Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 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
- 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
4 - Imagining the Balkans: The Cinematic Gaze from the Outside
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 May 2022
- Frontmatter
- 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
- 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
Summary
Abstract
The fourth chapter investigates the role of early moving images filmed by foreign cinematographers and production companies alongside a discussion of geopolitics in the shaping of the ‘Balkan imaginary’ before the onset of the Great War. An analysis of selected footage filmed in the Balkan region or with Balkan themes reveals how the new visual medium contributed to the creation of the Balkanist discourse by capturing and mediating semi-orientalist views of people, customs, and landscapes and sensational accounts of the Western traveller's adventures. The multicultural/ confessional/ethnic context of the region furnished the movie cameras with a varied repertoire of ‘cinema of attractions’-like images, while the nineteenth-century sensibilities of Western viewers were drawn to semi-oriental and exotic imaginaries.
Keywords: Balkanism, semi-orientalism, cinematic gaze, photography, newsreels, reconstructed actualities
Those Balkan peoples […] unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally. – Hector Hugh Munro aka Saki. (Vickers 1997, 77).
To those who have not visited them, the Balkans are a shadow-land of mystery; to those who know them, they become even more mysterious…Intrigue, plotting, mystery, high courage, and daring deeds – the things that are the soul of true romance are to-day the soul of the Balkans. (Arthur D. Howden-Smith, 1908, 1–3, 24).
The Balkanist discourse has been intertwined with the notions of war, violence, barbarism, and symbolic darkness for more than a century. While studies of early travel writing and commentaries by Western travellers in the region reveal the civilized ‘European’ gaze as either fascinated or horrified by the Balkan ‘Other,’ less attention has been given to early moving images captured by foreign film productions and travelling cine-reporters. Actualities and newsreels dominated the first decade of cinema history, and moving images of war, violence, and battles elsewhere drew audiences to moving image shows, not only because of their interest in contemporary events around the world now visible via the new and dynamic visual medium, but also due to draw of the spectacle. The ‘Balkans’ is as much about invention and imagination as it is a geographical, political, historical, cultural, and social construct, often perceived as the Other, Oriental European, and even Exotic through the lens of the normative Western gaze.
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- Early Cinema, Modernity and Visual CultureThe Imaginary of the Balkans, pp. 153 - 196Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2022