Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Art
Episode: JirĂ Anger, "Towards a Film Theory from Below: Archival Film and the Aesthetics of the Crack-Up" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
Description: JirĚiĚ Anger is a scholar, archivist, and videographic critic devoted, as he says in this interview, to "making weird shapes shine." In this episode of New Books in Film, Anger sits down with Alix Beeston to discuss his award-winning book Towards a Film Theory from Below: Archival Film and the Aesthetics of the Crack-Up.Â
Anger's book is an experiment in theorizing film "from below," from the perspective of moving-image objects themselves. Its revelatory readings of single frames from the digitized first Czech films by Jan KrĂĹženecký challenge what we think we know about film materials, histories, and s...