Shedding fresh light on lanterns

turning her PhD into a book, Grgić would have been best advised to cut the umbilical cord with what was the prevailing trend in Balkan studies while she was a student, and, with an exceptional work such as this, to set her own agenda. What her book does marvellously well is it exposes the exceptionally high level of both entrepreneurial and creative spirit found right across the region, producing extraordinary work, often with precariously limited means. It is precisely this industrious production and consumption of ‘the sublime’ in the Balkans that places it on an equal footing with the ongoing aspirations of the West. If the Balkan region can, as this book demonstrates, live beyond and outside the West, then there really was no reason to have to continually pivot its existence back to it. Quite the opposite. A strong feeling remains that this is what should have precisely been the objective of the work, not just to ‘unhinge’ the Balkans from the West, but to allow the former to legitimately formulate its own parameters without having to pay any dues, even if the Cinématograph did arrive from Paris. While the Cinématograph was flâneuring through, its fleeting presence was insignificant in comparison to the cross-fertilising cultural effects that it left behind, which in themselves are the focus of this brilliant study.