It is customary that a profile of an eminent theorist begins with an expert citation from some carefully selected tome. But Kateřina Svatoňová not only explains but practically demonstrates her theoretical viewpoints throughout the recorded material.
The short film similarly familiarizes us with some of the materials she has been theoretically involved with over the last few years, for example the hybrid images of Laterna Magika or the fragments from the estate of cameraman Jaroslav Kučera. It thus seems to me much more important to offer a broader view and, considering I have been her student for many years, it cannot help but be a bit personal.
Most people imagine academic work as a slow march up the steep steps of the Ivory Tower. It has its clear hierarchies, formal organization, its rules both written and unwritten. It requires diligence, distance and conscientious work. All that is often true and at times necessary. Therefore, not many people think that theory would be riveting or exciting. But the work of Kateřina Svatoňová shows us that theory is, first and foremost, an adventure: a compelling need to constantly question the world around us and undermine any seemingly given order of things. This unruly, perhaps almost irreverent traversing movement can be full of emotion, uncertainty and can sometimes leave us gasping for breath. Such theory is then no longer a mirror of reality but rather a living organism – a branching, surprising journey full of dead ends, but also unexpected shortcuts and fortuitous finds.
It is in this sense that theory is also a praxis of lived experience, of deeply felt conviction and aching feet which lead us to places we would never have dared to see from the cushy seats of the tower’s top floors, places we would never have thought to go. Kateřina Svatoňová possesses the precious gift of actually implementing such transversal, adventurous thinking in practice, and tirelessly transmits it to her students. She is never satisfied with a simple solution but is always looking for a place where she can hop the fence – whether it demarcates the normative aspects of research, the frame of the image or screen, the discourse of a given discipline, or simply an overgrown plot of land with a sign reading NO ENTRY.
Her years of pedagogical work at the Film Studies Department of the Faculty of Arts of Charles University have shown an entire generation of students that living thinking does not dwell – both metaphorically and literally – behind the thick walls of the institution, but constantly breaks through any seemingly stable surface, transforming all the actors involved. Her dedication to constantly seeking out new stimuli, her openness and sensitivity towards the objects of her expert interest, as well as the trust with which she helps other people develop theirs, have always been highly inspiring and have made a lasting impression on my faith in the lived adventure of theory. If I had to take this opportunity to paraphrase an eminent quote, then I would definitely opt for a passage from the introductory chapter of A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, which I first had the chance to read as part of Kateřina Svatoňová’s BA seminar: there is no difference between what theory talks about and how it is made.
Noemi Purkrábková
Kateřina Svatoňová, PhD. is a film and media theorist. Since 2009, she has been active at the Department of Film Studies at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University, which she has directed since 2015. Her work has been focusing on media theory, history, archaeology and philosophy, visual culture, the relationship of film and other media, film in the gallery and the margins of film. She has authored numerous texts and books, e.g. 2 ½ D: Prostor (ve) filmu v kontextu literatury a výtvarných umění (2008), Odpoutané obrazy: Archeologie českého virtuálního prostoru (2013) and Mezi-obrazy: Mediální praktiky kameramana Jaroslava Kučery (2016), for which she received the F. X. Šalda Award and the Trilobit award, and along with Lucie Česálková she co-authored Diktátor času: (De)kontextualizace fenoménu Laterny magiky (2019). She was a curator and co-curator of numerous exhibitions dealing with the history of film and media, e.g. Mezi-obrazy: Archiv kameramana Jaroslava Kučery, Laterna magika, Ester Krumbachová, and (co)editor of variously themed publications, for example Medienwissenschaft (2016), Mizení (2017) or Ester Krumbachová (2022). She is member of the editorial board of Iluminace.
