In Between Images: Cinematographer Jaroslav Ku č era’s Media Practices Kate ř ina Svato ň ová 1 As his thesis, Ku č era submitted two short documentaries Nová sm ě na and Úst ř ední loutkové divadlo , and a well-received essay entitled Film Camera . In his assessment of the thesis, Jaroslav Bou č ek mentions that it might even be published: “Jaroslav Ku č era’s essay remarkably fulfills its main goal of becoming a guide for young camera - men. [...] With a few minor additions, it could well become a textbook about camera basics and it could be used not just for freshmen but for other students as well.” AMU Archive, FAMU documents, folder 66, final state exam reports (provisionally organized). 2 Bohumil Mathesius, Formální metoda. In: Viktor Š klovskij, Teorie prózy ( Theory of Prose ). Melantrich, Praha 1933, p. 255. Jaroslav Ku č era, Cinematographer Jaroslav Ku č era (August 6, 1929 – January 11, 1991), undeniably one of the most notable Czech cinematographers, came from a white-collar family. After he graduated from high school (1948), he enrolled in the newly-established Faculty of Performing Arts (AMU), with his major being Film Photog - raphy and Equipment, where he studied from November 2, 1948 through his final exam on April 28, 1953. 1 From 1952 to 1957, he worked as a cameraman at Czechoslovak Army Film, making short agitprop films with strong ideological messaging as some of his earliest works ( For a Joyful Life /Za ž ivot radostn ý / , A New Shift /Nová sm ě na/ , Physical Education for Young Teachers /Telov ý chova mlad ý ch u č iteliek/ ). During this period, he also shot the short documentary, Army Artistic Theater /Armádní um ě lecké divadlo/, dedicated to E. F. Burian’s theater, and the semi-animated film Central Puppet Theater /Úst ř ední loutkové divadlo/ . The Czechoslovak Army Film studio also launched Ku č era’s collaboration with the director Vojt ě ch Jasn ý , namely, the staged documentary film It Isn’t Always Cloudy /Není stále zamra č eno/ . In 1957, Czechoslovak Film hired Ku č era to work at Barrandov Film Studios. He remained in this job until the end of his life. From 1968 to 1990 he was also a professor at FAMU’s Department of Cinematography, focusing mainly on color cinematography and color composition. Ku č era received many awards both at home and abroad ( The Cassandra Cat / A ž p ř ijde kocour / , All My Compatriots / V š ichni dob ř í rodáci /, Dinner for Adele / Adéla je š t ě neve č e ř ela /, Death of Fly / Smrt mouchy /, The Day Dawned All the Night / Svítalo celou noc / and Magic Adventure / Kouzelné dobrodru ž ství /); All My Compatriots was awarded by the CST (Supervisory Technical Committee) at the 22nd Cannes Film Festival; in 1968 he received the state medal for excellent work achievement. Ku č era and the director V ě ra Chytilová had two children – Tereza Ku č erová, an artist, animator, costume designer and actress, and Š t ě pán Ku č era, a cinematographer. During his studies and for a brief period after, Ku č era worked mainly with Vojt ě ch Jasn ý (in addition to It Isn’t Always Cloudy , other films include This Will All Be Over Tonight / Dnes ve č er v š echno skon č í / , September Nights / Zá ř ijové noci / , Desire / Touha /, I Survived My Own Death / P ř e ž il jsem svou smrt /, Pilgrimage to the Virgin Mary / Procesí k panence /, The Cassandra Cat , All My Compatriots or Bohemian Rhapsody / Č eská rapsodie /, a film poem for EXPO 70 in Osaka) and Karel Kachy ň a ( This Will All Be Over Tonight, The Lost Track / Ztracená stopa /, later he resumed their collaboration with Little Mermaid / Malá mo ř ská víla /, Death of Fly ). In the 1960s – following the joint project Pearls of the Deep / Perli č ky na dn ě / – Ku č era began shooting films with the filmmakers of FAMU’s second generation (the Czech New Wave), such as Jaromil Jire š ( Thy Cry / K ř ik /), Jan N ě mec ( Diamonds of the Night / Démanty noci /), Ivan Passer ( A Boring Afternoon / Fádní odpoledne /), and his wife V ě ra Chytilová ( Daisies / Sedmikrásky /, Fruit of Paradise / Ovoce strom ů rajsk ý ch jíme /). Starting in the early 1970s, after a forced career break, he was involved in popular films, most often ideologically-tainted comedies. Notably, he worked on several films with the directors Zden ě k Podskalsk ý ( A Night at Karl š tejn / Noc na Karl š tejn ě /, Christening /K ř tiny/ , What a Wedding, Uncle! /To byla svatba, str ýč ku! /) and Old ř ich Lipsk ý ( Straw Hat / Slam ě n ý klobouk /, Joachim, Put Him into the Machine! / Jáchyme, ho ď ho do stroje /, Hurly-Burly in a Circus / Cirkus v cirkuse /, Dinner for Adele ). Around this time, he also worked on short films and TV entertainment and variety shows (such as Ploskovice Nocturno /Ploskovické nokturno /, several episodes of the entertainment program Rendezvous /Dostavení č ko/ , musical variety shows A Novel about a Rose /Román o r ůž i/ , Vacation /Prázdniny/ , and a series of music videos for Hidden Water Springs /Zaváté studánky/ ). In the 1960s, he also worked for the experimental theater Laterna Magika; he had been involved in their second touring program, which was later banned and their collaboration abandoned. In the 1980s, Ku č era resumed his work with Laterna Magika as a cinematographer ( Pragensia ), co-director ( Black Monk / Č ern ý mnich /) and co-writer ( Odysseus ). From the 1970s and, especially, during 1980s he participated in its international projects (especially German, British and American ones), or more specifically, opera and literary adaptations by director Petr Weigl ( Die Nacht aus Blei / Olov ě ná noc /, Maria Stuarda / Mária Stuartová /, Die Reise nach Prag /Mozartova cesta do Prahy /, A Village Romeo and Juliet / Romeo a Julie na vsi /, Dumky ), TV series ( Theodor Chindler , Wilder Westen, inclusive ), and the short film Zlateh the Goat , an adaptation of a short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer. In 1982 he made his only, fully auteurist documentary film Prague Castle / Pra ž sk ý hrad / for Krátk ý film, where he acted as the cinematographer, scriptwriter and director. The list of films that credit Ku č era shows his broad professional reach, ranging from documentary films and realistic narratives with an affinity for cinéma vérité , through music videos, point-of-view features, personal films, (excessively) stylized films that draw inspiration from art and theater aesthetics, and all the way to popular genres. At the same time, Ku č era’s career spanned several periods – from the Socialist Realism of the 1950s, critique of its schematism, and the changing sensibility leaning towards the everyday, to the “restructuring” and the loosening of norms in the late 1960s, and on to the new normalization and later its gradual disinte - gration. He made his last films in post-1989 Czechoslovakia. Ku č era’s already extensive body of work has inflated still with the discovery of his archive that includes magazine clippings, photographs, negatives, transparencies, home movies and unpublished dailies, test shots, footage for special effects, as well as other film material. This discovery has established Ku č era not just as a filmmaker but also as a photographer and intermedia artist. Yet, despite his great range and a variety of approaches and modes, Ku č era possessed a distinctive creative style and professional attributes that are fairly recognizable and – within the context of Czech film – very memorable. In order to at least partly illuminate the cinematographer and his style, this study will not be restricted merely to film analysis but it will also explore stages prior to the “end products”. I will attempt to perform “ obna ž enije prijoma ”, i.e., revealing all means and methods that are “used [...] in the construction of his work”. 2 This text will examine the tools, techniques and practices deployed in Ku č era’s work. It also sets out to locate the images themselves, along with their ontological, noetic and phenomenological properties, as well as their historical aspects, and to absorb the images per se, regardless of what they convey, depict, mirror or critique. More generally, the text will also investigate the role, function and perspective of a cinematographer, the relationship to the (moving) image, its genesis as reflected in the discovered archive, as well as the very essence of film and photographic media. The In-betweenness of a Cinematographer A cinematographer occupies an ambivalent place within the film crew. Their task is, to an extent, privileged and the result of their work is the most visible. At the same time, their work should remain largely hidden so that the film does not turn into a display of empty visual figures. Though they should not abandon their own style, cinematographers must subscribe to a certain kind of rigor; they should “erase their own [...] way of seeing and allow for the permeation [...] of the generally 348 3 Jean-François Lyotard, Idea svrchovaného filmu (The Idea of a Sovereign Film). In: Návrat a jiné eseje . Praha: Herrmann & synové 2002, p. 110. 4 This problematic position can be best illustrated using the film Pearls of the Deep , for which Jaro - slav Ku č era shot five di f ferent short films by five di f ferent directors, each governed by di f ferent poetic styles and techniques of adaptation. Despite the stark di f ferences, Ku č era retained his specific style in all five films. 5 Paisley Livingston distinguishes between four types of authorship: individual; joint authorship among multiple persons working as equals; joint authorship among multiple persons working as equals in the context of a collective filmmaking process; and individual authorship in the context of a collective filmmaking process. Paisley Livingston, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman. On Film as Philosophy . Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009, pp. 72–76. 