Chapter 1 — Crisis and Nationalism: Film Archives as Physical Borders and Boundary Objects¶
Summary: The first analytical chapter pairs the Manakia Brothers' early-twentieth-century film collection with the EYE Filmmuseum's "Views of the Ottoman Empire" project to demonstrate two opposing fates of transnational film heritage: one over-codified into a national monument, the other deliberately fragmentary and participatory. From this comparison the chapter builds the concept of the boundary-archive.
Sources: cinema-of-marbles-draft-2025-12-30.md, sections 1.0 through 1.2.1 (lines 6–969).
Last updated: 2026-05-24.
Two cases, reversely articulated¶
Mademli's comparative method positions the manakia-brothers film collection — the body of work shot by the Vlach filmmakers Yannakis and Miltos Manakia between roughly 1905 and the early 1960s, principally preserved by the Cinémathèque of Macedonia in Skopje — against the curatorial project views-of-the-ottoman-empire (initiated around 2014 by Elif Rongen-Kaynakçı at the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, in dialogue with Cineteca di Bologna and Mariann Lewinsky's "Cento Anni Fa" programme at Il Cinema Ritrovato). Both involve early-twentieth-century footage from territories that were once part of the Ottoman Empire. Both use digital tools.
But the two projects "articulate reversely": the Manakia digitization is mobilized to "establish a form of national entitlement over a complex cultural product, deducing the digital restoration process to a politically charged mission that would remain inaccessible to the plenty"; "Views of the Ottoman Empire," by contrast, "activate[s] different prospects of situated knowledges, focusing on the networking dynamics of digital archival practices and locating the potential of the digital not in salvaging the image (i.e. representation in itself), but in disseminating film cultures of the past."
Memory takes root in the concrete¶
The chapter opens at the Milton Manakia statue in the main square of Bitola (delivered no earlier than 2007), where the figure of the camera-on-tripod is fused with a cut tree whose legs become roots drilling into the ground. The reading borrows from Pierre Nora's milieux / lieux de mémoire distinction and Bruno Latour's immutable mobiles: the statue literalizes the idea that memory "takes root in the concrete," and shows the cinematic apparatus itself being fixed in place as national-historical capital.
This same logic of national monumentalization is then traced through "Skopje 2014" — the urban-renewal project that erected over a hundred statues across the Vardar in the Macedonian capital — and across the border into Greece, where the Macedonian Sun became a logotype on everything from the Thessaloniki International Film Festival's branding to phone cards advertising the Macedonian diaspora.
"Macedonia is Greece"¶
The chapter's second-section reading of the 1992 nationalist rallies in Thessaloniki, and the funeral of the archaeologist Manolis Andronikos (excavator of the Vergina tomb attributed to Philip II), treats the Macedonia naming dispute as an archival problem in itself. Drawing on Mark Nunes on error, the chapter reads the famous slogan — preferring "Macedonia is Greece" over the grammatically expected "Macedonia is Greek" — as a generative glitch that simultaneously reveals the territorial-claim function of the archival speech act. The Greek motorway sign that transliterates Skopia (Σκόπια) instead of the international Skopje is treated as part of the same gesture.
The naming dispute was formally resolved by the 2018 Prespa Agreement; the chapter's footnote notes that "concerns regarding breach of convention are increasingly rising" with the post-2020 right-wing election victories in both countries.
From individual collection to assemblage¶
A short section on the Manakia family history shows how the brothers' birth certificate already inscribes a Hellenized name-ending (Manaki rather than Manakia), part of a wider Vlach marginalization. Their photographic practice — twelve thousand portraits across 125 Balkan locations — is read through Sontag's claim that photography lets people "take possession of space in which they are insecure." But where the photographs were singular, staged, and ethnographic, the moving-image collection becomes a technical assemblage whose preservation logic dissolves the artist's intentionality into institutional and national frames.
The boundary archive¶
The chapter's central concept is built in section 1.1.4 ("Framing the Boundary Archive"). Drawing on Susan Leigh Star and Geoffrey Bowker's "boundary objects" — objects that maintain interpretive flexibility across overlapping social worlds — Mademli proposes the boundary-archive as an archive in which "media and technologies of preservation, restoration, and exhibition resist the process of monumentalizing history by embracing partiality and acknowledging the liminal in its material translation."
The two-millimeter perforation deviation in the Manakia film stock — which made standard projectors flicker — is treated not as a technical defect but as the very feature that, properly mobilized, could make this collection a paradigm of transnational heritage rather than yet another national-cultural patrimony.
From marble to marbles¶
Section 1.2.1 introduces the second case study, "Views of the Ottoman Empire," and shifts vocabulary from the singular marble (immutable, monumental) to the plural marbles (mobile, interpretable, in encounter). Where the Manakia digitization was launched as a national mission and culminated in the 2014 FIAF congress in Skopje as a single anniversary event, "Views of the Ottoman Empire" was set up from the outset as an "open-ended project," shown to local audiences as close as possible to the original shooting locations and often with live musical accompaniment.
Ulysses Gaze as midwife of the discourse¶
Theo Angelopoulos's 1995 Ulysses Gaze, in which a diasporic Greek filmmaker traverses the Balkans in search of two missing Manakia reels, is read as a "child of its time" — a film that helped fix the Manakia legacy inside a Greek national imaginary at the very moment of Yugoslavia's dissolution. The narrative of the missing reels is treated as both a metaphor for the boundary archive and a vector by which the collection was nationalized.