Profile
My research lies at the intersection of media theory, 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 aim to 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 The project focuses specifically on marginalised artefacts – such as outdated video game interfaces, tacky editing transitions, hybrid broadcasting models, and proto-internet news services – whose place in media history has yet to be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, examining both their archival traces and their resonance within contemporary digital interfaces.
Thus far, the project has led to the publication of two articles (Screen and forthcoming in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television) and two videographic essays (published in Movie and [in]Transition respectively). These works have been presented at conferences and events in Amsterdam, Chicago, Glasgow, Lisbon, Locarno, Reading, Southampton, Urbana-Champaign, and Vienna. 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 a Runner-Up prize for Best Monograph by the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS). The book has also been widely reviewed and presented at institutions including the University of Amsterdam, the University of Illinois, Dartmouth College (online), 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. More publications and impact events will follow soon.
Although it focuses on a different corpus and time period, my Postdoctoral Fellowship builds in many ways on my long-term research into the so-called first Czech films – shot by Jan Kříženecký between 1898 and 1911 – and their digitisation at the National Film Archive (Národní filmový archiv) in Prague. Having the privilege to combine my PhD research at Charles University (2017–2022) with my professional activities at the NFA, I investigated how the distributed materiality of the digitized early films affects their aesthetic impact and our theoretical notions of cinema in the digital age. The project has brought many individual and institutional outputs, including a DVD / Blu-ray collection, an online edition, and several videographic essays and journal articles (The Moving Image, Film-Philosophy, Studies in Eastern European Cinema, Iluminace). For the article “Trembling Meaning: Camera Instability and Gilbert Simondon’s Transduction in Czech Archival Film”, I won the Film-Philosophy Annual Article Award in 2022. Two books resulting from the project have been published: an edited volume Digitální Kříženecký: Nový život prvních českých filmů (Národní filmový archiv, 2023), which brings my theory-based research together with my colleagues’ historical and archival examinations of the films’ materiality, circulation, and cataloguing, and the aforementioned monograph Towards a Film Theory from Below, finalised during my Fellowship.
In parallel with this project, I started investigating the possibilities of videographic criticism in research, teaching, and curatorship. My videographic essays, on which I collaborated with scholars and artists such as Veronika Hanáková, Adéla Kudlová, and Jiří Žák, were published in journals such as NECSUS, [in]Transition, Iluminace, or Tecmerín. Four of them received mentions in the annual Sight & Sound Best Video Essays polls (2022, 2023, 2024), and the essay Distant Journey through the Desktop (with Jiří Žák) was part of an award-winning Blu-ray edition of a digitally restored Czech film, Daleká cesta, and was later shortlisted for the Screen Audiovisual Essay Award in 2023. I taught modules and workshops on videographic criticism at universities in Prague, Brno, and Olomouc and presented my works at numerous international conferences (London, Montréal, Boston, Lucerne, Udine, Vienna, Bucharest, Tallinn, etc.). I also initiated platforms for curating and popularizing videographic research for journals Iluminace, Filmový přehled, and Film a doba and for the online television Artyčok.TV. Together with Veronika Hanáková, I started co-curating 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 any 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
Anger, Jiří. Towards a Film Theory from Below: Archival Film and the Aesthetics of the Crack-Up. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024. – Runner-Up: BAFTSS Best Monograph
Anger, Jiří. Afekt, výraz, performance: Proměny melodramatického excesu v kinematografii těla [Affect, Expression, Performance: Transformation of Melodramatic Excess in the Cinema of the Body]. Praha: Filozofická fakulta UK, 2018.
Edited Volumes and Journal Special Issues
Anger, Jiří, and Veronika Hanáková, eds. “Archaeologies of Desktop Media.” Feminist Media Histories 13, no. 4 (2027). – forthcoming
Davies, Byron, and Jiří Anger, eds. “Filmic Matter and Geographic Specificity.” Iluminace 37, no. 3 (2025). – forthcoming
Anger, Jiří, ed. Digitální Kříženecký: Nový život prvních českých filmů [Digital Kříženecký: The New Life of the First Czech Films]. Praha: Národní filmový archiv, 2023.
Anger, Jiří, and Sandra Baborovská, eds. Myslet filmem / Thinking Through Film. Praha: Galerie hlavního města Prahy, 2023.
Česálková, Lucie, and Jiří Anger, eds. “Interface.” Iluminace 32, no. 2 (2020).
Selected Articles
Anger, Jiří. “Desktop Montage: Ethics of Holocaust Footage in the Online Space.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television (2025). – forthcoming
Anger, Jiří. “Archiving the Live Music Spectacle: Woodstock ’99 and MTV Pay-Per-View.” Screen 66, no. 2 (2025): 197–221.
Anger, Jiří, and Veronika Hanáková. “The Return of the Star Wipe.” [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies 12, no. 2 (2025). [videographic essay]
Anger, Jiří, Veronika Hanáková, and Jiří Žák. “A Tale of Two Desktops: The First Czech Films in Parallel Worlds.” Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism 12 (2025). [videographic essay]
Hanáková, Veronika, Martin Tremčinský, and Jiří Anger. “Cycles of Labour: In the Metaverse, We Will Be Housewives.” NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies 12, no. 2 (2023): https://necsus-ejms.org/cycles-of-labour-in-the-metaverse-we-will-be-housewives/. [videographic essay] – Winner: BAFTSS Best Videographic
Criticism
Anger, Jiří, and Kevin B. Lee. “Suture Goes Meta: Desktop Documentary and its Narrativization of Screen-Mediated Experience.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 40, no. 5 (2023): 595–622.