6 Jaroslava Pe š ková, Technika a my š lení o tech - nice. In: Pr ů mysl a technika v novodobé č eské kultu ř e . Praha: Ústav teorie a d ě jin um ě ní Č SAV 1988, pp. 9–16. 7 Howard S. Becker, Art as Collective Action. American Sociological Review 39, 1974, no. 6, pp. 770–774. 8 Similar to photographers – for more details, see Barbara Rosenblum, Photographers at Work: A Sociology of Photographic Styles . New York: Holmes & Meier 1978. 9 Jan Kali š – Jaroslav Ku č era, Filmová fotografie a její funkce. Ro č enka č s. filmu 1961, p. 60. 10 Jaroslava Pe š ková, Technika a my š lení o technice. In: Pr ů mysl a technika v novodobé č eské kultu ř e . Praha: Ústav teorie a d ě jin um ě ní Č SAV 1988, p. 15. 11 Jan Kali š – Jaroslav Ku č era, Filmová fotografie a její funkce. Ro č enka č s. filmu 1961, p. 55. provides the basis of craftsmanship required to maintain image stability in films which do not want to depart from (formal) norms or (ideological) conventions. Technology, in this sense, helps to create conventions, i.e., non-directive work routines and sets of skills developed by a group of professionals in their practice that allow them to standardize their work and make it more efficient and faster. 7 In the case of cinematographers, it is the selection of tools (suitable camera and lenses that suit the meaning of the shot) and methods (such as lighting, developing) 8 that facilitate a clearly coherent image that fits the narrative, which remains uniform in the film’s entirety and corresponds to traditional, unembellished style. This particular way of approaching the cameraman-technician does not take into account the original “technology” and its origin of techné which is much closer to filmmakers who claim that “[m]odern film defies conventions both in its subject matter and form.” 9 Technology/ techné in this sense means (and originally meant simply) not doing and utilizing tools but “revealing, uncovering the truth of things that is hidden. Tech - nology is fruitful not by ‘creating’ but by acting in places that uncover the truth.” 10 Techné is very closely related to epistémé , in that it is art which employs a variety of art forms in order to uncover that which does not uncover itself. Attempting to restore this function to technology, Sibylle Krämer and Horst Bredekamp demonstrate that culture relinquished its original manual foundation and that the “shift to language” – the hege - mony of linguistic analysis and textual hermeneutics – robbed images of their epistemic power. It is precisely the original dimension of techné – with regard to Krämer and Bredeka - mp’s theories – that allows one to implement a creative gesture that is far from being a mere recording, which was crucial for Ku č era, but also restores the original role of technology related to the quest for truth, getting familiar with the world, and searching for the original. Since Ku č era did not merely implement other people’s ideas, his work represents the overlap of technology and techné . If we view him as a mere “technician” in the original sense of the word, the resulting portrait would be somewhat reductive, but it would be just the same if we claim he was an artist drawing on techné . Technology and techné are inevitably two sides of the same coin, as theorized in a text co-written by Ku č era and his colleague Kali š where they set out to show that, while camera craft cannot do without basic skills, it must also go beyond these skills. “Craft, in the sense of being able to control complex camera and lighting equipment and technology of photographic processes, is a necessary prerequisite. In his creative work, a cinematographer needs to subject their intention to the spirit of the screenplay shooting concept.” 11 Thanks to his approach to his work and in relation to the basic definition of the cinematographer’s position – Ku č era found himself in a very dynamic interspace. His position reflected the tension between service (technician/craftsman) and creative gesture (artist), between a style affected by the script and his individual style, between individuality and team work, between process flow and stoppage, between development, constant change and the result, stabilized image, method, between the documentary filmmaker, novelist, and the visualist poet. Ku č era’s lifelong affinity for fine art only added more layers to this ambivalence. One must also keep in mind his position between giving preference to visuality and tools used in fine art and between the search for a specific film language. His work was very often located between tradition and modernity, nostalgia and experiment, landscape art and subjectivity, snapshot and portrait, moving and static image, traditional and kinetic composition. visual” 3 in order to approach not just truthful representation but also higher (aesthetic) qualities of the image of reality. Cinematographers oscillate between immateriality and materi - ality, illusiveness and reality – they work with matter – sensitive (in all senses of the word), photographic, celluloid film. On the other hand, they also work with the illusions and abstract elements which must be inscribed onto the film stock in order for the meaning to be intelligible, the narrative “legible”, and for the visual aspect to match the original idea. Light, motion, color, time, composition, and depth determine not only the quality of the moving image but also whether viewers are allowed to “enter” the film or whether they are denied access. Being both visible and invisible, cinematographers are artists of the moving image as much as they are craftsmen. 