Early Cinema, Modernity and Visual Culture: The Imaginary of the Balkans (Eastern European Screen Cultures)

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. 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.00Ana Grgi? is Assoc. Professor at Babes-Bolyai University. Her research on Balkan and transnational cinema, archives and memory appeared in Early Popular Visual Culture, Studies in Eastern European Cinema, Film Quarterly, and KinoKultura. She is co-editor of Contemporary Balkan Cinema: Transnational Exchanges and Global Circuits (2020), and is Associate Editor of Studies in World Cinema.0 Table of Contents Acknowledgements Foreword: Travelling Down/Travelling Through • Dina Iordanova 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 2. Historicizing the Balkan Spectator and the Embodied Cinema Experience 3. Mapping Constellations : Movement and Cross-cultural Exchange of Images, Practices, and People 4. Imagining the Balkans: The Cinematic Gaze from the Outside 5. ‘Made in the Balkans’: Mirroring the Self Conclusion: The Future Perfect of Early Balkan Cinema Bibliography Appendix Index