin Tremčinský), won the BAFTSS Award for Best Videographic Criticism.
My research develops a practice-informed approach to film and media studies that I describe as “theory from below.” Drawing on my work as a media theorist, videographic scholar, and archivist, I ground theoretical inquiry in hands-on engagement with the material life of media objects, from nitrate film prints to digital editing software. This integrated and methodologically distinctive perspective, realized through written publications, video essays, and curated archival editions, positions me uniquely to tackle large-scale problems of today’s media landscape.
In my monograph Towards a Film Theory from Below: Archival Film and the Aesthetics of the Crack-Up, which grew out of my curatorial work on early non-fiction films of Czech pioneer Jan Kříženecký at the National Film Archive in Prague, I demonstrate how attention to technological detail reorients fundamental questions about what film is and how it persists in archival and found footage practices. In later articles published in Screen, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, New Review of Film and Television Studies, and elsewhere, I extend this approach to its ethical and political dimensions, including the legacy of Woodstock ’99 archives, the circulation of Holocaust footage online, and geographically situated materialist film and media practices.
In my British Academy project Videographic Archives: Understanding Transitional Audiovisual Objects in the Online Landscape (£391,675), I further integrate media theory, videographic criticism, and archival practice within the context of digital media. Here, “theory from below” becomes a methodological framework for reconstructing marginalised artefacts of the early digital era. Drawing on the desktop documentary format, I stage anachronistic simulations of historical digital interfaces to explore how overlapping temporalities structure contemporary online experience. The project culminates in a hybrid monograph on videographic criticism as a method for investigating software history and theory alongside the international conference Delete: Strategies of Negation in the Age of Data Suffocation and the special issue “Archaeologies of Desktop Media” for Feminist Media Histories.
Building on this work, my next project – provisionally titled How Computers Became Videomaking Machines: Editing Software Between Agency and Automation – is being developed into a competitive ERC Starting Grant application (€1.5m). It examines how digitization and automation since the 1980s have reshaped creative agency in professional and amateur video editing. Moving beyond film-centered accounts of the analogue-to-digital shift, the project analyzes how computer-based editing environments have transformed workflows and temporal experience across the United Kingdom, the United States, and Czechia. Extending my “theory from below” framework, it combines media-historical research with videographic excavation of editing software to explore how interface design redistributes agency between user and machine.
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?
This volume in the film|minutes series focuses on Alfréd Radok’s Daleká cesta (Distant Journey, 1948), a pioneering Czechoslovak film admired by figures such as André Bazin and Alain Resnais. Renowned for its bold experiments in cinematic montage, the film combines fictional scenes with newsreel footage, Nazi propaganda, and images of liberated concentration camps. Produced shortly after the war, Daleká cesta remains one of the earliest and most formally daring cinematic attempts to grapple with the Holocaust. Drawing on the creators’ ideas of editorial montage as a means of rescuing victims of atrocity—at least momentarily—from historical determinism, the book explores how a montage like experiment in film analysis can challenge not only deterministic narratives of history, but also the conventions of established theoretical frameworks and academic writing.
Volumes in the film|minutes series cut up films into segments of exactly one minute and transform each minute into an innovative tool for thinking with the film. Each volume works rigorously with the concept of “the minute” as a non-cinematic scale/quantity, a means to zoom in on (dis)orderly fragments that do not necessarily respect the confinements of cinematic form or meaning. As a critical practice, the focus on minutes causes disruptions and displacement that create novel connections and perspectives, and uncovers hidden traces, making it possible to watch each film anew.
This book deals with various possible ways in which the formalized expression of emotions that is characteristic of the melodramatic mode can be reinterpreted in the context of experimental cinema.
The main argument is based on two interrelated ideas. First, the melodramatic mode as a genre-bending category offers a wide repertory of stylistic features designed to express extreme emotional states or situations which can be encompassed by the term “melodramatic excess”. This type of excess manifests itself most visibly in moments of intense passion when the plot breaks down and freezes in a static or symbolic arrangement, either through close-up, tableau vivant or montage sequence. All attention is thereby focused on the heroes’ gestures and poses which express their emotional state face to face with an intense situation for which they cannot yet find an adequate response.