4 Cinematographers have experience with various kinds of team collaboration, yet in the case of somebody as creative and strong-minded as Ku č era, a specific aesthetic vision can impede the director’s individual effort. Ku č era was better known as an artist who opened up a dialogue and brought in new ideas which were later developed during the shoot. In his case, we can either talk about an equal contribution authorship of multiple individuals, which relies on a common vision of the filmmakers (especially Ku č era’s collaboration with V ě ra Chytilová, Vojt ě ch Jasn ý , and Petr Weigl), or about individual authorship in the context of a collective process, in which the director has the final say and acts as the supervisor, yet other colleagues from other departments also make key artistic contributions (such as in collaborations with Juraj Herz and Old ř ich Lipsk ý ). 5 The very definition of the cinematographer’s occupation is problematized by the commission-based nature of camera work and by the duties of an employee at a state-run company; as a result, Ku č era was not able to reject the burden of employee obligations and choose only projects that would be to his liking. Commissions can be bad, unchallenging, or ideologically unacceptable. The only free space (if we disregard technical limitations) was restricted to private or unofficial/semi-official work – whether it be private experiments, home movies (using the widely accessible 16mm film), or film ideas pitched to directors who would either accept them or turn them down. The technical basis of camera work, or the perception of equip - ment of cinematography as such, also cannot be discounted. Once we tie cinematographer’s efforts to their equipment, in today’s sense of the word, the cinematographer becomes an engineer who keeps trying to improve the tools which would make his work easier and bring him closer to the end product. Since modernity, this purpose has been ascribed to technology and it is closely tied to the industrial revolution, motivated by the desire to maximize man’s power over nature. It can lead to a performative display of the importance of production and performance. Technology as such contributes to the continuous develop - ment of the organization of human force as well as to the development of tools. Technology becomes a self-contained exploitation of both nature and man, 6 mechanical and mechanized work with no individual expression. The abstraction of technology, formalization, and construction has a definite impact on art–providing inspiration to abstract art on the one hand, as well as realism on the other, which can also be viewed as largely mechanical and schematic. For the cinematographer, this aspect of technology is, of course, significant – the camera’s technical equipment, lighting equipment, the technology of the photographic processes, and each’s advancement allows cameramen not only to record the surrounding scene and landscape, but also gives them a sense of personal improvement. The work of a cinematographer is, to an extent, shaped by technology, yet technology also 349 individual image planes, and an intertextual dimension. An internally dynamic image contains both the place from which things can be viewed, as well as the counterpoint, i.e., the anticipated reaction, another gaze which the image is directed to and materialized in. It is also crucial to understand point of view as a particular approach to life/art or as the overlapping of photography technique and more or less stylized reality within the given medium. The position of the cinematographer, especially as exemplified by Jaroslav Ku č era, can also be understood from the perspec - tive of a new ontology which no longer investigates the very existence of depicted objects but rather attempts to figure out their localization– i.e., it does not matter what they are but where they are located. Ku č era’s approach and the way in which he tried to avoid visual stereotypes, strict conventions and pursued experimen - tation (both with the material and techniques) recall another of Uspensky’s terms, ostraneniye . Commonly and misleadingly translated as defamiliarization, this concept includes a spatial aspect 17 – as the original Russian term suggests, it is a side view or, in this case, a view from behind the (still) camera. Though the cameraman stands in the center of the picture, he also uses the camera to keep his