Early Cinema, Modernity and Visual Culture: The Imaginary of the Balkans by Ana Grgić

Reviewed by: Early Cinema, Modernity and Visual Culture: The Imaginary of the Balkans by Ana Grgić Alexander Donev (bio) Early Cinema, Modernity and Visual Culture: The Imaginary of the Balkans By Ana Grgić. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021. Pp. 278. Ana Grgić's book—the third volume of Amsterdam University Press's Eastern European Screen Cultures series—is the first attempt to present early cinema in the Balkans in all its diversity and intricacy—not as the parallel existence of separate national protocinemas but as a unitary phenomenon. In Grgić's perspective, the dates of the first film shows or first original local productions are not the most important. She focuses instead on relationships and common denominators, exploring in depth what made the easy acceptance of cinema possible in the region and marked its long-standing importance. In conducting this strategy, Grgić has had to overcome several persistent biases. The first is that cinema is the "most Western of all the arts" (Parkinson, History of Film, 1996). Such a thesis exaggerates the importance of social, technological, and economic superiority in the fields of culture and art, a view that became indefensible after Ella Shohat's and Robert Stam's studies. At the same time, the easy and quick appropriation of cinema proves that the people and culture of the Balkans are not so different compared to the nations of central and western Europe that gave the initial impetus to the popularity of the invention of the Lumière brothers. [End Page 236] The next assumption, often advocated even by native Balkan scholars, is the emphasis on the primitiveness and deficits of local cinema, both in the early years and later. Grgić challenges such a research reduction that ignores real cinematographic facts at the expense of ideal constructions, which are products of imported traditions and projections of a different sociocultural situation. Thirdly, the book debunks a stereotype about the region: that due to the sharp national controversies, dramatic past, and uneven development of the Balkan countries, it is impossible to reconstruct their film history as something holistic, based on unified patterns and principles. Drawing from Dina Iordanova's concept on Balkan cinema, Grgić also considers the Balkans as more of a cultural entity than a geographic term. The existence of a shared imaginary and common model for the perception and establishment of cinema in the Balkans is justified by that multilingual, multiethnic, multireligious blend that defined the peaceful coexistence of the Balkan peoples before the series of wars that started after 1912. In regard to the Balkans, Grgić validates the findings of other scholars not only that technological advances led to the transition from photography to moving images, but that different forms of performative arts, narrative techniques, and sociocultural practices were essential for the adoption of cinema. However, one of the main factors, according to this book, was the haptic visuality essential to the imaginary of the region, perfected in different "minor and popular arts, such as weaving, tapestry, jewellery making and decorative arts, and religious artistic traditions, such as Byzantine fresco paintings and Ottoman architecture" (p. 26). Grgić highlights the specific corporeality of the early film images where "the body is the source of knowledge of the world" (p. 36). As very characteristic for the local seeing patterns creating the haptic space of representation, she emphasizes the reverse perspective typical for Byzantine iconography. In it—like in the cinema theater with a giant screen—the spectator is sitting inside the picture and feels as if in the "screen world." The book consists of five chapters, each dealing with a major issue representative of early cinema itself and specific for its reception in the Balkans: the art of seeing, the spectator's experience, pioneers, external gaze, and identity. The sequence of these epistemological perspectives on the Balkan early cinema reproduces the path of its emancipation from visual tradition and external influences toward the assertion of modernity in the context of local culture. Technologically, Grgić does not focus as much on the varied machinery used by early itinerant exhibitors and practitioners but instead on the materiality of the film's physical consistency—the widely used nitrate film stock. The ambivalent nature of...