Cinema as citizenship: practices of mis(re)cognition on the fringes of Europe

This paper comes out of a book project examining the emergence of identity recognition practices in the first half of the twentieth century, that is, during the period leading up to the visual (de)construction of identity in a manner no longer verifiable by the human eye. Its focus is on the filmic representation of early institutions of photographic identification and their tactical subversion through fraud, plastic surgery, masks, identity theft, as well as visual occlusions occurring at the level of cinematography, such as techniques of blocking, framing, magnifying, and editing as described by Balázs in his film theory. The paper focuses on practices of opacity and mis(re)cognition such as are practiced specifically by central and east European practitioners in exile, including in the films of Bela Balázs, Fritz Lang, Peter Lorre, and Conrad Veidt.