distance, viewing the scene from the side, testing the ideal camera shot, reflecting the initial perspec - tive, point of view . Ostraneniye and point of view show how strongly this category is inscribed into individual layers of the composition and how closely the concept is tied to perception of the world and its new recreation, both in the aesthetic and the philosophical sense. To set a photograph/image into motion then not only allows for another level of “defamiliarization” in the perception of the world but for the multiplication of individual planes and film frames. Where it used to be possible to experiment with space within the image, it is now possible to experiment with the space of an image. The experimental, ever-changing moving image is very elusive, especially during turbulent periods of political and social transformations. In light of media practices and formalist approachs, it is vital to think of the experiment not in terms of its end result but rather as a creative process which is trying to form a new outlook on the world – a process that constructs and conceptualizes the world/truth/reality anew – and also to see experimentation as a different/alternative way of thinking (with) media. Similarly, shooting a film is more of an operation which is engaged in looking. The task of a cinematographer lies in the intersection of these practices, as it is defined by thinking through images and making them visible while capturing the filmmaking process or later modifying it. We then begin to identify a set of media operations typical for a cinematogra - pher: searching and collecting , looking , recording and later experimenting (in the sense of looking for new ways and modifying the footage). Over his entire career, Ku č era focused on translating his experience with visuality and imagination into the (film) image. The resulting image was not intended to be merely an execution of cinematographic conventions but of a new, autonomous means of expression, a different way of thinking/seeing/perception. Media Practices of a Cinematographer Just as the cinematographer’s work is hard to define, shots and continuously transformed images are equally elusive, especially in the case of an essential experimenter like Jaroslav Ku č era. Yet they may be unique precisely for being ambivalent, ephemeral, and also very dynamic. In order to grasp at least some features of the film(ed) image and to shed some light on the perspective of a cinematographer as opposed to that of a director, I will not use tools that are designed and suitable for the analysis of completed works. Rather, I will draw upon German philosophy and media theory, namely Bernhard Siegert, who claims it is misleading to talk about and use closed media terms but, instead, that it is necessary to consider operations and practices which are more directly tied to the very process of creation rather than the end product. 12 With regard to this point, it seems crucial to analyze the end film not as a result but as a creative process, one that shapes a new perspective of the world, or that constructs and conceptualizes the world/truth/reality anew. While defining and searching media operations, “mediality” is much more important than media features, to think (with) (technical) image and about image is more important than its implementation, image perfor - mativity and the (technical) image are more important than an image’s textual, semiotic, narratological, and motivic nature. 13 While the author’s thought process is naturally unknowable, I will use these theories to reconstruct the “thinking” of the medium, i.e., the thought process that is visible in the image and gets developed on its formal foundation. This process can be captured using the “archeological” research of the cyclical relationship between the resulting images and the private archive that contains inspiration, traces, studies, reflections, and analyses which can become the foundation of creative work and that are reflected in the publicly presented image; I will also use the interdisciplinary perspective as proposed by Mieke Bal’s “traveling concepts” and by related theorists who use them to analyze various cultural phenomena. They consider thinking and culture not as permanent and clearly defined territories but as dynamic and changeable processes. “Handling things” within the context of this dynamic points out to cultural techniques 14 that allow connecting cultural and techni - cal perspectives both of which are essential and indivisible for a cinematographer. They also reflect tension produced by (non) individuality and (in)dependence in this occupation because cultural techniques “unlike production relationships, are not inaccessible owing to pragmatic or ideological reasons. On the other hand, like management techniques they are never merely individual.” 