Second, certain experimental films manage to transform the melodramatic excess through “expressive and performative operations” with filmic space, time and bodies, turning the exterior representation of emotions into the immanent expression of affects. In this case, affect is understood as a certain variation of emotions which demonstrates the capacity of bodies to transform while suffering intense pathos, without ever stabilizing in recognizable gestures or symbols.
Between the melodramatic excess and the concept of affect (or affect theory) therefore emerges a “two-way movement”. On the one hand, certain experimental films (e.g., the films of Werner Schroeter, Carmelo Bene, or Kenneth Anger) are able to transform the melodramatic excess in such a way that it becomes affective, on the other hand, the term affect, often defined in abstract or negative ways, thereby gains a specific stylistic variant, the melodramatic one. This book strives to show how this two-way movement works and which new impulses it can bring into the contemporary affect studies and film theory.
To address this gap, the special issue brings media archaeology and feminist media history into direct dialogue. Media archaeology offers critical tools for tracing how desktop media engage with and shape the evolution of the graphical user interface (GUI), and how they resonate with earlier technological practices—from desktop publishing to early computer video editing systems (e.g., Ernst 2021; Gaboury 2021; Distelmeyer 2022; Hanáková 2024). At the same time, recent interventions by feminist media historians provide strategies for denaturalizing the desktop through feminist, queer, and anti-racist perspectives on labor, domesticity, and authorship (e.g., Nooney 2023; Moretti 2023; Hilu 2024; Nakamura 2025). Together, these frameworks showcase a generative methodological tandem to interrogate how desktop media inherit, extend, or critique earlier promises of democratization, user-centered design, and interactivity. Crucially, they allow us to ask: What kinds of subjectivity have these formats invited, enabled, marginalized, or repressed?
This extensive publication by a collective of authors from the National Film Archive (NFA) represents the first comprehensive scholarly monograph devoted to the films—and their digitization—of the Czech director and cinematographer Jan Kříženecký, a pioneer of Czech cinema. The volume offers a nuanced account of early Czech film history while foregrounding the material conditions of the earliest cinematographic works. It is grounded in long-term archival research conducted at the National Film Archive, as well as in practical experience with the presentation of these materials. Methodologically, it engages a broad spectrum of approaches, including archival theory and digital restoration, the history of film technology, materialist film and media theory, media archaeology, film aesthetics, and artistic research.
The monograph is divided into two equally substantial parts. The first comprises original studies that examine the materiality and circulation of Kříženecký’s films from multiple perspectives; notably, the development of its theoretical framework was shaped in part by the digitization process itself. The second part presents an extensive, critically annotated edition of documents that situates both the earliest Czech films and their creator within a rich contextual and factual framework. These materials include, among other features, a map of filming locations, a chronological overview of Kříženecký’s life and work, and documentation of surviving physical artefacts associated with him. The volume is further supplemented by a substantial visual appendix, as well as a filmography, bibliography, and comprehensive indexes.
This videographic essay builds on the book Towards a Film Theory from Below and explores how we can approach early cinema and archival film both theoretically and videographically. It examines how nitrate film materials from the beginnings of cinema — with all their weird shapes, textures, and visual quirks — survive and circulate in the digital age.
We trace these materials across the online landscape, where they appear in forms ranging from compressed video files to 4K scans and AI-enhanced versions. At the same time, we engage with them in the physical world through experiments with printed film frames and investigate their tactile and material qualities.
Focusing on three films, twenty-six frames, and a single GIF, the audiovisual essay proposes a new vision of archival film. Rather than treating archival fragments such as Kříženecký’s films as mere ruins of the past, we argue they are always-already open to speculative, yet materially grounded, reimagination. READ.
This videographic essay examines the transformation of domestic labour into digital labour by tracing continuities between twentieth-century housework and contemporary data-driven economies. Drawing on Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, the essay foregrounds the repetitive, invisible, and unrecognised nature of reproductive labour historically confined to the private sphere. It argues that technological developments and the family wage model individualised and isolated housewives, embedding them in continuous cycles of care work.
Extending this framework, the essay explores how similar logics operate in the digital sphere. Through a three-part structure that includes historical contextualisation, interactive playthrough, and speculative demonstration, it reveals how everyday online activities such as browsing, communicating, and content consumption generate unpaid value. Inspired by The Sims, the project simulates domestic routines within a digital interface, illustrating how users become “digital housewives” who perform repetitive affective and cognitive labour.
