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

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.