15 Media practices and cultural techniques seem to provide a possibility of exploring the position of a cinema - tographer as such (not in the sense of historical-sociological analysis), as well as the image itself (and its motion), free from literary, semiotic, or narratological tradition and authorship theories. Unlike texts analyzing the work of a director or a screenwriter, this approach to a cinematographer’s perspective allows us to perceive films – and the period’s visual style – from the very center as well as “from the side”. The cinematographer’s eye, imprinted in the final image, does not reflect just one perspec - tive but ties together several perspectives. The crucial one is the point of view ( tochka zreniya ) as found in the work of Boris Uspensky, which cannot be related just to narratological focalization but which includes a functional and compositional dimension of the text or, in this case, image. 16 Point of view – perspective, camera angle and composition – includes a starting point ( tochka ) from which the view is executed, and a space that opens up by recording on the film medium. The resulting photograph/film is considered an aesthetic object, spectacle, or a construct rather than a document, yet it also involves dialogism as defined by Mikhail Bakhtin. The space of the medium includes the initial perspective, relationships between 12 Kate ř ina Krtilová, D ě jiny médií a média d ě jin. Rozhovor s Bernhardem Siegertem. Iluminace Vol. 23, 2011, Issue 2, pp. 104–105. 13 Sybille Krämer – Horst Bredekamp, Kultur, Technik, Kulturtechnik. Wider die Diskursivierung der Kultur. In: Sybille Krämer – Horst Bredekamp (eds.), Bild – Schrift – Zahl . München: Fink 2003, pp. 11–13. 14 Sybille Krämer and Horst Bredekamp do not define culture statically but examine its dynamic nature and focus on identifying its basic features and changeability. Sybille Krämer – Horst Bredekamp, Kultur, Technik, Kulturtechnik. Wider die Diskursivierung der Kultur. In: Sybille Krämer – Horst Bredekamp (eds.), Bild – Schrift – Zahl München: Fink 2003, pp. 11–22. 15 Friedrich Kittler, P ř edmluva. Zapisovací systémy 1800/1900 (Introduction. Discourse Net - works 1800/1900). In: Kate ř ina Krtilová – Kate ř ina Svato ň ová (eds.), Medienwissenschaft. V ý chodiska a aktuální pozice n ě mecké filosofie a teorie médií. Praha: Academia 2016, p. 204. 16 Boris Uspenskij, Poetika kompozice ( A Poetics of Composition ). Brno: Host, 2008. For more details, see my text co-written with Libu š e Heczková: „Ak - tualizace“ Poetiky kompozice aneb Boris Uspenskij z n ě kolika hledisek. Sv ě t literatury Vol. 21, 2011, Issue 1., pp. 114–124. 17 For more on these terms, see also Libu š e Hec - zková – Kate ř ina Svato ň ová, Sentimentální cesta. In: Ivan Klime š – Jan Wiendl (eds.), Kultura a totali - ta III. Revoluce . Praha, FF UK 2015, pp. 183–200. 350 Ku č era clearly did not try to follow a specific photographic tradition. Yet, if we attempted to pick a label for his work, we could identify associations with “new realism”. New realism is manifested especially in moments that reveal the materiality or performativity of images, i.e., in the “pop art” color images of various peeled-off posters and rusty surfaces, in the photographs of pedestrians streaming through the city, and of nighttime city captured with long exposure. Most of Ku č era’s photographs approach the style of “poetry/ photography of the everyday”, which we can trace in Czech photography from the late 1950s (Ku č era’s photographs can be compared to photographers such as Boris Baromykin, Bohuslav Burian, Ji ř í Jení č ek, Jan Dezort, So ň a Soukupová, and Pavel Dias). Ku č era’s photographs also capture urban life and its features, including buildings, modern elements, construction, trams and in a similar way highlight the everyday and lyricism. His photographs were not deformed or altered in any way and were mostly done with a 50mm lens. Ku č era’s “microstudies” or “macrostudies” of the everyday are equally remarkable. He did not just photograph framed wholes of everyday reality, but also depicted the outside reality and its internal rhythm and order, especially with photographs of dilapidated or emerging buildings, old posters peeling off, flaking walls and rusty sheets of metal. Ku č era took pictures of textures (most often in large detail) on various surfaces, and their transitions and combinations, best noticeable on peeling posters, but also large wholes of landscape textures, geometric structures and patterns (netting, bricks, scaffolding, rows of cars, fragments of human bodies), recorded reflections, glim - mers and fragments, which shifted Ku č era into the non-visual field as well. These photographs very often show moments in which realistic space falls apart, emerges and vanishes, takes on more layers and transformations. Ku č era’s geometrical - ly-structured images, lines and grids resemble Avant-garde photography, at the same time they are close to an art movement which emerged in the 1960s Czech art scene – “new sensitivity” as represented by Ji ř í Kolá ř , Karel Malich and Zden ě k S ý kora, and