Maurizio Cinquegrani

The Nexus of the Empire: Early Actuality Films of London at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

The study of early cinema has often focused on the modernity of the medium and seldom on the imperial forces which shaped and were represented in films. By bringing together the domains of urban sociology and imperial history, this article aims at discussing experiences of urban modernity and of Empire as they are reflected in early actuality films of London. By making the urban experience visible, early films of the London contribute to a topographical understanding of the modern urban space and create a visual map of the city. This article illustrates the ways in which the city was unavoidably rooted in the culture of the Empire and represented by a new medium expressing both its formal novelty – and insofar a break from exisitng modes of representation – and themes and images that had already emerged from pre-existing media.

The Cinematic Shtetl as a Site of Postmemory

‘The Cinematic Shtetl as a Site of Postmemory’ addresses the ways in which cinema has canalised the dissolution of an entire pre-war Yiddish world as a profoundly spatial phenomenon; an aspect of the study of film and the Holocaust which has hitherto played a minor role in the literature. In particular, this chapter investigates the shtetl as a cultural matrix in the memorialisation of the murdered Jews of Poland and includes a focus on survivors’ return journey to their ancestral home recorded in five case studies: Miejsce urodzenia (Birthplace, Pawel Łozinski 1992), Shtetl (Marian Marzynski 1996), There Once Was a Town (Jeffrey Bieber 2000), Paint What You Remember (Slawomir Grunberg 2010), and Return to my Shtetl Delatyn (Willy Lindwer 1992).

The cinematic city and the destruction of Lublin's Jews

ABSTRACT They took me up, up. Very far, maybe 300 miles, until we came to Lublin. (Art Speigelman, Maus1) With the words cited above, in Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus (1980-1991), Holocaust survivor Vladek Spiegelman remembers his journey from Częstochowa to Lublin as a Jewish prisoner of war in 1941. The name of the city of Lublin resounds as a distant place on map of Europe during the Second World War and, insofar as the study of film and the Holocaust is concerned, Lublin has entirely slipped under the radar as an understudied subject of investigation. This article aims at filling this gap and discusses the role of this city in the Final Solution by means of a study of its cinematic image and that of the concentration and extermination camp of Majdanek, at the outskirts of Lublin.

‘A fit of absence of mind’? Empire and urban life in early non-fiction films (1895–1914)

This article explores the cinematic representation of urban spaces in early films of East Asia and South Africa. It aims at demonstrating that early actuality films are an invaluable record of the economic, social, and cultural life of distant cities in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, but also that the spatial organization of the cities, and of the films’ representations of them, were decisively shaped by the ideology and activity of imperialism.

Travel Cinematography and the Indian City: The Imperial Spectacle of Geography at the End of the Long Nineteenth Century

This article looks at the ways in which early films, as much as photography and colonial exhibitions, transported the spectators to a version of India existing in great part as the creation of unchecked British imagination. Late Victorians and Edwardians stepped into this exotic world through different media, and cinematic exposure to the East would soon dominate visual culture and consolidate the East as a product of European imagination.It investigates the ways in which at the end of the so-called long nineteenth century a very Victorian passion for geographical spectacle migrated to early films of urban spaces in colonized territories, and reassess the part played by early films in the imperial project by investigating the cinematic image of Indian cities between 1895 and 1914.