Abstrakt
The digitization of all the surviving films of the Czech cinema pioneer Jan Kříženecký (made between 1898 and 1911) gave birth to media artefacts with uncertain ontological and aesthetic status. While the digitized films benefit from the crystal-clear 4K image quality, their material deformations have not been retouched but made all the more visible.
This problem is only highlighted in some of the most distorted films, in which the intrinsic technological properties of the Lumière film stock and apparatus interfere significantly into the figurative dimension of the image, even at the risk of evaporating it entirely. Thus, two central questions arise: What do such extreme archival artefacts bring to the ongoing debates about the "death of cinema" in the digital age, or, more broadly, about the ontology of the inevitably transforming moving image? How do they affect the fragile relationship between figuration and materiality, and, consequently, our understanding of this tension within the archival footage itself? To propose an answer to these questions, materialist film theory preoccupied with the ever-changing ontology of film will need to join forces with the contemporary theory of archival practice, as well as with experimental films that appropriate archival footage.
A case study of the film Grand Consecration of the Emperor Franz I Bridge (1901, digitized nitrate print) will demonstrate how a specific material-technological quality (in this case a yellowish-orange color layer with unclear origin) can pre-filter the figurative universe through the hybrid matter composed of analog and digital, external and internal, human and non-human entities. Such exercise will enable us to think ontology and aesthetics of digitized archival footage and, by extension, the hybrid moving image itself, together.