Found Footage Effect. Digital Kříženecký and the Crack-up of the Film Medium

The digitization of all preserved films by Jan Kříženecký, the so-called pioneer of Czech cinema, gave birth to filmic artifacts with uncertain media status. While they benefit from the crystal clear quality of HD video and many new options for variation and circulation, the decaying materiality of nitrate prints and negatives has not been effaced but made all the more visible. This paper aims to examine how this hybridity influences the aesthetic effects of the films, notably how it brings these films closer to a certain tradition of experimental found footage filmmaking that involves deformative practices and plays with the tension between figurative and material components of the film image (and the "crack-up" that keeps this tension alive). The alignment between Kříženecký's early cinematic works and found footage is highlighted to show how the deformative practices of experimental cinema and destructive operations of archival audiovisual documents are closely entwined. Furthermore, it also emphasizes how the hybrid materiality of the digitized artifacts and its unintentional infiltration into the figurative meanings of the films can make us see many ontological and epistemological problems of the film medium in a new light.

Keywords: Jan Kříženecký, digitization, materiality, found footage, crack-up