Iluminace, 2025 (roč. 37), číslo 3
FILMIC MATTER AND GEOGRAPHIC SPECIFICITY

Toward a Geographically Specific Understanding of Filmic and Media Matter: An Introduction to a Special Issue

Byron Davies, Jiří Anger

Iluminace 2025, 37(3):5-20 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1831  

It can be difficult to articulate a substantive materialism in film and media studies, owing to the slipperiness of that term and its cognates. Changes in media and their technology can even bring out the materialist elements of supposedly idealist views in past film theory, thus raising the question of whether there is any meaningful contrast with “materialism.” We proffer the hypothesis that these difficulties lose their force as we move away from the global center and toward sites shaped by material scarcity and colonial extraction. Consequently, a materialism thought through to its full implications must be a geographically grounded...

Cinema’s Atmospheric A Priori: How Weather and Environment Shaped Celluloid Film Manufacturing and Raw Material Supply at Fujifilm, Daicel, and Agfa

Marek Jancovic

Iluminace 2025, 37(3):21-42 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1819  

Where was the cotton for Fujifilm’s cine-film grown? Who supplied the animal parts that would end up coated on Agfa’s film as gelatin? How did climate, environment, geology, and river hydrology shape the history of celluloid film manufacturing, and thus of cinema? This article enlists several archival collections and a range of little-known, multi-language secondary sources in the broader task of understanding cinema’s relationship with the material environment and climate, and its historical role in global trade, extractivist practices, and colonial politics. Drawing on primary source research in the archives of film stock and chemical...

Knitting on Location: The Norfolk Knitting Pattern Film Series

Jennifer Nightingale

Iluminace 2025, 37(3):43-48 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1821  

This audiovisual essay and written statement unpack two films from the Norfolk Knitting Pattern series, which I created in 2023. The 16mm landscape films discussed here aim to translate Norfolk fisherman gansey knitting patterns. The films were shot and edited on location in two Norfolk fishing villages, Sheringham and Cromer, in the UK, where the patterns have been historically produced. The production of the films creates a structural relationship between a stitch of knitted textile fabric and a frame of film. In this methodology, gesture, landscape, and film are “knitted together” as a material object, re-embedding the knitting patterns...

Por un cine cachinero: Reappropriation as a Survival Strategy in Contemporary Experimental Cinema from Guayaquil

Libertad Gills

Iluminace 2025, 37(3):49-56 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1824  

The video essay Por un cine cachinero, based on the manifesto of the same title published in the book Guayaquil en ruinas (“Guayaquil in Ruins,” Guayaquil Analógico, 2023), brings together films made in Guayaquil on analog film or made by reappropriating archives. The aim is to recontextualize these works within the local framework of “cachinería,” the name of popular second-hand markets. What would a film theory inspired by the cachinería look like? This video essay considers reappropriation in experimental cinema in Guayaquil as a practice that resignifies international found footage tendencies or fashions as well as local...

Language Matters in the Geography of AI: French-Language Uses of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Filmmaking

Maxime Harvey

Iluminace 2025, 37(3):57-76 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1822  

This paper examines how generative artificial intelligence (AI) reconfigures linguistic practices and labour in contemporary filmmaking. Building on relational-materialist approaches, it argues that recent controversies and transformations in the film industry, such as synthetic voice generation, AI-assisted dubbing, and prompt-based creative tools, are deeply entwined with issues of language. The case of French-language filmmaking serves to foreground the geopolitical and sociolinguistic specificities that are often flattened in global AI deployments. Through a critical analysis of discourse around AI voice technologies and ethnographic observations...

Refiguring the Buryat Photographic Archive: Ethnographic Visuality, Vernacular Montage, and Shamanic Temporality

Aleksei Ziniuk, Margarita Galandina

Iluminace 2025, 37(3):77-108 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1826  

This article examines the Buryat photographic archive as a contested site of visual ethnography, historical trauma, and postcolonial critique. Spanning late Imperial ethnography (1880s), early Soviet ethnographic activism (1910s–1920s), and anthropometric studies (1930s), the archive documents the transformation of Buryat communities under imperial and Soviet regimes. Its dispersed materiality and digital aggregation foreground gaps, absences, and the mediated nature of memory, prompting an approach that combines archival analysis, vernacular photography, and contemporary photographic intervention. Structured in three parts, the article first...

