Early Cinema, Modernity and Visual Culture

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Balkans were animated by cultural movements and socio-political turmoil with the onset of the collapse of the empires. Around the same period, the proliferation of print media and the arrival of moving images gradually transformed urban life, and played an important role in the creation of national and regional cultures. Based on archival research that explores previously overlooked footage and early press materials, 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. This book investigates how the unique geopolitical positioning of the Balkan space and the multicultural identity of its communities influenced and shaped visual culture and the development of early cinema until World War I. It highlights how early moving images and foreign film productions contributed to the construction of Balkanist and semi-colonial discourses. Building on approaches such as ‘new cinema history’, ‘vernacular modernity’ and ‘polycentric multiculturalism’ to counter Eurocentric modernity paradigms and to reframe hierarchical relations between centres and peripheries, this monograph adopts an alternative methodology for interstitial spaces. Using the notion of the haptic, it examines the relationship between the new medium and regional visual culture. By doing so, it establishes new connections between moving image artefacts and print media, early film practitioners and intellectuals, the socio-cultural context and cultural responses to the new visual medium in the Balkan region.