Jiří Anger, Queen Mary University of London
This paper explores the historicity of Woodstock ’99 through the lens of its most comprehensive audiovisual record: the MTV pay-per-view broadcast. Situated between the mythologised legacy of Woodstock ’69 and the disaster narratives of recent HBO and Netflix documentaries, Woodstock ’99 is often framed as a cultural failure. Rather than reinforcing this binary, the paper examines how audiovisual media – particularly multi-camera live television – mediate our historical understanding of music festivals. Drawing on François Hartog’s concept of regimes of historicity and theories of liveness, mediatisation, and archival aesthetics, it argues that the MTV pay-per-view tapes constitute a paradoxical archive: produced for ephemeral consumption, yet now functioning as key historical artefacts. Through analysis of multi-camera aesthetics, split-screen techniques, and production dramaturgy, as well as the accidental survival of these recordings via home-made VHS transfers, the paper investigates how technological mediation shaped the event’s temporal experience – both in real time and through retrospective viewing. It further considers how moments of chaotic collectivity, particularly during nu-metal performances, reflect late-1990s tensions between societal decay and residual longings for emancipation. Rather than merely reproducing nostalgia or moral panic, these audiovisual traces reveal the non-simultaneity of cultural memory, exposing fissures in the dominant regime of presentism. Ultimately, the paper suggests that the pay-per-view tapes offer not only documentation of a spectacular collapse but also glimpses of lost futures – reframing Woodstock ’99 as a complex site of mediated memory, temporal dissonance, and archival possibility.
Biography: Jiří Anger is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Film at Queen Mary University of London and a researcher at the National Film Archive in Prague. His work spans media theory, archival practice, and videographic scholarship, with articles and videos published in Screen, NECSUS, Film-Philosophy, [in]Transition, and other journals. His book Towards a Film Theory from Below (2024) was a BAFTSS Best Monograph Runner-Up, and his videographic essay Cycles of Labour: In the Metaverse, We Will Be Housewives (2023, co-authored with Veronika Hanáková and Martin Tremčinský) won the BAFTSS Award for Best Videographic Criticism.