Do archivists dream of electric horses? Digital Kříženecký, static electricity, and the quadruple logic of indexicality

Abstract

Abstract The indexicality of film, generally understood as a connection between the object of reality and its photographic reproduction, remains a defining concept that distinguishes what cinema was and whether it persists in the digital age. Notably, the concept allows us to examine the ontological and aesthetic status of the digitised films from the analogue past. Nevertheless, the variety of material phenomena that appear in such artefacts requires us to reconsider the (f)actors that constitute indexicality. The aim of this paper is to discern a specific indexical logic in the digitised films of the Czech cinema pioneer Jan Kříženecký. While the digitised films benefit from 4K image quality, their material deformations were not retouched but made more visible. These deformations include static electricity marks, which not only signify the original event of shooting the film but also intervene into the formation of figures in the represented world. Kříženecký’s short actuality The First Day of the Spring Races of Prague (1908) will highlight how such intrusive presence of a technological actor brings the quadruple logic of indexicality – torn between representation and materiality, and between trace and deixis – into play, and how it can be prolonged into a specific theoretical and aesthetic thinking.