Furthermore, the essay situates digital labour within globalised economies of precarity, where microtask platforms replicate earlier patterns of exploitation and invisibility. It concludes that digital systems reproduce and intensify historical structures of reproductive labour, rendering users participants in ongoing cycles of extraction. READ.
Inka Zemánková (1915-2000) is known as a pioneering Czech female swing singer, a symbol of burgeoning Czech popular music under the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Due to personal, cultural, and political circumstances, her professional career, spanning over sixty years, did not ever reach nearly the same level of fame and success as in the early 1940s. Since the 1960s, however, there were many waves of nostalgia for the singer (and the golden days of swing) driven by radio and especially television that strove to bring her back to the spotlight. Our study argues for the significant role of nostalgia and recycling in (re)defining Zemánková's star image, which cemented not only her status as the first Czech swing star but also many ongoing myths about her life as well as gender stereotypes.
Analysis of written and audiovisual archival sources, focused particularly on television shows that involved Zemánková's iconic song Slunečnice (Sunflower) from the film Hotel Modrá hvězda (Hotel Blue Star, 1941), uncovers the ways in which nostalgic framing filtered the singer's star image through the gaze of prominent male figures of the Czech showbiz. It also demonstrates that the role of Inka Zemánková herself was far from passive: she exploited the nostalgic male gaze to revive her fame and support the myth of not fulfilling her star potential due to ideological persecution. The nuances of Inka Zemánková's stardom examined throughout the article are further demonstrated in the accompanying audiovisual essay Slunečnice očima gentlemanů (Sunflower Through the Eyes of Gentlemen). READ.
Why the first frames of Czech cinema? Since we are making the first Czech films accessible for the first time in the online space, it would be fruitful to examine the first images of individual films as material and aesthetic artifacts between the past and the present, involving physical deformations of the original nitrate materials as well as their possible digital manipulations.
The audiovisual essay compiles the first images of all the digitized original film materials in such a way as not to obscure but to emphasize the hybridity of the first film frames, even at the cost of playing analog and digital features against each other. In doing so, the essay not only reveals the potentialities of digital technology to make visible the complex material history of early film materials but also takes a curious detour back to the earliest cinematic projections, in which films began precisely as still images and only gradually awakened into movement. READ.
We have become accustomed to communicating with the digital world through various technological interfaces - computer and smartphone screens, user environments in programs, applications, and games, or windows into virtual worlds. However, these interfaces not only render things visible but can also hinder our vision (and especially our understanding). The sense of control, accessibility, and the immediate satisfaction of the desire for “content” runs into disruptive glitches and lags, the opacity of algorithms, and the suppression of socially marginalized, nonconforming perspectives. In our program, we present audiovisual essays as a form of artistic research that reflects on the digital landscape through its own means. The purpose of these essays is to create points of friction in digital interfaces, thus revealing them as techno-cultural spaces of constant struggle over which human and nonhuman actors can effectively act and assert their interests in the online environment.
We selected five audiovisual essays that explore the limits and paradoxes of the metric society from various angles. They demonstrate how the fetishization of quantitative data influences our perception of history, memory, archives, emotion, and corporeality. They search for its historical roots as well as its current and as yet unrealized manifestations, proposing possible tactics for exposing, confronting, and potentially overcoming our obsession with metrics. They do not offer clear lines of escape but rather traces and hints that can zigzag in any direction. However, they provide a wide range of expressive means that reveal or directly create flaws in the foundations of a system that has set out to challenge the existence of any flaws whatsoever - as well as a research base that allows their function and meaning to be analyzed.
The online environment often appears to us as a space of timelessness. A space where artifacts of the past accumulate regardless of their original context and where they disappear again after satisfying immediate demand. But can the (post)digital landscape be used to revive lost, missing or displaced media, objects, actors or interfaces? A thematic collection of audiovisual essays allows us to understand the online space as a labyrinth of fragments and traces of analogue and digital histories that can be speculatively ''reconfigured'' to play out surprising exchanges between ''then'' and ''now'' as well as to create alternative or unrealized futures.
Postwar nonfiction films (newsreels, documentaries, and hybrid promotional works) in this selection are divided into three key sections representing a cross-section of postwar nonfiction visual culture – Work, the Sudetenland, and Women. These period films are complemented by audiovisual essays created by students of the Department of Film Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, as part of the Digital Historiography workshop co-organized with Lucie Česálková.