Hussein Shariffe’s Filmic Ruins: Archival Noise and The Dislocation of Amber (1975)

Laurence Kent

Iluminace 2025, 37(3):109-118 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1820  

My audiovisual essay explores Hussein Shariffe’s The Dislocation of Amber (1975) as a filmic “ruin” within his archive. Described by collaborator Sondra Hale as “Sudan’s first art film,” The Dislocation of Amber was filmed in the Sudanese city of Suakin, which lies in ruins. The available digitised copies of the film are degraded and disrupted by noise. Hale interprets the film as “a metaphor for a society decimated by colonialism,” and this essay uses Shariffe’s approach to the ruins of Suakin as a model for how to approach the ruins of Shariffe’s film itself, along with the political and...

Ritualization and Táltos Procedures in Péter Lichter’s Nutrition Fugue (2018)

Bori Máté

Iluminace 2025, 37(3):119-146 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1825  

In his film Nutrition Fugue (2018), Hungarian experimental filmmaker Péter Lichter appropriates remnants of discarded film strips from a socialist grocery advertisement (közért, literally, “for the community”), featuring images of processed meat dishes. As an exemplary case of geographically specific materialist film practice, the film functions as both a historical artifact — documenting East Central Europe under the socialist regime — and as a disruptive rupture, bringing past and present materialities into dialogue. This paper argues that Lichter’s process of cutting, decaying, and reassembling the film stock enacts...

Kidlat Tahimik: Metaphorical Journeys in Decolonial Cinema

Ludo de Roo

Iluminace 2025, 37(3):147-170 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1827  

Philippine filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik’s debut film Perfumed Nightmare (1979) reveals a sophisticated use of what I term “concrete metaphor:” while evoking complex layers of decolonial critique, his 16mm cinematography keeps the metaphorical abstractions firmly grounded in material reality — a stone bridge, tropical foliage, and rustic sounds of nature. This essay considers the complex role of concrete metaphors in Tahimik’s evolving style. I start by showing how, on the one hand, multimodal extensions of cognitive metaphor theory (CMT) illuminate the dynamic structure of Tahimik’s cinematic metaphors. On the other...

Moving in Circles: Space and Place in Media Archaeology and the Art of Jop Horst

Floris Paalman

Iluminace 2025, 37(3):171-198 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1823  

This article is a media-archaeological investigation of the work by Dutch artist and experimental filmmaker Jop Horst (1961–2014). He was interested in the defining principles and features of moving image media: stillness/movement, on/off, light/dark, present/absent. He built his own zoetropes and produced Super 8 and 16mm trick films. Old appliances, such as ventilators, toasters, and washing machines, were turned into media machines, while overhead projectors showed truly moving images of larvae. The dispositif of his installations collided with the exhibition spaces, such as an old mill, a former school, or an aviary, often in his hometown,...

Středověký partyzán v barvě. Restaurování filmu Jan Roháč z Dubé jako pramen kulturní historie

Medieval Partisan in Color: Restoration of the Film The Warriors of Faith as a Source of Cultural History

Tereza Frodlová, Jakub Egermajer

Iluminace 2025, 37(3):199-232 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1828  

Předkládaná studie vychází z výzkumu realizovaného u příležitosti digitálního restaurování snímku Jan Roháč z Dubé (Vladimír Borský, 1947), na kterém se Národní filmový archiv podílel v letech 2022–2024. Studie rekonstruuje okolnosti vzniku filmu, jeho spletitou distribuční historii a jeho místo ve společenském a kulturně-politickém kontextu poválečného Československa. Současně se věnuje otázce ideologického rozměru subžánru historicistně pojatého historického filmu a produkční a distribuční praxi zestátněné československé kinematografie v jejích formativních letech, tedy v období tzv. třetí republiky. V části věnované restaurování sleduje postupy...

Chudáci chlapci a ti druzí

Poor Boys and the Others

Jakub Egermajer

Iluminace 2025, 37(3):233-240 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1829  

Recenze knihy: Pavel Skopal a kol., Lidé – práce – animace: Světy animovaného filmu na Kudlově (Brno: Host, 2024).

Prostor a čas v japonských videoherních centrech

Space and Time in Japanese Videogame Centers

Josef Tichý

Iluminace 2025, 37(3):241-247 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1830  

Recenze knihy: Jérémie Pelletier-Gagnon, Space and Play in Japanese Videogame Arcades (New York: Routledge, 2024).