Jiří Anger

The housewife lives in an endless loop of daily routines of caring for the house and family. These daily routines are captured in the film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975) over a period of three days. Similarly, this videographic essay takes the viewer through three stages in the cycle of the extension of the housewife logic into the sphere of the digital. It proceeds from introducing the evolution of reproductive labour, to a playthrough that foregrounds the connections between reproductive and cognitive labour in the datafied society, to a demonstration of how this development of housework turns us all into ‘digital housewives’.

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.

This videographic essay explores the star wipe – a long-dismissed and oft-ridiculed editing transition – as an emblem of marginal and forgotten media artifacts. By examining its historical use across various forms of media, from classic television and feature films to online ephemera, we reveal how this seemingly trivial transition embodies complex intersections of technology, memory, and aesthetic value.