Cinema Before the World: The Global Routes of the Lumière Brothers reimagines the origins of cinema through a transnational lens, following camera operator Alexandre Promio’s 1896–1897 journey across North Africa and the Middle East. The book treats these early films not as static records of place, but as sites where film form and global history converge.

Each chapter links a cinematic principle—framing, the tracking shot, the close-up—to the specific locales where they first came alive: a rooftop in Algiers, the Citadel in Cairo, the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem. Refusing a simple tale of imperial vision, the study highlights tensions between ethnography, observation, and visual capture, revealing how Lumière films persist as living archives.

In dialogue with contemporary artists and filmmakers, this groundbreaking book unsettles, enriches, and expands our sense of what cinema—and the world—can be.

“In this boldly original work Michael Allan scrutinizes films of the Middle East shot by Alexandre Promio for the Lumière 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