Introduction: Charting the Terrain: Early Cinema in the Balkans

Summary

The field of vision has always seemed to me comparable to the ground of an archaeological excavation. (Paul Virilio, 1984, 1).

[…] the outsider's view is not necessarily inferior to the insider’s, and the insider is not anointed with truth because of existential intimacy with the object of study. What counts […] is the very process of the conscious effort to shed biases and look for ways to express the reality of otherness, even in the face of a paralysing epistemological scepticism. (Maria Todorova, 2009 [1997], ix).

The crisis of memory during the nineteenth century in Europe brought about the construction of museums, commemorations, and other conservational projects, in order to preserve time as a historical object. The arrival of cinema, and, some time earlier, photography, would play a major role in this modernizing and memorial process. Most European nations were undergoing a profound change, the beginnings of a drastic mutation from a traditional, rural society to a more modern, urban and industrial one. Society, and memory, in particular, was being called into question and subjected to scrutiny. A similar profound change has taken place in recent years – our daily lives have never been so invaded by the spectres of the past – thanks to the digital revolution and access to practically anything anywhere in the world. Today, there is an unprecedented over-abundance of material, both text and images, and almost every institution seems to possess its own archives. Contemporary societies once again are experiencing the crisis of memory, due to the nature and ephemerality of the digital and the speed of change. Over the last decades, both media and the academic community, have witnessed heated debates about interrelated issues of archives, preservation, access, and the digital, and the ongoing discussions concerning postcolonial legacies, race discourse, ecology, and identity politics. Film and media scholars are increasingly moving away from film history canons, classical Hollywood cinema, and ‘Anglophone cinema,’ and towards world cinemas, major non-Anglophone film industries, but also marginal, peripheral, and minor cinemas, accented and diasporic filmmaking, and shedding light on neglected and forgotten figures and films from the ‘shadow archive,’ in an effort to understand the development of modern visual media as a complex and multifaceted process.