Cinema before the World
The Global Routes of the Lumière Brothers
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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.
“In this boldly original work Michael Allan scrutinizes films of the Middle East shot by Alexandre Promio for the Lumiére company in 1897. Analyzed formally and in terms of their historical and cultural significance, these films, lasting less than a minute, reveal the promise of a world cinema yet to be fulfilled.”—Tom Gunning, University of Chicago
“Early ‘travelogue’ films are often perceived as static: at worst Orientalist clichés, at best indexical witnesses. In contrast, Allan conceives of the Lumières’ films from cities like Cairo and Jerusalem as in motion, in relation, inexhaustible: worthy of being the origin moments of a decolonized world cinema.”—Laura Marks, Simon Fraser University
