Views of the Ottoman Empire¶

Summary: An ongoing curatorial-archival project, initiated around 2014 by silent-film curator Elif Rongen-Kaynakçı at the EYE Filmmuseum (Amsterdam), in dialogue with Cineteca di Bologna and with co-curation by Mariann Lewinsky and the American film critic Jay Weissberg, Director of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival. The project detects, identifies, and re-contextualizes films produced in territories that were part of the Ottoman Empire and presents them, often with live music, "as close as possible to the original shooting locations." Counter-case to the manakia-brothers digitization in chapter-1-crisis-and-nationalism and a worked example of a boundary-archive.

Sources: cinema-of-marbles-draft-2025-12-30.md, primarily section 1.2.1 ("From marble to marbles: Building a boundary collection," lines 742–969).

Last updated: 2026-05-24.

Origin¶

The project doesn't have a single founding date but coalesced around the 2014 edition of Bologna's Il Cinema Ritrovato festival, where the "Cento Anni Fa / A Hundred Years Ago" section — established by Tom Gunning and continued by Mariann Lewinsky — had been retrieving early-cinema fragments since 2004. The 2014 sub-program "Views from the Ottoman Empire 1896–1914" thematically marked the centenary of the First World War's outbreak.

Lewinsky's wording for the section signaled an explicit center/periphery tension: "From the start of cinematography, cameramen travelled to many parts of the world including the Ottoman Empire — Asia Minor, the Near East, the Balkans and North Africa — and brought back these exotic images to European audiences."

The fragmentation method¶

Rongen-Kaynakçı describes the EYE Filmmuseum's strategy as "endorsing fragmentation as a working method, and putting emphasis on the importance of fragments as individual historical data and integral samples of filmmaking in their own right." From the start, the project was "open-ended": no fixed corpus, no fixed periodization, no fixed national rubric.

Curators routinely encountered errors of prior cataloguing — material on the Balkan Wars catalogued as First World War, or vice versa — and used these errors as research prompts rather than corrections. The naive question ("Do you have images of Jerusalem?") is treated as analytically productive.

Why it's a counter-case to Manakia¶

Where the Manakia digitization was deployed to establish national entitlement over a contested cultural product, "Views of the Ottoman Empire" is structured to keep the Ottoman frame open. The "Ottoman" is not pinned to any current nation-state; films circulate to local audiences across the former imperial geography; live musical accompaniment refuses the idea of a finished restoration.

The chapter is careful to note that EYE Filmmuseum is itself "a major, central European institution" — so this is not a peripheral project in any naive sense. The "Views" methodology is read as a center deliberately working against the center / periphery hierarchy, while remaining structurally implicated in it.

Interoperability¶

A key term: in this project, interoperability is not just a technical desideratum but a cultural one — the ability of one archive's system to converse with another's modes and functions. Andrea Leigh (2006) is quoted: "Archivists need to shift from a paradigm centred around saving a completed work to a new paradigm of saving a wide body of material that contextualizes a work."

"Crystallogy in the making"¶

Mademli borrows Arianna Borrelli's "crystallogy in the making" to describe the project's exposure of "deep time of the media in a non-Western context." This figure is then carried forward to the contemporary Greek documentary chapters.

Aslı Özgen and Elif Rongen-Kaynakçı, "The Transnational Archive as a Site of Disruption, Discrepancy, and Decomposition: The Complexities of Ottoman Film Heritage" (2022).
Mariann Lewinsky's catalogue notes for Cento Anni Fa / Il Cinema Ritrovato.