1 - Visual Culture in the Balkans, Haptic Visuality, and Archival

Summary

Abstract

This chapter examines the impact of diverse historical legacies and visual cultures present in the Balkan region on sense perception and the reception of early moving images, through a transnational and crosscultural reading of surviving art forms and practices. Taking inspiration from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological epistemology, Vivian Sobchack's work on embodied spectatorship, and Laura Marks’ theory of haptic visuality, I explore a selection of visual and textual artefacts and archival moving images, which marked my fieldwork journeys in the region, to uncover the embodied experience of vision and haptical encounters between the spectator and the image.

Keywords: Sense perception, haptic, Balkan visual culture, archival moving images, phenomenological epistemology, Byzantine art

[S]eeing is irrational, inconsistent and undependable. It is immensely troubled, cousin to blindness and sexuality, and caught up in the threads of the unconscious…Seeing is like hunting and like dreaming, and even like falling in love. It is entangled in the passions ‒ jealousy, violence, displeasure, and in pain. Ultimately, seeing alters the thing that is seen and transforms the seer. Seeing is metamorphosis, not mechanism. (James Elkins, 1996, 11–12).

During my research journey to uncover the history of early cinema in the Balkans, I discovered that archival moving images resemble sensual vaults waiting to release collective memories and embodied imaginary of individuals, of communities, and of nations. Not merely documents or monuments to historical events or past moments, archival moving images are impregnated with collective and individual memories, which, in turn, shape and guide their reception and interpretation in the present time and affect the viewer. Henri Bergson argued that memory is embodied in the senses, and that the human brain processes many types of information not translated into thoughts before being experienced and embodied. On a number of occasions, I, the spectator, and I, the researcher, stood in front of the ‘affected’ or ‘affective’ object, drawn closer, in a state of metamorphosis. At these times, the present seemed to assume a form of historical rupture (Walter Benjamin), and, consequently, these moving images (fragments of films, disparate footage) became a key mode for a ‘historical awakening.’ In an effort to capture, to see further or deeper, to imagine, and to have something revealed, at times stubbornly hidden, I understood that the very process of seeing was deeply troubled and caught up in passions, and more akin to aesthesis (Greek ‘sense perception’).