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

This work 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 20th 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.