Picturing the Primitive

“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.

Author Biography

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.