Dr Jiří Anger

Profile

My research brings media theory into dialogue with videographic criticism and archival practice. In my British Academy Postdoctoral Project (2024–2026), titled Videographic Archives: Understanding Transitional Audiovisual Objects in the Online Landscape, I develop tools for understanding the archaeologies and afterlives of technologies and interfaces from the transitional era between analogue and early digital media. The project focuses specifically on marginalised artefacts – such as outdated video game interfaces, tacky editing transitions, hybrid broadcasting models, and proto-internet news services – whose place in media history has yet to be recognised. By using videographic criticism, a method that blends film studies, digital humanities, and artistic research, I combine theoretical analysis with creative practice to establish these transitional artefacts as research objects, zeroing in on both their archival traces and their resonance within contemporary digital interfaces. 

Thus far, the project has led to four articles (Screen, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, forthcoming TMG Journal for Media History and New Review of Film and Television Studies), two videographic essays (published in Movie and [in]Transition respectively), and a short experimental monograph (Daleká cesta / Distant Journey [film-minutes]). These works have been presented at conferences and events in Amsterdam, Chicago, Dublin, Glasgow, Lisbon, Locarno, London, Reading, Southampton, St Andrews, Urbana-Champaign, and Vienna. The article published in Screen – “Archiving the Live Music Spectacle: Woodstock ’99 and MTV Pay-Per-View” – won the Best Article Award from the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS). The Return of the Star Wipe, published in [in]Transition, was the most-voted entry in the 2025 Sight and Sound Best Video Essay Poll. For these efforts, I was named Best Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and was Highly Commended at QMUL’s Research and Innovation Awards. 

Two outputs completed at the outset of my postdoctoral tenure received major recognition. My first English-language monograph, Towards a Film Theory from Below: Archival Film and the Aesthetics of the Crack-Up (Bloomsbury Academic, Thinking Media series, 2024), received the Runner-Up prize for Best Monograph from BAFTSS and was included in Oxford’s The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory (2025). The book has also been widely reviewed and presented at institutions including the University of Amsterdam, the University of Illinois, Dartmouth College, the University of St Andrews, the University of Edinburgh, and Birkbeck, University of London. Additionally, Cycles of Labour: In the Metaverse, We Will Be Housewives, a videographic essay co-authored with Veronika Hanáková and Martin Tremčinský, won the BAFTSS Award for Best Videographic Criticism and was screened at the Museum of the Moving Image, New York.  

Key outcomes of the Fellowship are the workshop Archaeologies of Computerised Video Editing (29 May 2026, University of Amsterdam) and the conference Delete: Strategies of Negation in the Age of Data Suffocation (17–18 September 2026, Queen Mary), which are planned to result in edited volumes. The project’s final outputs also include a hybrid monograph on transitional audiovisual objects and the special issue “Archaeologies of Desktop Media” for Feminist Media Histories. 

Although focused on a different corpus and historical moment, the Fellowship builds on my longstanding research into archives, digitisation, and videographic criticism. During my PhD at Charles University (2017–2022), conducted alongside my work at the National Film Archive (Národní filmový archiv) in Prague, I examined the digitisation of the first Czech films and its implications for film theory, resulting in the abovementioned monograph Towards a Film Theory from Below, the edited volume Digitální Kříženecký: Nový život prvních českých filmů (Národní filmový archiv, 2023), a DVD/Blu-ray/online collection, and several articles (including “Trembling Meaning: Camera Instability and Gilbert Simondon’s Transduction in Czech Archival Film”, which won the Film-Philosophy Annual Article Award in 2022).  

In parallel, I started investigating the possibilities of videographic criticism in research, teaching, and curatorial practice. My videographic essays, created in collaboration with scholars and artists such as Veronika Hanáková, Adéla Kudlová, and Jiří Žák, have been published in journals such as NECSUS, [in]Transition, Iluminace, and Tecmerín, and have been repeatedly recognised in the Sight and Sound Best Video Essay Poll since 2022. I have presented and taught videographic criticism at universities, conferences, and festivals across Europe and North America and initiated platforms for curating and popularising videographic research for journals Iluminace, Filmový přehled, and Film a doba, as well as for the online gallery Artyčok.TV. Together with Veronika Hanáková, I co-curate a competitive videographic essay section at the Marienbad Film Festival. 

If you’re interested in discussing videographic criticism, media theory, or archival practice, feel free to get in touch. I also welcome ideas for collaboration with the institutions I am involved with in the Czech Republic: the National Film Archive (Národní filmový archiv) and the Czech peer-reviewed journal Iluminace. 

Research

Research Interests:

• Film and Media Theory 

• Film and Media Philosophy 

• Archival Theory and Practice 

• Videographic Criticism 

• Media Archaeology 

• Digital Media 

• Software Studies 

• Editing and Montage 

• Found Footage 

• Essay Film 

• Early Cinema 

Publications

Monographs

Towards a Film Theory from Below: Archival Film and the Aesthetics of the Crack-Up 

Bloomsbury Academic, 2024 (Thinking Media series). 

Runner-Up, BAFTSS Best Monograph (2025). 