may also recall older photographs by Ji ř í Toman and contemporaneous photographs of Miroslav Hák, Emila Medková and Vojt ě ch Sapara. Ku č era’s fascination with tactile images, structure, surface and relief was also close to the then influential Art Informel as exemplified in photography by Emila Medková, in art by Mikulá š Medek, Jan Koblasa, Jan Kotík and Vladimír Boudník, and in film by Jan Š vankmajer. These compositions show the frequently depicted reality internally “flaking” and “fading”. To an extent, these captured objects are personified, and they are either themselves active, or bear traces of activity belonging to a subject that remains outside the frame. They can (unconsciously or incidentally) speak of human actions that are made passive, brought down to the level of mechanical tasks or condemned to inactivity. 20 Images composed in such a way, containing fragments and ruptures, can have a powerful impact; they can surprise and “pierce” us, like the Barthesian punctum 21 This is Roland Barthes’s term for places in a photograph that are “uncultivated”, unchained, and unexpected, filled with latent potentiality. The viewer’s eye can be attracted to look at these surprises in the photograph that can produce affects. For Ku č era though, photographs were not important for the punctum , or strong emotions in response to an image, but for allowing studium , as Barthes called his second approach to photography. Ku č era focused on rational aspects of photography, exploring details that raised his interest , active reception, watching their encoding, yet not in relation to content but rather in relation to the process of recording, to the materialization of the gaze. He focused on professional aspects of photography that led him to the constant need to capture various qualities of outside reality, to record surfaces as well as internal movement, rhythm and perspective of structures. Searching, Collecting and Preserving: A Cinematographer’s Archive Although Ku č era dedicated himself to most cultural and media practices, it is convenient to consider them chronologically in keeping with the standard order of film production, i.e., first exploring the media practices of searching and collecting that constitute his private archives and precede a film shoot. 18 Throughout his life, Ku č era collected fragments of found objects, including rusty sheets of metal, cigarette butts, glass bottles, various pictures, newspaper cutouts, mostly photo - graphs, slides and (mostly 16mm) film. Side by side, we find photographs of paintings from art history, of posters and every - day life, images of urban and countryside landscape, details of textures and abstract ornaments; there are both figural and non-figural pictures, high- and low-brow, natural and artificial. Ku č era’s collection had some of the features of a modern archive (though his collection was not created as an archive per se, as it was not systematically classified and organized). Modern archives do not care as much about preserving history, traces of memory, or facts as they do about the conditions and processes related to collecting and searching. This collection can be thought of as a catalog; Ku č era used these images in his work in order to create new connections. In this kind of collection, the original mnemonic function is replaced by the pragmatic one. An archive designed to be recycled carries only the memory of the experiment, not historical memory, open to its own destruction in return for new experiments. An archive requires continuous recontextualization of objects, and their irretrievable destruction, in favor of a new image, with a changeable structure (depending on the owner or curator); in these archives, meanings and historical connections are residual and potential rather than permanent and current. 19 If the search and collection of images was even recorded, it was often only in the form of the media practice itself – as un-materialized potentiality; from a large part of the developed material, no transparencies were made, there is just the negative photographic film or slides. In most cases, the photographic image as an artifact suitable for a traditional archive was not important to Ku č era but a view, the moment and possibility of copying, or the possibility of analyzing a framed view, reality. Thanks to the photographic process, it was possible to capture, cut out and freeze some of the features of the outside world, whether it be light, lines, color, texture or space, that could be analyzed further. Only thanks to the analyses of the recorded light was he able to create a solid studio environment or to use exterior lighting to fit the mood of the film. Exploration of colors and the ways they affect a photograph or a slide was the basis for his creation of color compositions for individual scenes, studies of framed space helped to resolve issues with perspective. Ku č era utilized representation, framing, immobility and isolation to “learn” to see, and created a wealth of material to be used not just for other works but for other media practices. Jaroslav Ku č era, Photographer If we look at Ku č era’s visual archive in greater detail, it is apparent that Ku č era’s negatives, photographs, slides and home movies display multiple (counter)movements, thematic shifts, and reflect several cultural techniques – they oscillate between realism and abstraction or geometrization, between an arranged pose and a snapshot, between singularity and seriality, or sequence making. These images involve constant interplay between different media, interconnections between the moving and still image, photographic and film/media techniques. 