Picturing the Primitive - Visual Culture, Ethnography, and Early German Cinema

Primitive Pictures explores the relationship between early German cinema and anthropology's fascination with 'primitive' cultures. At the core of this study is a mythic first contact between the camera and the non-Western body. The term that binds the two is the 'Primitive', referring both to cultures ostensibly existing outside of modern Time and also to a way of seeing the world via the lens. Asseka Oksiloff examines how the movie camera, with its capacity to record reality in a supposedly direct fashion, is legitimated by the primitive body in the first decades of the twentieth century. From the earliest research footage to popularized adventure footage, the film theory, the 'primitive' holds out the promise of a critical space that affirms modern, technological vision.

List of contents

Introduction The Body as Artifact: Early Cinema and Ethnography The Evolution of Vision Paradise Lost: Adventure and Colonialist Films of the 1910s and 1920s Leo Frobenius and Kino-Vision Primal Screen: Early Film Theory and Ethnography Primitive Modernism: Hofmannsthal's Cinematic Aesthetics Ethnotopia: F.W. Murnau's Tabu

About the author

ASSEKA OKSILOFF is an Assistant Professor of German at New York University. She has written on modernist film and literary aesthetics, contemporary film, and romanticism. She is co-author of the critical anthology of early German romantic writings Theory as Practice.

Summary

Primitive Pictures explores the relationship between early German cinema and anthropology's fascination with 'primitive' cultures. At the core of this study is a mythic first contact between the camera and the non-Western body. The term that binds the two is the 'Primitive', referring both to cultures ostensibly existing outside of modern Time and also to a way of seeing the world via the lens. Asseka Oksiloff examines how the movie camera, with its capacity to record reality in a supposedly direct fashion, is legitimated by the primitive body in the first decades of the twentieth century. From the earliest research footage to popularized adventure footage, the film theory, the 'primitive' holds out the promise of a critical space that affirms modern, technological vision.

Product details

• Authors: A Oksiloff, A. Oksiloff, Assenka Oksiloff
• Publisher: Springer Palgrave Macmillan
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 01.01.2002
• EAN: 9780312293734
• ISBN: 978-0-312-29373-4
• No. of pages: 227
• Dimensions: 141 mm x 218 mm x 13 mm
• Weight: 306 g
• Illustrations: VII, 227 p.
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > General, dictionaries; Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Natural sciences (general); Non-fiction book > Politics, society, business > Politics; Social sciences, law, business > Social sciences (general); B, Cultural History, Cultural Studies, European History, Anthropology, Arts, Film History, auseinandersetzen, Central Europe, Social and cultural history, Culture—Study and teaching, Civilization—History, Europe, Central—History, History of Germany and Central Europe, Film and TV History, Motion pictures—History, Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts Collection, Film history, theory or criticism