Anger's book contributes to these debates admirably, starting with material details of film to rethink practices of film-theoretical inquiry, and embraces the noise of our object of study, itself always on the verge of spilling over any pre-definable boundaries, without losing sight of the bigger picture and the ethico-political responsibilities of theory.

Laurence Kent, Screen

In his excellent book Towards a Film Theory from Below: Archival Film and the Aesthetics of the Crack-Up, Jirí Anger blends high theory with haptic exploration in order to deliver the best of both approaches.

Liri-Alienor Chapelan, Eastern European Screen Studies

Highly engaging and carefully argued … The book's thorough and engaging theoretical reflection is an eye-opener that offers a completely refreshing take on film archiving … Hopefully this highly original proposition will be picked up by film archivists and scholars alike.

The Journal of Film Preservation

How many more times can we anchor our analysis in Grand Theories before acknowledging that we may have neglected the film itself, distancing ourselves from the form that predicates our scholarly interests? Clearly understanding this, Jirí Anger, in his book Towards a Film Theory from Below, offers a remedy: a methodological shift away from Grand Theory and hermeneutic decoding, letting the film's own serendipitous accidents, deformations, and imperfections speak to us.

Joe Garrard, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

Towards a Film Theory from Below takes the films of Jan Kríženecký as starting points for a series of dazzling close readings and deep revelations about the afterlives of film artifacts and the figurative effects of moving-image material. Anger commits to a radical kind of method and a profoundly small scale. Each chapter moves from just a film frame or two-just one strange and specific detail-to consider what difference the idiosyncratic or errant trace might make. Anger's own work on the digitization of Kríženecký's films-his deep understanding of the particulate matter of these images and the processes that contributed to their digital re-circulation-position him among a crucial community of archivist-scholars who are capable of reorienting our understanding of film matter and its contingent figurations.

Katherine Groo, Associate Professor, Lafayette College, USA

Jiri Anger's intriguing question about what it would mean to do film theory “from below” resonates with recent interventions in “new materialism” and related strands of theory, but it does so with a specificity that is sometimes lacking in those fields-and with clearer relevance to questions of the relation between human sensation and the technologically modulated material environments in which we live. In short, Anger's question-and his detailed answer to it-has far-reaching philosophical significance that goes beyond traditional issues in film studies to implicate the very role of the human in a rapidly changing ecological and ultimately cosmological context.

Shane Denson, Associate Professor of Film & Media Studies, Stanford University, USA