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Full Description
Cinema before the World investigates the transnational origins of filmmaking by focusing on a case study in world cinema - the 1896-1897 voyage of one of the Lumière Brothers camera operators, Alexandre Promio, across North Africa and the Middle East. The book shows how the sites in these early films are not simply backdrops, but integral to film form and its global history.
Connecting a series of filmic principles (framing, tracking shots, close-ups) to the sites where they are made visible (a rooftop in Algiers, a train station and the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem), Allan unsettles a familiar narrative of imperial vision. In the interplay of local history and global media, he highlights tensions between ethnography, observation, and visual capture, revealing how the Lumière Brothers films persist as living archives.
The book evokes a formative moment when cinema stood before the world - both as a technological marvel and as a medium that shaped how space and time were perceived. Tracing a journey from Algeria to Egypt and Palestine, and moving across media from lithography to photography and panoramas, Allan shows how in the hands of later filmmakers, such as Egyptian director Youssef Chahine and the Syrian collective Abounaddara, the Lumière films continue to enrich and inform visions of what cinema - and the world - can be.
Cinema before the World offers a critical historical intervention in the global story of the cinematograph and a visionary method for film scholarship grounded in transnational analysis across languages, regions, and media.
Contents
p>Introduction:
Microhistory: Envisioning Ellipsis 1
A Flashback to Cinema's Elsewhere, 5
Microhistory: Excess as Method, 10
Illusions of Index, or the Ethnographic Mirage, 13
Conceptual Cartography, 17
A Preface to Prehistory: A Potential Future of Cinema, 20
1 World: The Labor of Representation 23
On Atlases and Adjacency, 26
An Archive of Potential Worlds, 31
Iteration and Empire, or the Labor of World Cinema, 35
Afterimages of Future Pasts: Glass and Bricks, 39
2 Location: Locating Looks in World Cinema 43
Mirror: A Local History of World Cinema, 47
Window: A World History of Local Cinema, 51
(The Postcolonial) Pivot: Unlearning Imperial Enchantment, 56
Portal: Beyond the World Picture, 60
3 Frames: De-Centering Orientalist Optics 62
A Frame Story, 65
Enframing the Unpredictable, 70
Beyond Icon and Index, or a Prayer for Mimesis, 72
An Expanded Field, 75
The Photorama, or a World without Frames, 80
De-Orientalizing Optics, 82
4 Sovereignty: Iterations of Cinematic Statecraft 85
Serial Sovereigns, 88
The Khedive's Two Bodies, 91
Sovereign Cuts, 95
Sovereign Afterlives, 99
The Sovereign Image?, 103
5 History: The Duration of Myth 105
Perfecting Place, 108
Picturing the Past, 110
The Image of
Duration, 114
Cinematic Futures, 119
The Cinematic Event, 122
6 Tracks: Tracking the World in/as Cinema 124
Placing Perceptual Paradigms, 129
Middle East Trains, 132
World in/as Motion, 138
Arriving at a Farewell, 140
7 Scale: The World as Close-Up 145
The Figure in the Carpet, 148
The Close-Up at a Formal Distance, 151
Looking and Masking, 158
Zoom Out: Facing the Globe, 162
Epilogue: Planet: Otherworldly Futures 167
Toward a Planetary Cinema, 169
Planetarity, 173
The Promise of
a Future Planet, 176
A World beyond Compare, 178
Acknowledgments 181
Notes 187
Bibliography 215
Index 231
