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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 May 2022
Abstract
The third chapter examines the trajectories of selected early film pioneers and travelling cinemas, revealing how the transnational mobility and intercultural exch ange informed and shaped the development of local cinemas, and highlighting the importance of movement to understand the complex and fluctuating narrative of early cinema in the Balkans. Mobility of foreign and local film exhibitors and practitioners and the movement of films via their circulation, distribution, and exhibition, led to cultural exchanges and cross-border networks in the Balkan space. The legacy and work of figures, such as the Manakia brothers and Louis de Beery, not only shed light on the shifting political borders in this period, but also reveal the desire to document, expand, and imagine the possibilities of the new visual medium.
Keywords: early film pioneers, transnational, mobility, the Manaki brothers, travelling cinemas
The indeterminacy of the subject's identity in the Balkans, a product of centuries of the West perceiving the Balkans as a hybrid, transitory zone, as well as the material domination of the region by Western and Eastern empires, is expressed in the novel through the metaphor of the bridge. The narrator wishes to escape this ambiguity but cannot. […] For to repetitively assert one's identity in the face of indeterminacy caused by the outsider's gaze is futile: subjectivity ultimately rests with the gaze, not its object. […] the bridge/narrator continues to tell and retell the story. (Marina Antić, 2003, 16).
Cultural historians (Todorova, Jezernik, Glenny) have explored the reasons for the static, frozen image of the Balkans laden with negative connotations (backwards, savage), which has persisted in Western imagination, perhaps as a latent photograph or a haunting spectre, in psychoanalytical terms, Europe's alter ego (Žižek). If we were to imagine this static image of the Balkans as a photograph, an immobility, and an abduction, and, on the opposite end, consider cinema and the associated notions of movement as a way to counter such fixed ideas (of a culture, of people, of a region), we can start to reimagine the cultural history of the Balkans in moving images. In a still image, there is no clear direction of movement, while a succession of still frames inadvertently creates a narrative; in other words, there is a natural tendency to lead towards a symbolic journey in cinema.
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