Keep That Image Burning: Digital Kříženecký, Color Veil, and the Cinema That Never Stops Ending
2020; University of Minnesota Press; Volume: 20; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5749/movingimage.20.1-2.0123
ISSN1542-4235
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
ResumoKeep That Image BurningDigital Kříženecký, Color Veil, and the Cinema That Never Stops Ending Jiří Anger (bio) June 14, 1901. Jan Kříženecký shoots the Grand Consecration of the Emperor Franz I Bridge. The camera stands on the left side of the bridge and captures the people passing by. Some ignore the apparatus; others try to draw attention to themselves, at least for an instant. This is what the filmmaker, and perhaps also the film's audience, wanted to see in the resulting film. Yet, another actor makes itself visible in its own way. The walking figures are covered by a rippling color veil, progressing from yellow to orange to red. Amid these two planes, wherein lies the film's aesthetic meaning, if there ever was one?1 The short, forty-six-second-long2 actuality Grand Consecration of the Emperor Franz I Bridge (Slavnostní vysvěcení mostu císaře Františka I.; 1901) belongs to the recently digitized oeuvre of Jan Kříženecký, the so-called pioneer of Czech cinema. The films of Jan Kříženecký, made between 1898 and 1911 in the Czech lands (then still a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), have been virtually invisible in their original nitrate form for around a hundred years. Every now and then, snippets of the films appeared in compilations, documentaries about the history of Czech cinema, and TV shows; if they were screened in cinemas, it was on later-generation duplicate prints.3 From one point of view, this obscurity seems logical—owing to the nonstandard single round perforation,4 the original prints are no longer screenable, the decaying nitrate base is at a permanent risk of burning, and the films' pioneering status makes them a treasured artifact that needs to be preserved for future generations. When the Czech National Film Archive digitized all of the surviving original materials from Kříženecký's estate and made them available on DVD/Blu-ray (2019), it gave birth to a body of work that simulates an authentic archival imprint of history yet, at the same time, is riddled with fissures, ellipses, and uncertainties. Labeled as "digitization" rather than "digital restoration" by the chief curator, Jeanne Pommeau, the project left Kříženecký's films intentionally unretouched. According to her, digital retouching would, especially in the cases of significantly deteriorating film materials, inevitably lead to creating the films anew, and in other cases, it would make the photographic features of the materials disappear.5 In other terms, how can we return the images to their original form and historical context if the condition of the film stock and the lack of functional technological dispositif of its period do not allow it? The digitization of the films "as they exist today" does not necessarily make them more "authentic," but it highlights the struggle between different time epochs and different media in a way that stock archival footage with dots, dust, and scratches or crystal-clear digitally restored films usually do not achieve. While the digitized films benefit from high-definition picture quality, allowed by scanning in 4K, and many new options for exhibition and manipulation, the deformations present in the film materials [End Page 124] were not effaced but made all the more visible in the image. The digitization preserved the damages and instabilities caused not only by the ravages of time but also by the material properties of the original nitrate prints and negatives and of the camera obtained from the Lumière brothers (Cinématographe-type).6 Thus, in a strangely twisted manner, digital technology allows us to better perceive the potential that early film technology itself had for intervening into the form and content of the moving image and, consequently, to understand how this new form of visibility can put the ontological and aesthetic qualities of the materials into question. Grand Consecration of the Emperor Franz I Bridge, one of the most distorted films from Kříženecký's digitized body of work, embodies this dilemma. Despite (or because of) high-resolution digital video, the images still burst with cracks, holes, and burns; some of the frames are missing or incomplete; others hold together only because of splices. Additionally...
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