Full Description
Based on original archival research, Early Cinema, Modernity and Visual Culture: The Imaginary of the Balkans is the first study on early cinema in the region from a transnational and cross-cultural perspective. It investigates how the unique geopolitical positioning of the Balkan space and its multiculturality influenced and shaped visual culture and cinema. Countering Eurocentric modernity paradigms and reframing hierarchical relations between centres and peripheries, this book adopts an alternative methodology for interstitial spaces. By deploying the notion of the haptic, it establishes new connections between moving image artefacts and print media, early film practitioners, the socio-political context and cultural responses to the new visual medium.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword: Travelling Down /Travelling Through
Preface: The Balkan Imaginary of Ruins
Introduction: Charting the Terrain: Early Cinema in the Balkans
1. Visual Culture in the Balkans, Haptic Visuality, and Archival Moving Images
My Journey through Savage Europe
Hapticality of Archival Moving Images
Hapticality of Visual Culture in the Balkans
The Byzantine Cultural Legacy
The Ottoman Cultural Legacy
Architecture, Fresco Painting, Icons, Textiles, and Jewellery
'Image survivante' and the Legacy of Balkan Visual Culture
The Difference in Perception
2. Historicizing the Balkan Spectator and the Embodied Cinema Experience
Anticipating Cinema
The Arrival of Cinema: Haptical Encounters with Moving Images
The Spaces of Cinema and Coffee Consumption
Cinema and 'Intensive Life'
Cinema in the City
Looking Back at Cinema
3. Mapping Constellations : Movement and Cross-cultural Exchange of Images, Practices, and People
Journeys from the East: Cross-Cultural Travels of the Shadow-Puppet Theatre
The Cinematograph at the Theatre
Travelling Cinema Exhibitors and Filmmakers
The Mysterious Hungarian and the Serbian-Bulgarian Connection
The Balkan Cinema Pioneers and the Lost Gaze
Cinema and the Global Imaginary
4. Imagining the Balkans: The Cinematic Gaze from the Outside
Exoticism and the Balkans
The Orientalist Gaze in the Marubi Studio Photographs
'Oriental' Austria: Cinematic Representations of Bosnia and Herzegovina
Sensational Killings and Wild Insurgents at the Cinema
The Charles Urban Trading Company in the Balkans
Imperial Imagination, Archives, and Moving images
The Reverberations of Balkan Wars and Siege of Shkodra
5. 'Made in the Balkans': Mirroring the Self
The Desire for 'Our' Views
High-life and the Pleasure of the Screen
Scientific Spectacles
Views of Ethnographic and Socio-Political Significance
Pictures of Home
Constructing the Nation through Cinema
Historical Drama from Serbia
Historical Epic from Romania
Conclusion: The Future Perfect of Early Balkan Cinema
Bibliography Appendix Index