Anger, Jiří, and Veronika Hanáková. “Screen Stars Dictionary: Natalia Oreiro.” Tecmerín: Revista de Ensayos Audiovisuales, no. 11 (2023): https://tecmerin.uc3m.es/project/screen-stars-dictionary/. [videographic essay]
Anger, Jiří, and Veronika Hanáková. “Once Upon a Screen: The Clown, the Tree, the Shadows.” [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies 9, no. 3 (2022): https://mediacommons.org/intransition/clown-tree-shadows. [videographic essay]
Anger, Jiří, and Miroslava Papežová. “Kdo se otáčí za Slunečnicí?: Nostalgický konstrukt hvězdného obrazu Inky Zemánkové [Who’s Looking Back at the Sunflower? The Nostalgic Construction of Inka Zemánková’s Star Image].” Iluminace 34, no. 3 (2022): 25–68. [article + videographic essay]
Anger, Jiří. “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.
Anger, Jiří. “Shaping the Unshapeable?: Videographic Curation of Early Czech Cinema.” Iluminace 34, no. 1 (2022): 9–29. [article + videographic essay]
Anger, Jiří. “Trembling Meaning: Camera Instability and Gilbert Simondon’s Transduction in Czech Archival Film.” Film-Philosophy 25, no. 1 (2021): 18–41. – Film-
Philosophy Annual Article Award
Anger, Jiří, and Jiří Žák. “Distant Journey Through the Desktop.” [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies 8, no. 1 (2021): https://mediacommons.org/intransition/distant-journey-through-desktop. [videographic essay]
Anger, Jiří. “Keep That Image Burning: Digital Kříženecký, Color Veil, and the Cinema That Never Stops Ending.” The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 20, nos. 1–2 (2020): 123–155.
Anger, Jiří. “(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.
Anger, Jiří. “Found footage efekt: Digitální Kříženecký a prasklina filmového média [Found Footage Effect: Digital Kříženecký and the Crack-up of the Film Medium].” Iluminace 31, no. 2 (2019): 89–117.
Anger, Jiří, and Tomáš Jirsa. “We Never Took Deconstruction Seriously Enough (On Affects, Formalism, and Film Theory): An Interview with Eugenie Brinkema.” Iluminace 31, no. 1 (2019): 65–85.
Anger, Jiří. “Médium, které myslí sebe sama: Audiovizuální esej jako nástroj bádání a vyústění akademických trendů [Thinking Through the Medium Itself: Audiovisual Essay as a Research Method and a Result of Academic Trends].” Iluminace 30, no. 1 (2018): 5–26.
Book Chapters
Anger, Jiří, and Veronika Hanáková, “The Musical World of Tumblr.” in Materializing the Musical, eds. Jenny Oyallon-Koloski and Desiree Garcia. Ann Arbor: Lever Press, 2025. – forthcoming
Anger, Jiří. “První políčka českého filmu: Videografický přístup k raným kinematografickým artefaktům [The First Frames of Czech Cinema: A Videographic Approach to Early Cinematic Artifacts].” in Digitální Kříženecký: Nový život prvních českých filmů [Digital Kříženecký: The New Life of the First Czech Films]. Praha: Národní filmový archiv, 2024, 212–235.
Anger, Jiří. “Estetika praskliny: Filmy Jana Kříženeckého na pomezí figurativna a materiálna [Aesthetics of the Crack-Up: The Films of Jan Kříženecký Between Figuration and Materiality].” in Digitální Kříženecký: Nový život prvních českých filmů [Digital Kříženecký: The New Life of the First Czech Films]. Praha: Národní filmový archiv, 2024, 40–75.
Anger, Jiří. “Úvod: Digitální návrat k nejranějším českým snímkům [Introduction: Digital Return to the Earliest Czech Films].” in Digitální Kříženecký: Nový život prvních českých filmů [Digital Kříženecký: The New Life of the First Czech Films]. Praha: Národní filmový archiv, 2024, 22–37.
Anger, Jiří. “Druhý život montáže v (post)digitální realitě / The Second Life of Montage in the (Post)Digital Reality.” in Myslet filmem / Thinking Through Film, eds. Jiří Anger and Sandra Baborovská. Praha: Galerie hlavního města Prahy, 2023, 117–137.
Anger, Jiří, and Sandra Baborovská. “Předmluva / Preface.” in Myslet filmem / Thinking Through Film, eds. Jiří Anger and Sandra Baborovská. Praha: Galerie hlavního města Prahy, 2023, 9–14.
Anger, Jiří. “Dotýkat se nedosažitelného objektu: Haptická audiovizuální esej a antropotechnický interface [Touching the Unattainable Object: Haptic Audiovisual Essay and the Anthropotechnical Interface].” in Operátoři (nových) médií, eds. Tomáš Dvořák and Martin Charvát. Praha: NAMU, 2022, 235–270.
Impact Activities
Curation of archival collections [DVD / Blu-ray / Online] (National Film Archive in Prague)
Curation of video essays (Iluminace, Film a doba, Artyčok.TV)
Festival programming (Marienbad Film Festival)
Anger, Jiří. “Co dokáže trpící tělo?: Melodramatický afekt a Smrt Marie Malibranové [What Can a Suffering Body Do?: Melodramatic Affect and The Death of Maria Malibran].” Iluminace 28, no. 1 (2016): 87–105.