Distant Journey through the Desktop

Video Distant Journey through the Desktop by Jiří Anger and Jiří Žák approaches Alfred Radok’s newly digitally restored “Distant Journey” via the desktop. It begins with the question: "How to think about a film that itself thinks?” One answer the video suggests is to think with the audiovisual images and to appropriate poetic principles of the film to its own contemporary analytical videographic study

Year of creation: 2020

video

With Jiří Anger

More info

Published in [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, Issue 8.1, April 2021:

http://mediacommons.org/intransition/distant-journey-through-desktop

Alfréd Radok’s essay film Distant Journey (Daleká cesta, 1948) is a canonical classic of Czech cinema and a still unique answer to the question of how to express the inexpressible horrors of the Holocaust. However, such a self-reflexive film also needs a film theory that would extend this reflexivity in a videographic form, by means of using the images and sounds themselves and the context in which they appear in the digital space. The film’s “trick montage,” a technique that links storyline moments with archival footage of war destruction, Nazi emblems, and anti-Jewish terror within a single film shot, is thereby translated into the desktop interface and rethought anew.

The videographic essay was made on the occasion of the digital restoration of Distant Journey supervised by the National Film Archive in Prague.

Where

Marienbad Film Festival, CZ

[in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies

Screen Journal, The University of Glasgow

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