Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
Picturing the Primitive 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. 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.