Publication details
From Found Footage to Collective Event : Intermediality and Intersubjectivity in Pan Roman (2009)
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| Year of publication | 2026 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Martin Ježek is a Czech filmmaker who does not preserve copies of his works and, emphasizing the ephemerality of analog material and the performative nature of projection, resists their archiving. Nevertheless, his film Pan Roman (premiered 2009) functions as a kind of archive – a visual archive of the life of an anonymous man whom the artist named “Roman.” The film consists of found footage from 1955–1981, in which this man was likely filmed by his father. Ježek chronologically reorganized this material and used it in its entirety. Pan Roman cannot be understood solely as a found-footage archival film – it operates as an intermedial event. Its projection is accompanied by live music, but its form is also shaped by other elements, including everyday objects. Pan Roman is screened in apartments, and viewers are invited to bring their own food and drinks. The material from socialist Czechoslovakia is thus embedded in a situation that Ježek models on historical apartment screenings. Archival material is no longer tied exclusively to specific historical moments; instead, it is activated in the present and reconfigured through its embedding in a collective event. This event can be understood through Ágnes Pethő, who describes intermediality as “an experience of in- betweenness.” Intermediality here does not refer only to relations between media, but emerges as a lived state between image and sound, and between objects and subjects. In Pan Roman, the intermedial is intertwined with the intersubjective: gaps between media are filled by people, while gaps between people are filled by media. In this context, Rita Felski’s concept of “social phenomenology” is particularly relevant, as it describes how the subject is shaped by the world of others. This process is examined on two levels: in the archival images of the everyday life of the aging “Roman,” and in the projection situation as an intermedial event that forms a temporary community in which these images are reactivated. |
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