"An impressive, exhaustively researched work on Balkan early cinema grounded in regional and transnational layers of a culture history of visuality and geopolitics in modern times."
. Zhen Zhang, New York University Tisch School of the Arts
"This is a different story of modernity with tensions between memory and forgetting, the archive and its absent films, the Balkan gaze and the Oriental gaze. Grgi. enhances and offers alternatives to the prevailing notions and concepts of early cinema scholarship."
. Nezih Erdogan, Istinye University
"Early cinema, visual culture and modernity: The Imaginary of the Balkans is the first English-language synthetic volume in the still emerging field of early Balkan cinema history, an area marked by the extreme scarcity of multilingual sources. [...] Grgi.’s book is indeed an existential journey through the cinema history and memory of the Balkans. [...] On the road, crossing frontiers, bridging gaps and affronting the dramatic lacunas of fragmentary film and text collections while continuously translating the regional languages, the author takes the reader by the hand from an Archival center to another."
- Mélisande Leventopoulos, Studies in Eastern European Cinema