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

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216305%3A26420%2F25%3APU155379" target="_blank" >RIV/00216305:26420/25:PU155379 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/scapvc/film/movie/" target="_blank" >https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/scapvc/film/movie/</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

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Result language

angličtina

Original language name

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

Original language description

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

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

J_ost - Miscellaneous article in a specialist periodical

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

60405 - Studies on Film, Radio and Television

Project

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Continuities

S - Specificky vyzkum na vysokych skolach

Publication year

2025

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Name of the periodical

MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism

ISSN

2047-1661

e-ISSN

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Volume of the periodical

neuveden

Issue of the periodical within the volume

12

Country of publishing house

GB - UNITED KINGDOM

Number of pages

3

Pages from-to

„“-„“

UT code for WoS article

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EID of the result in the Scopus database

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