Included in The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory (Oxford University Press, 2025). 

Reviewed in Screen, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Millennium Film Journal, Journal of Film Preservation, among others. 

Daleká cesta / Distant Journey [film|minutes] 

Lever Press, 2026, forthcoming. 

Afekt, výraz, performance: Proměny melodramatického excesu v kinematografii těla  

[Affect, Expression, Performance: Transformation of Melodramatic Excess in the Cinema of the Body]. 

Charles University, 2018. 

Reviewed in Iluminace, Film a doba, and ArteActa. 

 

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles (Selected, 14 overall)

“The Star Wipe Effect: Why Gimmicky Media Survive.”

New Review of Film and Television Studies, 2026, forthcoming (with Veronika Hanáková).

“Videographic Scholarship from Below: A Practice-Based Media Archaeology of (and through) Digital Tools.”

TMG Journal for Media History 29, no. 1 (2026), forthcoming (with Veronika Hanáková).

“Archiving the Live Music Spectacle: Woodstock ’99 and MTV Pay-Per-View.”

Screen 66, no. 2 (2025): 197–221.

Winner, BAFTSS Best Article Award 2026.

“Desktop Montage: Ethics of Holocaust Footage in the Online Space.”

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 45, no. 4 (2025): 831–858.

“Suture Goes Meta: Desktop Documentary and its Narrativization of Screen-Mediated Experience.”

Quarterly Review of Film and Video 40, no. 5 (2023): 595–622 (with Kevin B. Lee).

“Do Archivists Dream of Electric Horses?: Digital Kříženecký, Static Electricity, and the Quadruple Logic of Indexicality.”

Studies in Eastern European Cinema 13, no. 1 (2022): 90–111.

“Trembling Meaning: Camera Instability and Gilbert Simondon’s Transduction in Czech Archival Film.”

Film-Philosophy 25, no. 1 (2021): 18–41.

Winner, Film-Philosophy Annual Article Award (2022).

“Keep That Image Burning: Digital Kříženecký, Color Veil, and the Cinema That Never Stops Ending.”

The Moving Image 20, nos. 1–2 (2020): 123–155.

“(Un)Frozen Expressions: Melodramatic Moment, Affective Interval, and the Transformative Powers of Experimental Cinema.”

NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies 8, no. 2 (2019): 25–47.

 

Peer-Reviewed Videographic Scholarship & Practice-Based Outputs 

“Operational Femininity: The Kiki Wipe and the Gendered Logic of Video Editing.” 

Feminist Media Histories 14, no. 2–3 (2028), forthcoming (with Veronika Hanáková). 

“The Return of the Star Wipe.” 

[in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies 12, no. 2 (2025) (with Veronika Hanáková). 

Most-voted video essay, Sight and Sound Poll (2025). 

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

Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism 12 (2025) (with Veronika Hanáková and Jiří Žák). 

“Cycles of Labour: In the Metaverse, We Will Be Housewives.” 

NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies 12, no. 2 (2023) (with Veronika Hanáková and Martin Tremčinský). 

Winner, BAFTSS Best Videographic Criticism (2025). 

Screened at the Museum of the Moving Image, New York. 

“Distant Journey Through the Desktop.” 

[in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies 8, no. 1 (2021) (with Jiří Žák). 

Shortlisted, Screen Audiovisual Essay Award 2023. 

 

Edited Volumes and Journal Special Issues

Archaeologies of Desktop Media, co-edited with Veronika Hanáková. 

Feminist Media Histories 14, nos. 2–3 (2028), forthcoming. 

Filmic Matter and Geographic Specificity, co-edited with Byron Davies. 

Iluminace 37, no. 3 (2025). 

Digitální Kříženecký: Nový život prvních českých filmů 

[Digital Kříženecký: The New Life of the First Czech Films]. 

National Film Archive in Prague, 2023. 

Longlisted, Magnesia Litera Award (Best Scientific Book). 

Reviewed in Film a doba, Cinepur, and Iluminace. 

Myslet filmem / Thinking Through Film, co-edited with Sandra Baborovská. 

Prague City Gallery, 2023. 

Reviewed in Film a doba. 

 

Book Chapters (Selected) 

“The Musical World of Tumblr.” 

In Materializing the Musical, eds. Jenny Oyallon-Koloski and Desiree Garcia. Lever Press, 2027 (with Veronika Hanáková).  

“The Beginnings of Cinema Are Never Finished: Early Film and Videographic Scholarship.” 

In A Long Early Cinema?, eds. Ana Grgic, Dimitrios Latsis, Hugo Ljungbäck, Michael Cowan, and Tami Williams. Lever Press, 2027, forthcoming. 

“Desktop Documentary.” 

In Routledge Resources: Screen Studies, eds. Nora Alter, Lucy Donaldson, and Lori Morimoto. Routledge, 2026, forthcoming (with Veronika Hanáková). 

“Where Is the Desktop in Desktop Cinema?” 

In The Future of Reality, ed. Kevin B. Lee. Diaphanes, 2026 (with Veronika Hanáková).