A Tale of Two Desktops: The First Czech Films in Parallel Worlds

článek v časopise - ostatní, Jost

angličtina

What kind of an object is a digitised analogue film? The so-called “digital surrogates”, or “digital reproductions of pre-existing works” (Cameron 2021: 4), are infiltrating the online space in increasing numbers and higher and higher picture quality. Despite that, there has been surprisingly little effort to theorise these “surrogates” as full-fledged material, historical, and aesthetic artefacts. Archivists and historians judge them according to their fidelity to the analogue originals (Fossati 2018), while digital media scholars see them as relatively homogenous and replaceable fragments surrendering to the logic of big data and algorithmic patterns (Parikka and Dvořák 2021). Can a practice-based audiovisual approach give these artefacts proper space – one that would account for their historically determined mixture of photochemical and digital elements while also emphasising their potential for change and variation? Our audiovisual essay focuses on the earliest Czech films, shot between 1898 and 1911 by Jan Kříženecký and recently digitised by the National Film Archive in Prague. Thanks to a non-intrusive approach to digitisation (Pommeau 2020), which aimed to use digital technology not to retouch or (over)stabilise the films but to approximate how the preserved film materials look in their current state, we can perceive physical deformations that have appeared in the films due to ageing or technological dispositions of the equipment obtained from the Lumière brothers (nitrate prints and negatives and the Cinématographe apparatus). The digitised artefacts thus showcase both the original features of photochemical technology and the new potentialities of digital tools to make these features more visible at the level of the individual frames and circulatable across a multitude of online platforms and software interfaces. But how can we take advantage of this disjointed existence to analyse the artefacts’ aesthetic effects, or more precisely, the “weird shapes” that emerge from the clash between the figurative and material dimensions of the image? To examine the artefacts within the domains of their actual and potential circulation, we have employed a “desktop documentary” format, which enables scholars to simulate the experience of browsing through the online landscape by screen-capturing the computer or smartphone desktop (Kiss 2021; Anger and Lee 2023), and “doubled” it by orchestrating parallel operations with the film frames on a wooden desk (Binotto 2023). This doubling reflects the fact that the seemingly immaterial digital “surrogates” always have the capacity to re-enter the world outside the screen and again become physical and haptic in a traditional sense – in this case, thanks to a classical printer. The two-desktop scheme then serves to investigate three of Kříženecký’s films – Grand Consecration of the Emperor Franz I Bridge (Slavnostní vysvěcení mostu císaře Františka I., 1901), The First Day of the Spring Races of Prague (První den jarních dostihů pražských, 1908), and Opening Ceremony of the Čech Bridge (Slavnost otevření nového Čechova mostu, 1908) – and the aesthetic functions of specific material dispositions of the Lumière film equipment within the moving image – a yellowish-orange veil, marks of static electricity, and camera trembling respectively. This approach puts the weird shapes resulting from distinctive encounters between technological elements and the films’ figurative content on display, thereby stressing the meaning-making role of accidentality across virtual and physical worlds. As a result, our audiovisual essay marries the affordances of videographic criticism and archival practice by showcasing that a digitised analogue film is, first and foremost, a malleable object.

first films of Czech kinematography

ŽÁK, J.; HANÁKOVÁ, V.; ANGER, J.

30. 3. 2025

University of Warwick

Londýn

2047-1661

MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism

12

Spojené království Velké Británie a Severního Irska

3

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/scapvc/film/movie/