The end of the nineteenth century saw the Balkans animated with cultural movements and socio-political turmoil. Alongside these developments, the proliferation of print media and the arrival of moving images was transforming urban life and played a significant role in the creation of national culture.
Based on archival research and previously overlooked footage and early press materials, Imaginary of the Balkans: Visual Culture, Modernity and Early Cinema is the first study on early cinema in the region from a transnational and cross-cultural perspective. This work investigates how the unique geopolitical positioning of the Balkan space and the multi-cultural identity of its communities influenced and shaped visual culture and early cinema development. Moreover, it examines the relationship between the new medium and visual culture through the notion of the haptic, and explores the role early cinema and foreign productions played in the construction of Balkanist and semi-colonial discourses.
Reframing hierarchical relations between ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’, this book departs from approaches such as “new cinema history” and “vernacular modernity” to counter modernity discourses of “lacks and absences”, and instead, establishes new connections between moving image and print artefacts, early film practitioners and intellectuals, the socio-cultural context and cultural responses to the new visual medium.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword: Travelling Down /Travelling Through
- Preface: The Balkan Imaginary of Ruins
- Introduction: Charting the Terrain: Early Cinema in the Balkans
- The Balkan Space of Enquiry
- The Invention of the Balkans
- Modernity, Cinema, and the Balkans
- Visual Culture, Early Cinema, and Hapticality
- Connecting a Disconnected Space: A Working Methodology
- Journey through the Archives
- The Field of Vision
- Limitations and Structure
- 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
- Works cited
- 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
- Works cited
- 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
- Works cited
- 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
- Works cited
- 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
- Works cited
- Conclusion: The Future Perfect of Early Balkan Cinema
- Bibliography
- Archival Sources
- Interviews
- Appendix
- Index
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