Iluminace 2022, 34(1):9-29 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1721

Shaping the Unshapeable? Videographic Curation of Early Czech Cinema

Jiří Anger
Národní filmový archiv, Prague

Whenever a curator attempts to present films from the very beginnings of cinema to contemporary spectators, multiple pressing questions always come to mind. Shall the ephemeral one-minute scenes be shown individually or as parts of larger wholes, sorted out according to thematic or chronological affinities? How to successfully reproduce not only the films' content but also their inherent technological features or the distinctive quality of early cinematic experience? How is it possible to make the audience aware of the historical distance that the surviving archival artifacts covered? How can we navigate between the film materials' past, present, and future?
This study brings forth the idea that to understand the earliest cinematic works in a richer way, film curatorship may adopt a more creative and interventionist approach - not in order to turn the artifacts into something entirely different but to highlight their hidden cracks and ambiguities. More specifically, it examines a videographic essay titled The First Frames of Czech Cinema (Jiří Anger and Adéla Kudlová, 2021) that plays with the paradoxes and contradictions of the recently digitized films of Jan Kříženecký (1898-1911), or, more precisely, of the very first images of the works we see. Both the videographic essay and its written accompaniment showcase that curation of uncertain, disfigured, and fragmentary archival artifacts from the beginnings of cinema does not necessarily have to limit itself to filling the gaps; instead, it can embrace their lacunas as windows onto all the things that make the earliest cinema so strange and fascinating.

Keywords: early cinema, film curatorship, archives, digital humanities, videographic criticism, Czech cinema, Jan Kříženecký

Published: March 1, 2022  Show citation

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Anger, J. (2022). Shaping the Unshapeable? Videographic Curation of Early Czech Cinema. Iluminace, 34(1), 9-29. doi: 10.58193/ilu.1721

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