18 Jaroslav Brabec also takes note of Ku č era’s col - lecting habit, yet instead of an archive, he mentions “an inconspicuous notebook”. Jaroslav Brabec, Mimoverbální komunikace barevn ý ch vztah ů . Academic lecture, May 2015, FAMU, Prague. 19 Allan Sekula, V ý klad archivu (On the Invention of Photographic Meaning). In: Karel Císa ř (ed.), Co je to fotografie? Praha: Herrmann & synové 2004, pp. 295–298. 20 V ě ra Linhartová’s interpretation of Emila Medková’s photographs are structured in a similar way as Ku č era’s photographs. V ě ra Linhartová, Soust ř edné kruhy. Č lánky a studie z let 1962–2002. Praha: Torst 2010, pp. 297–298. 21 Roland Barthes, Sv ě tlá komora. Poznámky k fotografii ( Camera Lucida ). Praha: Agite/Fra 2005, pp. 31–61. 351 with the same subject. 25 Sequences and series may have been interesting for Ku č era precisely because they drew on the same media practices and principles as film. Shifts between individual images on sequences were either due to temporal reasons, based on a shift of the camera in space or a change in perspective, or – unusually for a sequence – due to a different exposure or filter (and shot for the purpose of testing equipment and material). Regardless of the reason, these images mostly recall snapshots, carrying a moment of reflection as well as differ - entiation constituting cinematic visuality. The main defining feature of photographic sequences is not (thematic, temporal or spatial) identification but rather difference as defined by Deleuze. 26 Images with minimal differences repeat themselves, forming sets with a particular internal rhythm whereby the tension between being static and dynamic shifts them closer to films or – owing to non-narrativity and highlighted fragmenta - tion as opposed to continuity – to afilms 27 Difference of a figurative kind is typical for snapshots that produce cinematic illusion. Difference multiplies the possibil - ities of media transposition, furthering application in moving images (especially those which Ku č era shot frame by frame to create non-cinematic, unnatural, choppy movement), 28 and possibilities for other interpretations – as common in abstract and conceptual art. Series of photographs in the photography archive upset its chaotic order, constituting homogeneous and interconnected sets that cannot be broken down into individual photos but in which individual photos follow from the previous ones, thus attesting to their cinematic continuity and connectedness. Owing to these methods, Ku č era’s realism went through an inner transformation; to a certain degree, it came close to stylization and formalism, and it was this countermotion that defined his film work. On the one hand, Ku č era’s images moved closer to possible identification, truth, and the authen - ticity of images which had already lost it, on the other hand they also gravitated to difference and allowed for the creation of a parallel, alternative space. Abstract and abstracting images cannot be viewed as being in contrast to realism but rather as having a complementary role; they share the same functions and consequences and frequently blend into a single correlative whole. Infused with fascinating anonymity, Ku č era’s photographs and slides were in no way motivated by the need to keep a system - atic record and archive. Instead, they were a specific medium of perspective and reflection. Indeed, his approach problematizes or multiplies the nature of the medium. Photographs establish two types of mediality, as discussed by Christoph Hubig. 29 The first one is external, objective mediality, in which the medium determines what is possible, visible and serves as evidence, information and communication. The other one is internal mediality, in which the medium opens up a space of possibilities, allowing for reflection of a particular type of representation, communication about what is seen, exploration and manipulation of reality, while technically expanding the potential of the medium and the photograph. In this definition, photographs – and the entire archive – serve not only as a piece of information, an aesthetic object and as the foundation for further work, but as a way to reflect the media situation as a whole, to reflect possibilities presented by photography or film,